Chapter 40: WHAT THE DARK MAKES

POV: Anna De'Leon

In the dream she was in the garage.

Not the garage as it had been before, the Sunday morning version with the coffee going cold on the workbench and the light coming in at the summer angle and her father's hands moving the polishing rag in slow circles. This was the other garage, the one the dream had built from the materials of the last months, and it was the same space with different contents, the same concrete floor and the same fluorescent light and the same smell of oil and chrome polish but everything else wrong.

Scarface was there.

Not as he had been in the garage the night Victor came, not the living man with the scar and the knife and the anticipation in his eyes. The dream's version of him was what he had become after Victor's forty-five fired twice in the enclosed space, and he was standing upright anyway, and he was looking at her with the eyes that the living version had looked at her with in the moments before the shooting, and the knife was in his hand and it was moving toward her and her legs would not produce the movement she was asking them to produce.

Eddie was there.

He was standing against the far wall in the light from the bay door and his face was the face from the clubhouse floor after Victor's enforcers had finished what her words had started, and he was looking at her with an expression she did not have a clean name for, not accusation exactly, not the performance of blame, but the simple and direct look of a man who understood the cause and effect of his situation and had traced it back to its origin.

His daughter was there too.

She was the detail the dream had assembled that was worse than the sum of its parts, the small girl from the club barbecues sitting on the concrete floor between Eddie and the bay door looking at Anna with the specific uncomprehending directness of a child who does not yet know that some things cannot be fixed, and Anna looked at the child and she could not move and the knife was still coming and the child was still looking and the fluorescent light was buzzing with the complaint of something that was about to fail.

She screamed.

She screamed herself out of it with the specific violence of a body that has produced a sound large enough to break the surface of sleep, and she was sitting upright in the dark of the trailer with her chest heaving and the sweat cold on her skin and the dream images still present in the way dream images were present in the first seconds of waking, vivid and physical and carrying the weight of things that had actually happened even when the specific assembly of them had not.

She pressed her palms against her eyes.

She breathed.

The trailer was dark and the desert wind was moving against the aluminum siding and the phone on the nightstand showed a time that meant she had been asleep for less than three hours and she breathed and she tried to let the specific images go, the knife and Eddie's face and the child on the concrete, and they did not go because things that were made from real material did not go simply because you asked them to.

The door opened.

She heard it before she saw it, the specific sound of Victor's door opening, and she understood what it meant about the architecture of the space he had built around her, that his trailer was close enough that her scream had reached him, that close enough was by design and not by accident, that nothing about the compound's geography was accidental when it came to the people Victor considered his.

He filled the frame.

Hair not perfectly arranged, shirt not fully buttoned, moving with the specific urgency of someone who had been pulled from sleep by a sound they had classified as requiring immediate response. She had never seen him anything other than completely composed and the not-composedness of him now produced something in her that she did not have a name for, some response to the evidence of his having run toward her sound that she was not going to examine directly.

He crossed the room in three steps and the mattress dipped as he sat beside her.

"What happened," he said. His voice was low and carried the specific quality of calm that cut through panic, the voice of a man who understood that matched energy was not useful in this situation and had adjusted accordingly.

Anna shook her head. Her face was against her knees and the words came out muffled and broken with the specific texture of words that had been inside a nightmare and were still coated with it. "I saw them. The Serpents with the knife. And Eddie. Raul. Their faces after. Because I told you."

Victor's hand settled on her back.

Not demanding. Not the possessive anchor of a man establishing ownership, though it was that too, she had learned to read his touch well enough to know that it was always that. But it was also simply present, simply warm, simply there in the dark with the weight of something solid and real against her back while the dream images were still trying to reassert themselves.

She hated that it helped.

She hated it with the specific self-knowledge of a person who understands exactly what is happening to them and cannot stop it from happening, who can name the mechanism and watch it operate and remain subject to it regardless of the naming and the watching.

His hand was warm and present and her breathing was steadying.

"You are safe," Victor said. "No one is touching you. Not while I am here."

She thought about saying that he was the reason the dream existed, that the specific assembly of images the nightmare had produced were all downstream of choices he had made and she had been made to participate in. She thought about saying that the child on the concrete floor was the detail that had broken her out of sleep and that the child existed in the dream because she existed in the world and that the connection between those two facts was not incidental.

She said, "It does not stop. Every time I close my eyes."

Victor shifted closer. The warmth of him was along her left side now, the specific heat of a body that had been under blankets and had come to her through the desert night, and he was not performing comfort in the way she had watched him perform other things. He was providing it, which was the more complicated problem.

"That is because you have not learned yet," he said, his voice dropping to the register he used when he wanted her full attention, the intimate tone of a man sharing something he considered true, "that the people who want to hurt you cannot reach you here. Not while I am between you and them."

Anna looked up.

She looked at his face in the dark of the trailer, the blue eyes that were the same whether he was sitting in his office teaching her about information as a weapon or sitting on her mattress in the middle of the night with his shirt half-buttoned, and she thought about all the things those eyes had witnessed and all the things they had directed and all the things they had remained unchanged through.

He brushed the hair from her face.

His fingers were careful with it, moving the damp strands back from her forehead with a gentleness that she had learned to understand as deliberate, that everything Victor did with his hands was deliberate, that gentleness from him was as calculated as the slap had been, both of them selected for what they would produce in the specific person he was applying them to.

She knew this.

She felt the gentleness anyway.