Blood and Vows.

Chapter 27 — A Gift Wrapped in Bruises

The coffee in Sebastian’s cup had gone from hot to merely obedient. He didn’t drink it. Ritual mattered more than taste; the cup steadied the hand he refused to let tremble.

His apartment sat thirty floors above the city, a glass throat swallowing light. At this hour, Mexico City was all sodium and sirens, the night’s pulse running along the arteries of the Periférico. A piano lived in the corner and never played itself. On the table by the window, a chessboard held a game mid-argument—white’s knight stranded in an elegant mistake, black’s bishop aimed at a future that had not decided whether to arrive.

He sat with his back to the glass, a decision as old as his first lesson about windows and rifles. From the hallway beyond the private elevator came the soft friction of expensive carpet learning new footsteps.

Sebastian did not look up when the door opened without knocking.

“Your concierge is charming,” Fernando said, and the room became a smaller place for containing two men. “He believes my smile.”

“You wear it like a counterfeit coin,” Sebastian replied. “It passes until it doesn’t.”

Fernando laughed, pleased, and crossed the room with an athlete’s economy. They were of an age and had grown into different species: Sebastian carved down to the line, Fernando honed toward the edge. Sebastian wore dark trousers and a shirt without a tie, sleeves rolled once. Fernando wore something a shade too glossy, as if he’d dressed for a party and mistaken the door.

He took the chair opposite Sebastian without being asked and slouched into it in a way that would have made lesser furniture again consider its purpose. “You look tired,” he said.

“You look pleased,” Sebastian said. “I assume the two conditions are related.”

Fernando held out a hand as if sharing a secret and examined the bruised knuckles idly, like a man admiring a souvenir. “Work,” he said. “The kind that requires participation.”

The zipper of an overnight bag sighed by the door. Two of Fernando’s men stood just inside, anonymous in well-tailored malice. They held the bag too lightly for it to be luggage. Sebastian glanced once, a millimeter of attention.

“You brought laundry?” he asked. “Thoughtful.”

“A gift,” Fernando said. “From me to you. To save you time.” He turned his head toward the men. “Ahora.”

They tipped the bag toward the floor and unzipped it the rest of the way. What slid out did not fall so much as crumple and try to remember how to take up space with dignity.

Leila.

Her black shirt was streaked brown with dried blood; her close-cropped hair was matted at the temple. One eye had swollen nearly shut, the other scanned by instinct and then focused when it found the room’s gravity. Her hands—God—her hands. Fingers taped at wrong angles, two splinted crudely, nails purpled. Someone had been thorough with small bones.

For a fraction of a second the apartment forgot its training. The air went hard as glass. Sebastian put his cup down very gently, the saucer’s porcelain ring a civilized sound that canceled several uncivilized impulses.

He did not stand. He did not move.

“Pick her up,” Fernando told his men, uninterested in the optics of letting her lie on Sebastian’s floor. They each took an elbow and propped her into a sitting position against the wall. Leila’s breath hissed as her broken fingers brushed fabric. She made no other noise.

Fernando smiled at Sebastian, bright as a match. “She is your dog,” he said conversationally. “She learned a new trick tonight.”

Sebastian’s gaze did not leave Leila’s face. “Which one,” he asked, “fetch or bite?”

“Open, close, unlock,” Fernando said, wiggling his fingers with cheerful vulgarity. “She likes doors that belong to other people. She let a problem out of a cage she had no right to open.”

A muscle at the hinge of Sebastian’s jaw marked the truth he refused the room. “A problem,” he repeated.

“The one with a borrowed badge and an attitude,” Fernando said. “Pretty. Loud in her own way. You know the one.”

Silence arranged itself into a geometry where survival was possible. Leila lifted her chin a degree and put her good eye on Sebastian. It was not a plea, not a warning, not an apology. It was information: I am here. I am not finished. Decide.

Sebastian let breath out through his nose. “You did this,” he said to Fernando, and made it a weather observation, not a question.

“She did,” Fernando said lightly, nodding toward Leila. “I merely corrected. Consider it quality control. Imagine my disappointment. Your shadow is leaking.”

“You don’t correct,” Sebastian said. “You vandalize.”

Fernando’s smile widened. “Such ethics from a man who sells information like communion wafers. Don’t confuse me with your conscience; I don’t carry one.”

He wolfed a glance at Leila’s hands, admiring his own handiwork. “Fingers,” he said, almost pedagogical. “They think they are independent. They learn otherwise. She’ll never shoot the same again.”

Sebastian’s cup was empty and his hands were not. He lifted the bishop on the chessboard and placed it back on the exact square it had already occupied. “Leave,” he said.

“In a moment,” Fernando said. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Two things, and then I retire to let you weep in private or posture in public. First—this goes to your story.”

“What story,” Sebastian asked, bored. He knew. He made the other man say it.

“The one for Selma,” Fernando said, savoring the name. “She will ask why your telegraph wires hummed tonight, why police looked the other way down precisely the right street, why a woman walked out of a house that prides itself on remembering its guests. You will tell her you found the leak and punished it. You will show her this.” He flicked two fingers toward Leila with a careless tenderness that made the men by the door look away.

Sebastian watched him the way men watch other men approach a cliff. “And if I don’t perform your little play.”

“Then you invent a better one,” Fernando said, delighted. “But you will perform something. She is in a mood that requires theater. Do not upstage her.”

“And the second thing,” Sebastian asked.

Fernando stood, smoothing invisible wrinkles. “I like you,” he said. “You are almost everything I pretend to be. I enjoy telling you what I took from you, and I enjoy watching you invent a reason to keep liking me anyway. This,” he nodded at Leila, “is me being generous. Next time I will be efficient.”

Sebastian’s smile was very small and had edges in it. “You mistake survival for generosity,” he said. “It’s a common error among men who relied early on charm and fists.”

“How we flatter ourselves,” Fernando said, amused. He tilted his head, as if remembering something, then snapped his fingers softly. “Almost forgot. She did not speak,” he said of Leila, as if issuing a review. “Not about you. Not about the girl. Not about the colonel whose name everyone’s tongue remembers but lips pretend not to. Impressive. Loyal. You should reward that.”

Sebastian’s face did not change. The room had seen it not change through funerals and raids and dinners where his mother’s ring tapped time like a metronome. “I will,” he said.

“Good,” Fernando said. He looked toward the window and his reflection looked back at him, smaller than he imagined. “You should get her a better doctor than the one that comes with the building. She’ll need small miracles if she intends to keep the grip she’s proud of. Fingers, Sebastian. Who knew they were so fragile?”

He clicked his tongue twice at his men and sauntered toward the door. At the threshold he paused, turning half back, as if granting a parting kindness.

“Oh,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “Make up something for Selma about why you didn’t kill the intruder in the cellar when you had the chance. She will assume you hesitated. Hesitation is expensive in this house.”

He left the door open behind him. His men followed with professional, unhurried steps. Silence reassembled around the furniture.

Sebastian set the bishop down and stood.

The change in him was small to anyone who hadn’t paid for the course. The line of his shoulders shifted, not forward into anger but down into intention. He crossed to Leila, went to one knee, and let his eyes make the inventory the doctor would need—pupil response in the good eye, the ugly bloom under her right cheekbone, the unmistakable twist of two fingers, the shallow gutter of her breathing.

“Boss,” she said, the word bent but intact.

“Don’t,” he answered softly. “Save the vocabulary for later.”

Her mouth twitched. “I… got her out.”

“I know,” he said. It was both promise and order. “Look at me.”

She obeyed. He saw awareness through the pain, a mind still building the next move. She had never been sentimental. He loved that about her in the way men allow themselves to love weapons that have saved their lives twice.

“Martin,” Sebastian said, not raising his voice. The door from the interior hall opened within three seconds—the kind of obedience that doesn’t come from fear alone. Martin Cortéz entered in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, a field medic’s kit in one hand and something that looked like an apology in the other.

He took in Leila, the blood on the floor, the ghost of Fernando’s cologne in the air, and the absence on the chessboard, and he did not ask useless questions. “Alvarez?” he said.

“On her way,” Sebastian said. “But we move first.”

“Hospital is a trap,” Martin said.

“Home,” Sebastian answered.

Martin nodded once. “Two beds ready. Lines laid.”

Sebastian glanced at Leila’s hands again—swelling, angles gone wrong, the crude splints that had kept damage useful and guaranteed worse. Rage moved through him like a cold current. It did not warm; it clarified.

“Gloves,” he said. Martin tossed him nitrile. Sebastian pulled them on and, together with Martin, moved Leila from the wall to a blanket. Leila cursed once, softly, a word that tasted like iron. Sebastian held her forearm just above the wrist so the fingers wouldn’t bear weight.

“Don’t be gentle,” she muttered. “Be right.”

“We can do both,” he said.

Martin signaled, and two of Sebastian’s men—his men, not Fernando’s—appeared from the hall like parentheses. They lifted the blanket by corners, easing the improvised stretcher onto a low gurney that had arrived with the building the year he bought his first silence. Sebastian stepped ahead to the door, paused to look back at the coffee cooling on the table and the bishop waiting for orders it would never again receive, then turned out the light in the room and left it to its reflection.

The private elevator acknowledged his code with a discreet chime, the sort that costs extra. They moved down in a box that smelled faintly of metal and oranges—a habit Leila hated and he indulged because it made him think of citrus groves under glass, a greenhouse where men pretended nature could be improved by temperature control.

In the garage, the car waited with engine warm. Martin slid into the front, already on the phone in a language that was mostly numbers and yes/no answers. Sebastian took the back with Leila and laid his palm lightly on the blanket, not touching her, counting breaths.

“Don’t tell me to rest,” she said, words clipped around pain.

“I need you to stay awake until Alvarez looks,” he said. “After that, I will narcotize you myself if she hesitates.”

This got him the ghost of a laugh. “You don’t do needles.”

“I do obligations,” he said. “Close enough.”

The car took the night with the obedience money buys. Sebastian’s driver chose routes cameras had learned not to see. Up in the glass throat, a camera on a neighboring tower panned, paused, decided it was more interested in the highway.

Martin turned in his seat. “You want me to brief Selma.”

“No,” Sebastian said.

“She’ll call.”

“She will,” Sebastian agreed. “Later.”

Martin held his gaze, meaning something else with the look. She’ll hear a story anyway. Do you want to be the one who tells it? Sebastian let the question hang between them like a garment no one intended to wear.

“Start the old fires,” he said instead. “The ones with smoke she recognizes. If she is busy stamping ghosts, she will step more carefully around the living.”

Martin grunted approval. “And Fernando?”

Sebastian’s hand tightened once on nothing. “He believes I’ll give him a story to feed my mother,” he said. “I’ll give him a choice instead.”

“What kind,” Martin asked, professional curiosity wrapped around loyalty.

“The kind where every door is a trap,” Sebastian said. “And all of them look like the one he most wants to open.”

The car took a turn under an overpass where paint peeled and light broke into bars. Leila’s breath stuttered and caught. Sebastian leaned in, head low.

“Counting,” he said. “Stay with me.”

“Four,” she whispered. “And four.”

He nodded. “Good.”

They reached the second apartment—a safe house that didn’t pretend to be a home. The elevator opened into an entry with a rug made to swallow the sound of boots. Martin keyed them through to a room that knew how to be bare: two narrow beds, a dresser that had never stored a secret, a table with nothing sentimental on it. In the kitchen, Alvarez’s bag waited, its zippers at attention like soldiers.

The door opened and Dr. Alvarez arrived on a breath of clean air. She wore a gray sweater and the look of a woman who has forgotten to be impressed by violence. “What did he do,” she asked Leila, already at the bedside, already gloving up.

“Hands,” Leila said.

“Obviously,” Alvarez said dryly. “Anything else you’d like to keep for later?”

“Everything,” Leila said, closing her eyes because she could.

Alvarez cut away the tape and profanity migrated from her mouth to Sebastian’s throat. “Clean breaks would have been considerate,” she said. “Whoever did this understands anatomy badly and cruelty well. Give me ketamine and three minutes of no one speaking in metaphors.”

Martin moved to the kitchen to draw up vials with a competence that had kept half a dozen men alive and one friend angry. Sebastian stepped back as Alvarez worked, the room contracting and expanding around her like a lung.

His phone vibrated with a polite insistence. He didn’t look. Another vibration, then a third: messages stacking like cards. He took the device out and, without reading, turned it face down on the table.

“Drink,” Martin said, thrusting a glass of water into his hand as if the act were an insult. Sebastian drank because obedience is also a skill.

Across the room, Alvarez set one finger, then another, then two back into shapes nerves would recognize in the morning. Leila groaned, then drifted, then clawed her way back because Alvarez told her to. “Not yet,” the doctor said. “Ten more questions. Then you can fall.”

“Questions for me,” Sebastian said quietly.

“No,” Alvarez replied without looking up. “Her body.”

Martin smirked at that and then didn’t, because the night had not earned levity.

When Alvarez finally nodded permission, Leila’s eyes rolled closed, lashes rasping her skin. The drug took her the way a tide does—firm, impartial. Alvarez checked the pulse in her neck, then the band of gauze at her wrist. “She’ll keep all her fingers,” she said. “Shooting will be a negotiation. Sword work is out for a month. Tell her I said she’s not twenty.”

“I’ll let her fire you herself,” Sebastian said.

Alvarez peeled off gloves and looked at him until he had to be a person. “You look like someone has been counting your bones,” she said. “By my professional observation: stop trying to pass for furniture. It makes men like him think you are made of wood.”

He inclined his head. “Duly noted.”

She packed her bag with the exact neatness of someone who had learned to be careless and then corrected the habit. “I’ll be back in the morning. If your mother calls, let her go to voicemail. She sounds better that way.”

When the door closed behind her, the quiet that followed wasn’t peace. It was a staging ground.

Martin leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “I’ll sit first watch,” he said.

“You’ll sleep first,” Sebastian said. “You look like an argument I don’t have time to win.”

Martin’s mouth tugged. “Boss—”

“Sleep,” Sebastian repeated. “I’ll wake you before dawn gives anyone ideas.”

Martin pushed off the wall and gave him a look that had learned to be both insubordinate and useful. “Try not to redecorate the street with a man I can’t explain,” he said, then went to the spare room and shut the door without locking it.

Sebastian stood by the bed and watched Leila breathe. He remembered a training yard in a different country, a girl with a ponytail and a knife correcting a boy’s stance with the economy of a drill sergeant and the humor of a burglar. He remembered the first time she’d taken a bullet for him without being asked. He remembered the debt. He was paying it now as interest.

His phone vibrated again. He lifted it and glanced. Selma, twice. Ernesto, once. A third number that belonged to a man who thought his message would be the exception.

Sebastian typed two sentences: Containment complete. Debrief at noon. He did not specify with whom.

Then he sent another, to a contact labeled only with an animal that did not exist: Find me the man with the broken knuckles and the bad habits. Map everyone who laughed at his jokes tonight.

The reply came fast: Already started. Do you want pain or silence?

Sebastian looked at Leila’s fingers, now bound and resting like small birds that had remembered how to be still. “Both,” he typed. “In that order.”

He put the phone away and finally allowed himself the smallest luxury of the night. He placed his hand—not on Leila, not near her wounds, but on the edge of the mattress—and bent his head.

“You were right,” he said into the quiet. “Loyalty is a verb.”

The city turned under the window, unaware. In the other apartment thirty floors up, a bishop waited on a board that would not be played to the end. In a villa where citrus oil tried to cover the smell of old sins, a woman lifted a glass she would not drink and asked a room to bring her stories. Somewhere between the two, a man who liked to smile at his reflection counted his knuckles and wondered why they hurt.

Sebastian straightened, the night settling around him like a coat he had chosen long ago. “One debt at a time,” he murmured.

He picked up his coffee at last. It was cold. He drank it anyway.