His to harvest

Chapter Two: The Golden Viper

POV: Luz

The car arrived the next morning at exactly nine o’clock.

Black. Tinted windows. Engine humming like a contented predator.

Luz watched it from her bedroom window, still in her nightdress, her braid undone. Her father, César, stood in the doorway of their small house, one hand gripping the frame, the other trembling around a mug of chicory coffee.

“He’ll be angry if you don’t go,” her father said. Not a threat. A fact.

“He’ll be angrier if I do,” Luz replied, because she knew Marco. A yes today meant a yes tomorrow, and then a yes to his bed, and then a yes to his ring, and then a yes to a life where she stopped having a voice at all.

The car door opened. A man in a gray suit stepped out—not Marco himself, but one of his lieutenants. The man smiled with too many teeth. “Doña Luz. Don Marco insists.”

“Insists,” she repeated. “Not invited.”

“Insists.”

She pulled her braid tight, wrapped it into a bun, and walked outside barefoot. The cobblestones were hot. The sky was a white blaze. The lieutenant opened the back door.

She didn’t get in.

“Tell Don Marco that my father is sick today,” she said, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “I can’t leave him. Perhaps tomorrow.”

The lieutenant’s smile didn’t waver, but his eyes went cold. “Tomorrow, then.”

He drove away.

Luz stood in the street until the dust settled. Then she went back inside, locked the door, and threw up in the sink.

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That night, the fruit stand burned.

Not entirely—just the wooden sign that read Bananas César, hand-painted by her mother twenty years ago. The letters were still smoking when Luz ran to the square at dawn. The rest of the stand stood untouched. The bananas were fine. The cash box was fine.

But painted in red across the back wall, in letters as tall as her arm:

SAY YES.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She found a rag and a bucket of water and scrubbed until her knuckles bled. Then she opened for business as if nothing had happened.

The first customer of the day was the baker, Señor Rojas. He looked at the wet wall, at her raw hands, and said nothing. He bought two bananas and left a third on the counter as a gift.

The second customer was La Chivata, the empanada seller. She wore her red headscarf and her sharp little smile. “Such a shame, mija. Don Marco is so generous. A girl like you should be grateful for his attention.”

Luz handed her change without looking up. “A girl like me should be left alone.”

La Chivata snorted. “That’s not how the world works, flaca. Pretty fruit gets eaten. Always has.”

She left. Luz watched her go and felt something cold settle in her chest.

Someone had told Marco where to paint that message. Someone who watched her every day.

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