Chapter Text
They had survived.
They always survived.
She had known who Javier was since she had heard him calmly, patiently explain to a man how he would kill the man’s wife. She had known since that fateful day in the closet that had changed her life.
She had known him better when his father used words like a blade and cut their whole family open in Ava’s restaurant, first with his ode to Santino and then with the revelation about Javier’s career.
And I’ll take you, she had told Javier afterward, alone with him in the restaurant when everyone else had abandoned him.
And she had.
But only now, with blood still caked beneath her manicured fingernails, did she know him.
Hollywood was bright and loud and cruel in all the ways she had hoped it would be, and Javier had gotten them a room fancier than any she had ever slept in, which was saying something.
And despite the softness of the bed and the truly ridiculous thread count of the silk sheets she was sprawled across, she was wide awake at three in the morning.
This was worse than the worst bender. This was worse than waking up in a forest with no battery and no way out, abandoned by the men she’d gotten high with. This was worse than prison.
Her body was numb and cold.
Was she dead, too?
Had she been successful, finally, after failing to destroy herself so many times before?
Was that why the delivery man—Patrick—spoke to her every time she turned around?
The weight of the gun trembled in her hands.
But no.
No, that wasn’t right.
She was lying on the hotel bed. There was no gun. She was alone.
“Letty.”
She jerked, full body tensing, and then it was just Javier.
Javier.
“Hi,” she said weakly.
“Are you with me?” he asks. He lies beside her, propped up on one elbow, staring down at her with that mixture of concern and care and the darkness that is always, always there, lingering.
She has always been afraid of the dark.
“No,” she answers him, and he sighs, the breath of wind before a storm.
He reaches out, his fingers brushing her hair. “Then come back to me.” He says it softly, but he says it like an order.
Tell me again, she wants to beg. Tell me again, and again, and again, and maybe I’ll be able to.
But she has never been a woman who begged for anyone to stay, for anyone to help. She was a woman who burned bridges and left people behind. She was a woman burning down at all the edges.
“Letty.”
His words curl around her name, sharp and strong and sweet. His voice—her name in his mouth—sounds like a command, and she shivers.
“Do you remember?” she asks suddenly, her wide eyes staring up at the ceiling. “In our first hotel, when you told me…you told me I would be very fucking sorry.”
Very fucking sorry.
“If you left,” Javier says contemplatively. “I remember.”
“What would it take?” she asks him, asks the ceiling, asks the ghosts she brought with her. “What would it take now? To make you…”
Her voice trailed off.
To make him what?
To make him snap.
She had pushed him every moment since they had met, shoved at him with all her might, and still they kept falling together. And still his hands were gentle when she wanted them to be rough.
He was rough when he fucked her. And that was when she wanted, needed him to be rough with her.
But when she was breaking, he held her.
And that was the worst part.
“Letty.” He says her name again, serious and soft and sad. “Letty, I was wrong. When I took you, when I made you my accomplice against your will. I was wrong.”
Was he?
The word didn’t mean much to her anymore. Maybe it never had.
She stared down at her hands. Her body was still scraped, bruised in too many places to count from her drugged romp through the forest with her old friends.
“But what would it take?” she asked.
“No,” Javier said firmly.
Something tugs at her, some idea she can’t quite form words for, not yet. Something she wants from him, if she only knew how to ask him for what she wanted.
She is not used to asking, only taking, only pushing until she gets what she wants.
She has been like that since she was seven years old, always daring, always pushing until the world punished her the way she has always known she deserves to be punished.
“No?” she asks him.
“No,” he repeats gently.
“Where’s the cocaine?” she asks him. “Teo’s cocaine? I need some.”
“No.” He is not stern, but he is immovable, and she will not get an answer from him, not get the cocaine unless she finds it and takes it for herself.
And she needs it, just this last time, just to help her come down.
“I can’t,” she says, and then her voice buckles. “I can’t go through withdrawal.”
He pulls her close, tucked against his chest, her head resting on his bicep, her hair splayed out across his chest. “You have to,” he tells her softly. “I am sorry, Letty. But you do.”
“You could let me be,” she whispers.
She is asking him to leave her alone, because she is a fucked up junkie, because alone is how it always ends, because alone is what happened the last time she got high.
She is asking him, and she wants him so badly to say no.
“I can’t,” he says, and then she is crying, her body shaking, and she hates herself for it, hates herself so much, but she is weak weak weak, there is not enough of her left to hold it together, or even to pretend.
He holds her, one arm wrapped tightly around her.
She couldn’t leave if she wanted to.
Not that she wants to, even if she does deserve it.
Stupid cunt, she tells herself. Stupid fucked-up junkie. You will destroy him.
Push him away. Push him away. Push him away.
But she can’t.
In the end, it’s the thing she is never strong enough to do.
When her body is spent from crying, the ghosts linger, the men she shot standing beside their bed staring down at her.
She flinches backwards against Javier’s chest, and he pulls her into the curve of his body.
“What do you see?” he asks finally, and she wants to know how he knows.
Because if he saw the ghosts of everyone he has killed, how would we walk through the world? How would he do anything at all?
“What do you mean?” Normally, she’d play dumb like this and it would work, she would be convincing, her lies would slide from her mouth with ease and even Javier could be fooled.
“Letty.” Javier leans down, presses a kiss to her temple. “You’ve been talking to them all day.”
“I’m not crazy.” Her words sounded so heated they may as well be feverish.
“No,” he says. “You are not.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says finally, because how can she put it to words? How can she say any of it?
She needs the cocaine.
“Did you hide it in the hotel room?” she asks him.
He sighs, and then pushes himself up and off the bed. “Get up.”
She groans, though she is colder now, missing the warmth of him, missing his arm across her body. It had been the only thing tethering her to the earth, and now she is coming unmade again, unspooling across the bed and being pulled, pulled, pulled up towards the empty void of the sky.
“Letty.” More sternly this time. “Come.”
The voice is a different kind of tether, a reminder that she is here, that is here with her even if she deserves to be alone.
Javier crooks a finger at her, beckoning, and she lets his certainty, his firmness pull her body up from the bed.
“Where are we going?” she asks him, but he leads her to the bathroom without saying anything more.
“Come,” he says. “Take off your clothes.”
She opens her mouth, searching for some inuendo to insert into the conversation, searching for words that will lighten the mood and push away the truth of what he is to her, words that will help her hide from him.
But he turns her to face him, gentle and inexorable, and he puts one hand gently over her open mouth, the pads of his fingers pressing against her lips.
They are calloused and firm and strong. They are killer’s hands. They catch all the broken words, and Letty is grateful.
He runs the bath, swirling his fingers in until he is satisfied.
She remains where she is, a statue, half-dead, cold all the way through.
Javier turns back to her, sighing just a little when he sees that she is still fully dressed.
I’m sorry, she wants to tell him. I tried.
But she didn’t try. She just stood there, and watched him fill the bath, and ignored what he said to her. She didn’t try at all. She wants him to be angry with her, wants to see the spark in his eyes that is so dangerous it could consume her. She wants the fire and the fury and the wanting.
There is so much wanting in him, she has realized. It’s what drew her to him in the first place, what made her follow him to the club and fuck him and get in the way of his hit.
“Let me,” Javier says. When she makes no move, he turns her around, his fingers quick and sure on the zipper of her dress.
He pulls it over her shoulders, and she feels something, feels that same spark she has been waiting for, dulled beneath everything else, fire beginning to heat low in her belly.
“Javier,” she whispers.
His hands still on her body, one hand on her shoulder, one on her lower back.
His hands are warm, and she wants them over every inch of her. Exploring, coaxing, demanding everything from her.
“Fuck me,” she says. “I want you to fuck me.”
Javier hesitates, his whole body still in that eerie way he has, stillness that is so measured and contained and violent.
She thinks she might love him for it.
“No,” he says after a breath.
She tilts her head back, suppressing a groan at the pain in her neck when she does. “You don’t want me?” she asks plaintively.
“I always want you,” he answers, pressing a chaste kiss against the mouth she has raised towards him. With one deft hand, he unhooks her bra and helps her out of it. Still, his hands don’t return to her breasts afterwards, don’t cup them or wrap around her neck from behind the way she wants them to.
“Fuck me,” she says, snappish this time.
Again, his hands still on her body, though it’s different this time.
Last time, a careful, measured constraint.
This time, anger there, lurking. Always, always lurking.
If she makes him angry enough, will he fuck her and be done with it?
“Letty,” he says sternly. “I said no, earlier.”
“Earlier?”
“You asked me what it would take,” he says. “And I am telling you no. I will not. I will not let you make me into one more thing that destroys you.”
She catches her breath, throat swelling shut, more sob than anything. “Javier”—
“Shh, shh.” He wraps his arms around her, pulling her close from behind so that her own arms are pinned, too. "I know, Letty. It's okay. I know."
It feels safer this way, her own arms pinned so she can't damage and damage and damage.
“Okay,” he says finally. His words are so cruelly gentle.
She wants him to push her up against the bathroom wall and fuck her until she screams. She wants to feel again, and Javier can always make her feel.
Though she is feeling now, something not quite the same as when they fuck, softer and more terrifying.
“Come.” He pulls her underwear down slowly, letting her lean on him as she steps out of them.
And then he lifts her into the tub himself, setting her gently amidst the bubbles.
“It’s hot,” she complains in a voice that is not as sharp as she wanted. It sounds more like a whisper, something so, so lost it is unrecognizable.
“I know,” he says. “But you are cold, Letty. This will help.”
She is cold. Cold all through, through and through to her chest where her heart has turned to stone.
He disrobes quickly, and she takes in the sight of him, of all that he is, and her body heats, just a little.
He nudges her forward, and then climbs in behind her so that she can lean back against his chest, and he wraps his arms around her.
“Javier,” she says. She has so much to tell him, apologies to make for all the ways in which she broke things between them, so much she needs to atone for. But where does she even begin?
“I know,” he says when she does not continue. “I know, Letty.”
She is trembling in his arms again, and she lets her head drop back against his chest, lets the waters and the bubbles nearly cover her.
He strokes hair back from her face.
“I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t do this alone.”
“Letty,” he tells her softly. “You are not.”