Blood on the Canvas

Chapter 6: Cracked Glass

Bianca smelled it before she even got through the front door — the sharp, sour edge of whiskey underneath the usual smell of her mother's cooking, out of place at four in the afternoon on a Saturday, hours before she was supposed to meet Elizabeth.

Her father was at the kitchen table again, though this time there was no pretense of pretending otherwise. A half-empty bottle sat next to his elbow, no can this time, no polite illusion of moderation. Her mother stood at the counter with her back to him, shoulders rigid, chopping nothing in particular, just moving the knife across a board that already held perfectly diced vegetables.

"You're back early," her father said, words slightly blurred at the edges.

"I was just at Elizabeth's, picking out what to wear tonight," Bianca said carefully.

"Right. Class." He said the word like it tasted strange in his mouth. "Must be nice."

"Dad—"

"No, I mean it." He wasn't looking at her, exactly — his eyes had that unfocused quality that meant he was really talking to some other version of the conversation, one that had been playing on a loop in his head for days. "Must be nice, having somewhere to be that isn't a shop that doesn't need you anymore."

"That's not fair," her mother said quietly, still facing the counter.

"None of it's fair, Marisol." His voice cracked on her name, more grief in it than anger, though the anger was there too, threading through everything he said now like a wire pulled too tight. "Fifteen years. I gave them fifteen years, and they gave me two weeks' notice and a box for my desk stuff."

Bianca stood frozen in the doorway, school bag still on her shoulder, watching her parents in a kind of standoff that had clearly been building since long before she walked in. She wanted to go to her room. She wanted, more than that, to fix something that wasn't hers to fix.

"I'm sorry, Dad," she said instead, quietly. "I know it's been a hard week."

Something in his face shifted at that — not quite softening, but recalibrating, like her voice had reached some version of him further underneath the drink. "Not your fault, sunshine." The old nickname, unused in years, came out rough and unfamiliar. "None of this is your fault. You just—" He stopped, shook his head slightly, like he'd lost the thread. "Go do your homework. Go be twenty. Don't waste it worrying about your old man."

She went upstairs, but she didn't do homework. She sat on her bed and listened to the muffled shape of her parents' voices through the floor rising and falling, never quite breaking into a full argument, but never settling into silence either, and thought about Saturday, and about how badly she needed one night that wasn't about anyone's fear or grief or slow unraveling.

---

Elizabeth called that evening, and Bianca almost didn't pick up, exhausted in a way that made even talking feel like effort. She answered anyway.

"Aaron's coming tonight," Elizabeth said without preamble.

"Wait, what? Why?"

Elizabeth hesitated, and in that hesitation Bianca heard something new — a caution that hadn't been there before, like Elizabeth was choosing her words with unusual care. "It's a long story. There's stuff going on with my dad. Old stuff. Aaron wants to be around, just in case."

"In case of what?"

"I don't totally know yet." Another pause, longer this time. "I'll tell you everything tonight, before we head out, I promise. I just don't want to do it over the phone."

Bianca frowned at her own ceiling, unease settling low in her stomach — not fear, exactly, just the sense that something was shifting underneath her, some current she couldn't quite see the shape of yet. "Liz, you're kind of freaking me out."

"I don't mean to. It's probably nothing. Dad's being paranoid, and Aaron's being protective because that's just what he does." Elizabeth's voice brightened deliberately, an obvious effort to lighten the mood. "Doesn't change the plan, though. Drinks, terrible karaoke, you complaining about your color theory grade all night. Just with a slightly bigger group than usual."

"Fine," Bianca said, letting herself be pulled along by Elizabeth's determined cheerfulness, too tired to push harder. "But you're explaining everything tonight. All of it, before we even leave the house."

"Promise."

---

That same night, three streets from the garage where he worked, Fernando stood in the shadow of a closed pharmacy, waiting for a man he hadn't seen in over a year.

Marcus arrived exactly on time, the way he always had — a habit left over from years of operations where timing meant the difference between clean and caught. He looked older than Fernando remembered, more tired, though his eyes were as sharp as ever.

"You look like hell," Marcus said, by way of greeting.

"Feel like it too." Fernando kept his voice low, glancing once down the empty street before continuing. "I need out. For real this time. Not the half-measures I tried before."

"Nobody gets out clean, kid. You know that."

"There's got to be something. A trade. Information, money, anything." Fernando's jaw tightened. "I've got the job tonight. I don't want to do it."

Marcus went quiet for a long moment, studying him in the dim light. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped even lower, careful in a way that made Fernando's pulse pick up before the words even landed.

"There might be one way," Marcus said slowly. "But it's not the kind of thing you walk back from either. You'd be trading one danger for a worse one, just further down the road." He paused. "You sure you want to hear it?"

Fernando thought of Reyes's warning at the garage, of the small, fragile life he'd built that was already cracking under the weight of a single phone call, and nodded once, grim and certain.

"Tell me," he said.

Marcus glanced up and down the street once more before he spoke, dropping his voice to barely above a whisper, and what he said next made Fernando go very still, his stomach turning cold in a way that had nothing to do with the night air.