#pentaelzerom

A year ago, Lola would have been standing behind the curtain at Gorilla, her notebook pressed against her ribs like a shield, analyzing the segment for broadcast metrics. Tonight, she was in the front row, close enough to feel the percussion of bodies slamming against the canvas vibrate straight up through the soles of her shoes.

The air in the arena was a living, breathing thing, thick with the smell of spilled beer, and the haze from the pyrotechnics, and the frantic, collective heat of fifteen thousand screaming fans. But Lola’s focus was entirely whittled down to the twenty-by-twenty ring in front of her.

Penta looked exhausted. His chest heaved against the ropes, his black and white gear dark with sweat. They had been dating for twelve months; an entire year of stolen hotel mornings, hushed conversations in dark rooms, and the quiet, terrifying vulnerability of learning how to let someone stay. But watching him work never got easier. Every time he took a bump, the impact echoed somewhere behind her own sternum.

He pushed himself off the ropes, dodging a desperate lariat from the reigning champion, Dominik Mysterio. The movement was pure, vicious poetry. Lola leaned forward, her fingers white-knuckling the barricade. She knew the cadence of his matches by heart now, could read the microscopic shifts in his breathing and the angle of his shoulders. The crowd was on their feet, a deafening wall of sound, chanting Cero Miedo in a rhythm that rattled her teeth.

He caught Dominik with a Mexican Destroyer with that lethal, practiced grace, and locked it in. It was swift, brutal, and perfect. 

The bell rang, sharp and frantic, but it was immediately swallowed by the roar of the arena.

"Here is your winner... and the NEW WWE Intercontinental Champion... Penta!"

The referee handed him the belt; heavy, gleaming, an anchor of leather and gold. Penta didn't hold it up immediately. He dropped to his knees in the center of the ring, clutching the title to his chest, head bowed. To the crowd, it was the ultimate picture of a warrior taking in his hard-fought glory. But Lola saw the tremor in his shoulders. She knew exactly what his face looked like under the mask in this exact second; eyes squeezed shut, jaw tight, overwhelmed by the weight of a lifelong dream suddenly made real in his hands.

When he finally stood, he hoisted the championship high above his head, the arena light catching the gold in a blinding flash. He climbed the turnbuckle nearest to her, soaking in the adulation, raising his hands. But as he looked out over the sea of screaming faces, his gaze dropped.

Through the chaos, the lights, and the noise, his eyes found hers. It was a microscopic fraction of a second, entirely invisible to the cameras and the thousands of people surrounding them. But the look he gave her; dark, fiercely triumphant, and entirely unmasked in its intent, was a promise. Lola let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, a ragged laugh tearing from her throat as she clapped, the heat of tears threatening the corners of her eyes. She was his. And he had just conquered the world.

Lola didn’t wait for the broadcast to end. She slipped through the gap in the barricade, flashing her credentials at a startled security guard, and navigated the familiar, cinderblock labyrinth of the arena’s underbelly.

Backstage was a blur of chaos. Techs were sprinting with cables, producers were barking into headsets, and the catering crew was already beginning to break down the tables. Lola dodged a rolling AV cart and practically threw herself through the door of Penta’s private dressing room.

She paced the small, fluorescent-lit space, the erratic thud of her heart loud in her own ears. The adrenaline of the crowd was still humming in her veins, making her hands shake slightly. She stopped in front of the small television monitor in the corner, watching the delayed feed of his post-match celebration, until she heard the heavy, unmistakable sound of his boots in the hallway.

The door swung open, and Penta stepped inside.

He looked absolutely battered. His chest was still heaving, but it was the championship; heavy, gleaming, and draped over his shoulder that changed the entire gravity of the room.

For a second, neither of them moved. He stood in the doorway, breathing in the quiet of the room. Then, with a sudden, careless motion, he let the Intercontinental Championship slide off his shoulder. It hit the top of his suitcase with a heavy, metallic thud; a sound made of leather, gold, and twenty years of sacrifice.

He didn't say a word. He just crossed the room and pulled her in.

Lola collided with him, burying her face in the crook of his neck. He was hot, slick with sweat, smelling of oil, and raw exertion. The stiff edge of his chest piece dug into her collarbone, but she didn’t care. She wrapped her arms fiercely around his waist, grounding him, holding on as if to prove to both of them that he was actually here and the match was truly over.

Penta’s arms locked around her, his hands splayed wide across her back, pressing her flush against him. He buried his face in her hair, his breath coming in ragged, uneven hitches that sounded dangerously close to a sob.

"You did it," Lola whispered, her voice cracking as she pressed a kiss to the damp, exposed skin of his shoulder. "I’m so proud of you."

He pulled back just enough to look at her, his hands coming up to cradle her face. The mask was still on, the terrifying visage of Cero Miedo staring down at her, but Lola saw right through it. She saw the exhaustion, the disbelief, and the overwhelming relief in his dark eyes.

Slowly, his thumbs found the thick laces at the back of his head. It was a ritual they had perfected over the last twelve months, a deliberate shedding of armor. He tugged the knot loose, peeled the mask up and over his head, and let it drop to the floor beside his boots.

Without the mask, the vulnerability was absolute. His face was flushed, dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, black and white paint smeared across his lips and eyes, and the faint lines of the mask still indented into his skin. He looked younger, softer, and entirely human.

"I saw you," he murmured, his voice wrecked and gravelly from the match. His thumb traced her cheekbone, wiping away a tear she hadn't realized she shed. "When I was on the turnbuckle. I looked for you."

"I was right there," she said, leaning into his palm. "I'm always right there."

Penta let out a breath that seemed to deflate the last of his remaining tension. He rested his forehead against hers, closing his eyes. "It was heavy," he admitted, the confession meant only for her. "When they handed it to me. The belt. It felt like... everything.”

"It is everything," Lola reminded him gently. "It's exactly what you deserve.  It’s what you’ve worked so hard for all these years!"

He opened his eyes, the gold flecks in them catching the harsh light. The fierce, unmasked intent she had seen from the front row was back, softening into something deeply private. "Not everything," he corrected, his voice dropping an octave as he brushed a kiss against her jaw, then her lips. "Tu eres mi todo." (You are my everything.)

Before Lola could formulate a response, the heavy, impatient knock of knuckles rapped against the dressing room door.

"Penta?" Hunter's muffled voice called from the hallway. "Give you five minutes to breathe, man, then we need you for the digital exclusive and press photos."

Penta sighed, a low, rumbling sound of annoyance, and let his head drop to Lola's shoulder. "Five minutes," he muttered against her skin, his lips brushing her neck in a way that made her pulse jump.

Lola gathered the strands of his hair, damp, curling at the nape of his neck, and gently swept them away from his forehead. She cupped his face for a moment, thumbs reverently catching the last traces of paint and sweat from his temples, committing to memory the softness and fatigue etched there. She reached for the mask, the iconic thing that was half cult to his fans and half armor for the man who wore it. For twelve months she had come to both resent and adore it; it was at once the instrument that hid him from the world and the vessel through which he was most wholly himself.

She held the mask in her hands a second longer, a brief and silent negotiation, as if it might, for once, let him simply rest. But the moment snapped like a rubber band; there was a world outside this room, and it was calling his name. Lola slid the mask over his head. Her fingers threaded through the thick laces, drawing them closed and tying the knot at the base of his skull as gently as she could, as if that might ease the ache in his neck or the weight of the night. She adjusted the chin, smoothed the lines over his jaw, and then rested her palm against the side of his face.

He looked down at her, the mask transforming his battered features into the impassive, icon adored in countless arenas, but the eyes, his eyes, remained. They were bloodshot and shining. Lola leaned in, her lips brushing his. “I’ll be here when you’re finished,” she said, her voice low and certain. It was both benediction and challenge, and she meant it with every atom in her body.

Twenty minutes later, he returned to the locker room. The door swung shut behind him with a gentle thud, and suddenly it was just the two of them again, the overhead fluorescents making everything a little too bright, a little too brittle. Lola watched him from her post in the battered armchair across the room, legs tucked up, arms wrapped around her shins, a picture of strained composure.

He barely looked at her. Instead, he let the silence fall, thick and uneven, as he dropped the championship belt onto the table next to his suitcase. He stood there for a moment, as if trying to remember where his body ended and the mask began. His gloved hands went automatically to the back of his head, fingers working the laces with the weary muscle memory of a man who had done this a thousand times. But before he could pull, Lola spoke.

"Leave it," she said, voice low and a little rough, like she was admitting something indecent. Her cheeks burned with the effort of the words. "Please. Keep it on."

He paused, hands hovering at the knot. He turned, a little awkward in his own skin, surprised by the request. “Leave it on?” he repeated, as if maybe he hadn’t heard her right. His tone was softer than the paint and leather made him seem; the mask had always been a shield, never a gag.

The two of them stared at each other, a charged standoff. Lola had never asked for this before. Usually, it was a ritual, the way he would shed the mask first, the way she would cradle his bare face like a secret. But tonight, everything felt raw and different; every nerve in Lola’s body hummed with the aftermath of the match, the way he’d looked at her from the turnbuckle, the singularity of his victory. She wanted, no, needed to see him this way a little longer, armored and untouchable to the world, but hers, only hers, in the space between the mask and his eyes.

"Leave it on," she said again, firmer this time, holding his gaze. "For me."

He let his hands drop to his sides, letting the mask stay. The air charged around them, thick with something neither of them would name. He crossed the room, and stopped in front of her. The mask was impassive, the mouth a set, aggressive line, but his eyes, Lola would have drowned in those eyes if not for the mask holding her afloat. For a moment, neither of them moved.

Lola just pressed her lips together, eyes shiny and intent, as if she was waiting to see what he’d choose, what version of himself he’d be.

“Oh?” he said, the sound cracked with exhaustion, a question more than an answer. “Ohhhh.” The second word dropped lower, all the air gone out of it, and in the echoing pause after, he understood what she was asking. 

Lola’s voice came again, quiet but with a new edge. “I want you like this,” she said, and the words made the air between them shiver. “Right now.” She unfolded from the chair, pulse fluttering at her throat, and let him close the gap. Penta sank to his knees in front of her, the mask’s hard line brushing her cheek, his hands gripping her wrists with careful reverence. He looked up at her, and even though his face was hidden, Lola saw everything in the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his chin, the impossible gentleness in the way he touched her.

“Okay,” he said, voice muffled but intent. “For you.” 

She closed the space with a single, decisive motion; her lips found his, her hands greedy and unyielding as she fisted a handful of his shirt and yanked him in. The force of it startled a sharp, startled sound from him, half laugh, half groan, before he caught himself and kissed her back, harder. She was still trembling, every muscle a live wire. His hands, gloved, rough, immense, slid down to the curve of her hips, pulling her flush against him. The mask pressed into her face, stiff and unyielding, but she wanted it, wanted all of it, all of him, the heat, the sweat, the afterglow of violence and victory and the way his body seemed to hum with the leftover current of the ring.

She couldn’t get enough of him. Her hands went to his neck, his hair, the raw line where the mask met skin. She could feel his pulse thumping, frantic and alive, beneath her palms. His breath came through the mask in hot, ragged bursts, the air behind it damp and heavy. When his tongue slipped past her lips, she gave it without hesitation, her own answering with a need that was almost feral. They clung to each other, devouring and desperate, all pretense incinerated in the aftermath of his triumph.

He edged her backwards, careful but insistent, until the backs of his knees hit the armchair and he collapsed into it, pulling her down with him. For a second, the mask stared back at her, it should have been awkward, but there was only adoration, only hunger, in the way he looked at her. Lola let out a breathless, helpless sigh and leaned down, her mouth opening to catch his once, twice, like she was drinking the last oxygen left in the room.

They kissed until her lips tingled, until she had to breathe through her nose and tears stung behind her eyes. He was shivering, not from cold, but from the electric comedown of adrenaline, the aftershocks of the match. He was so much bigger than her, so much heavier, but he let her take the lead, let her pull and bite and command.

He let out a guttural, almost involuntary, “Lola,” that vibrated against her lips. She felt herself unravel at the sound of it, the name reconstituted into something sacred. She pressed her lips to the mask, to the sweat-slick skin at his temple, to the line of his jaw.

“Don’t let go,” she whispered, her breath catching, her hands still tangled in ties at the back of his head. 

He didn’t.

She swung a leg over his lap and settled herself on him, the denim of her jeans rough against his thighs, the heat between them immediate and almost punishing. The movement made him drop his head back against the chair, exposing the column of his throat, the edge of the mask slicing a hard line between painted leather and flesh. The sight made her tremble; from desire, from nerves, from the reckless joy of seeing him so completely undone in front of her. Lola’s hands went to the hem of his shirt, fingers digging into the sweat-damp material, and she pulled it up, slow and deliberate, her knuckles grazing the tattoos that covered his chest like armor. She dragged it over his head in one hard, decisive motion, the shirt catching for a heartbeat on the mask before it came free. He shivered, skin blooming with goosebumps, the new air making the blood rise in bright, vulnerable streaks where her hands had been.

She let the shirt drop to the floor and pressed her palms to his chest, flattening them over the tattoo that bloomed across his heart. Beneath her hands, his pulse sang, a wild staccato she could match to the throb behind her own ribs. He reached for her then, unable to help himself, his hands rough and greedy on her hips, pulling her closer, anchoring her to him with a need so unfiltered it left her breathless. 

She slid her hands up to the mask, tracing the grooves and ridges, feeling the heat of his skin radiating through the leather. She stared into the holes where his eyes blazed, searching for the man behind it, and found a raw, unguarded tenderness that made her ache. She bent down, lips hovering just over his, breathing him in, her hair a curtain around their faces. He was trembling again. She licked the salt from his skin, bit gently at the edge of his lips, and felt him moan, the sound so real and so close it vibrated in her chest.

She kissed him again, slower this time, savoring the taste of sweat and paint and him. He tipped his head back further, letting her have all of him; she felt him surrender to her, she felt memory in the way his hands gripped her thighs. She rocked against him, testing, teasing, pushing the pressure until he gasped, the sound muffled and desperate. Her hands dropped to his shoulders, her nails leaving half-moons in his skin, and she moved against him again, harder, not caring if the air left her lungs or if the ugly chair toppled backwards.

She wanted to devour him. She wanted to crawl inside his armor and never come out.

And so she did.

He touched her as if she were the first thing he had ever wanted, as if his entire life had been a prelude for this moment, his hands unhesitating, all of the bravado gone and replaced by something needier, more exposed. His fingers found the button of her jeans, grazing the trembling skin just above the waistband, and paused there, not from uncertainty, but from reverence, as if the act of undressing her was a ceremony as sacred as the unmasking she had forbidden. Their eyes locked, and for an instant Lola saw the man behind all the facades; vulnerable, desperate, hungry for her in ways that transcended language.

She leaned in, breath hot against his cheek, her lips grazing the edge of his mask, and whispered, "Go on." The words were an order, but also a gift, and he took it, deft fingers working the button and zipper with impatient grace. Her jeans loosened, the seam giving way with a shiver, and his hands slid under the denim, palms rough and certain, traveling the length of her, mapping the landscape of her want. She arched into him, pressing herself forward until their bodies met at every possible point, the friction sparking something wild and reckless in both of them.

He tugged her jeans  and panties down, slow enough to savor but fast enough to make her gasp, and she stepped out of them, never breaking eye contact. The air around them shifted, the balance of power tipping back and forth, each of them testing how far the other would go, how much they could take. She was clad now only in one of his merch tshirts, bare legs straddling his lap, and the sight seemed to undo him; his hands shook, just a little, when he cupped her hips and pulled her closer, as if he was terrified she might disappear.

He lifted his hips, the motion urgent but unsteady, and shoved his pants down over his thighs, stopping just above his knees. Lola watched him with a hunger that bordered on feral, every nerve ending tuned to the frequency of his want.  He wanted her–no, he needed her, with the same reckless abandon he brought to the ring, and she sensed it, relished it, pulled him forward by the shoulders until he was half out of the chair, pressing into her with the full heat of his bare skin against hers. He anchored himself under her hands, the lines of his thighs trembling, the mask at a cant that should have been ridiculous but somehow turned her blood molten. 

Lola reached between them, fondled, stroked, discovered the heft and weight of him with a reverence that bordered on worship. He gasped, the sound both triumphant and startled, and bucked against her hand. She guided him, lined their bodies up, the moment thick with the inevitability of it, the promise of what came next. He gripped her hips, not to control, but to anchor himself in reality, and she could feel the trembling in his fingers, the way he held on for dear life. 

He shuddered, the word breaking from him in a voice so raw Lola barely recognized it as human, let alone his. “Amor.” It was a confession, a naked plea, guttural in its need. The sound vibrated through her, set every nerve on edge. She felt the word more than heard it; felt it in the way his breath hitched, the way his hands tightened, the way the mask pressed so hard into her cheek she thought it might bruise. Her own name, her own self, suddenly wrapped in something so immense it dwarfed every ache that had ever come before.

His face bobbed forward, reckless, and he kissed her with a violence she hadn’t known he possessed; collision of teeth, the taste of sweat, the salty slip of tongues meeting and retreating and meeting again. The want between them was an electric storm, a monstrous thing alive and starving, and she rode it, grinding down onto him, her hunger insatiable.

She took control, because she needed to, because he needed her to. She rocked against him, relentless, and the friction sent shockwaves up her spine. He bucked helplessly, the mask tilted at a desperate angle, his hands fisting in the fabric of her shirt, and he surrendered, all at once, to the inevitability of her. 

Lola was beyond words, reduced to the rawest animal logic, and the sound that came out of her wasn’t a moan so much as a declaration; triumph, possession, joy, and ache, all entwined and searing. She rolled her hips, changing the angle, and felt him gasp beneath her, his breath catching, his hands bracing tight on her thighs as if he could anchor himself against the tide of her. 

She leaned back and forth in quick, greedy snaps, her hair falling wild around her face. She felt the burn of friction, the throb of his body inside hers, and she bore down harder, chasing the next wave, the next electric pulse, determined to ride it higher. Her eyes kept drifting to him, to the strangeness and beauty of his face half-obliterated by paint and leather, the impossible vulnerability that shone through the mask. He was shaking, sweating, his eyes clenched shut, the cords of his neck straining with the effort not to come too soon, to let her write the story of their collision.

Every time she rocked against him she felt his hands flex, his fingers digging in, not to control but to plead, to urge her on, to ask for more. She gave it gladly, losing herself in the rhythm, letting the world contract to the wet slap of skin, the creak of the ugly chair under their combined weight, the rising, drowning flush of pleasure. She slowed to a grind, savoring the friction, and he cursed under his breath, the sound thick and reverent, almost prayerful.

He tried to speak, his voice breaking between syllables. “You…ughhhh…fuck, Lola–” and then he was silent, head thrown back, mouth open, mask shining with sweat. The look on his face undid her, the openness and awe, and it drove her harder. She wanted to see him fall apart for her, wanted to become the only thing he could think of. She bent forward and seized his jaw in her hand, forcing his eyes open to meet hers, and rode him with a speed and ferocity that surprised even her. His hands scrabbled at her waist, and then he yielded, let his arms fall slack, gave over every last inch of himself.

Her thighs burned, the muscles shaking with every downward grind, but she couldn’t stop, wouldn’t. The chair creaked beneath them like it might snap, and the thought flashed, absurd and electric; let it. Let everything break. She rolled her hips again, slower, deeper, until the head of his dick caught the place that made her vision white out around the edges. A sound tore out of her; raw, open-mouthed, unashamed. She didn’t know if it was his name or just air, but it felt like surrender held inside a single syllable.

His hands were under her shirt, thumbs dragging over her nipples, twisting and pulling; the friction making her jerk against him. She felt the wet drag of his tongue, hot and clumsy on the side of her neck, and it was so obscene she laughed, breathless, her fingers tightening in his hair until the leather squeaked under her grip. “You–fuck–you feel like mine,” she panted, not meaning to say it out loud, but it was there, hanging between them.

“Am yours, always yours.” He answered. His breath broke against her collar, an honest-to-god sob, raw enough to brand her skin. 

She leaned down, her forehead resting against his, her voice so low it was almost a secret, “I love you like this.”

He nodded, once, twice, his eyes squeezed shut, as if that might hold the night together a little longer. And then she broke him open, and let the rest of it pour out. She felt the moment he let go; the sudden clench of his fingers, the jerk of his hips, the hot spill inside her that turned every muscle molten. She kept moving, slow, drawing it out until she shuddered so hard the chair legs scraped linoleum. 

She finally pulled the mask off, and his eyes turned up to meet her, and for just a second Lola thought; this is how it is meant to be, this is the truest version of you, and the truest version of me, and maybe together we form something that cannot be destroyed.

*I recently saw a picture of Dragon Lee's without his mask... I got inspired. This is VERY smut heavy. I'll be breaking it into two parts because I got carried away (shocking, I know) The smut comes in heavy in the second part. Also, the google machine tells me that his real name is Emmanuel, so we'll be calling him Manny for my story purposes.*

Part 1

Nighttime pressed against the windows of their cramped rental car, turning the world outside into flat silhouettes. Samara claimed the passenger seat, her feet propped up on the glove compartment. Manny hunched forward as he drove, jaw tight, fingers drumming an anxious rhythm on the steering wheel. Behind them, Penta sprawled across the back seat, his frame contorted around their luggage.

Samara tapped her nail against the cupholder rim, matching rhythm with the radio’s beat. From the backseat, Penta’s face appeared between the headrests, his words brushing her ear. “What time are we supposed to be there?” A shiver crawled up her neck as she laughed softly, shoulder hunching. “Quit that,” she murmured. “You know what your whispering does to me.” .

“Why I do it,” Penta replied with a smirk.

Manny’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror for the dozenth time, catching the smug look on Penta's face and the way Samara leaned into the whisper. His knuckles were bone-white against the steering wheel. “Stop flirting,” Manny cut in, his voice sharper than he intended.

Samara caught the slight movement at the corner of his mouth, noticed the tension pulsing along his jawline. She shifted toward him, letting her hair cascade over one shoulder, “Lighten up a little,” she said, jabbing his ribs playfully.

The casual touch sent a jolt through him, but he forced his posture to remain stiff. “Trying to focus here,” he muttered, desperate to keep his eyes on the dark road instead of her. “Don’t see either of you offering to take the wheel.”

From the back, Penta’s drowsy voice; “Pull over. I’ll drive.”

“No!” Samara and Manny shot back simultaneously.

The dynamic churned on, week after week, through a succession of endless drives. Penta never let a silence settle, always filling the gaps with some twist of a phrase or a sly, well-timed glance. He flirted relentlessly, with words, with silence, with the slow, deliberate way he read billboards aloud in a bedroom whisper. Samara acted immune, rolled her eyes, batted away his comments with practiced sarcasm, and yet even her barbs had a way of curving back toward him, laced with something softer. She’d accuse him of being an idiot, but the way she said “idiot” sounded almost affectionate, a syllable she tasted before letting go.

Manny watched this with an ever-growing knot in his stomach. He tried to convince himself it was mere annoyance, an irritation at being stuck with the two of them, their private universe expanding to consume all available air. But each time Penta leaned in close, lips brushing the shell of Samara’s ear, and each time Samara’s laughter spilled out, Manny felt the sting of being surplus, a third wheel spinning without purpose.

———

“Now that Wrestlemania weekend is here and you’ve won the tag titles… let’s have some fun tonight! We don’t have anywhere to be until Monday! We’re in Vegas…” Samara’s eyes glittered as she bounced on her heels. She was radiant, all sharp angles and kinetic energy, the sort of beauty that made it impossible to look away for long.

Manny hesitated, glancing past her at the mass of bodies swirling around backstage. “We’ve got press after the show…” he mumbled, but it sounded weak even to him. The excuse was threadbare, and Samara saw right through it.

“So… after that!” she said, reaching up to grab his bicep, then leaving her hand resting there with calculated intimacy. She’d always been a little too close, a little too much, but tonight she radiated the kind of confidence that made Manny’s resolve leak away in tiny increments.

“We should probably rest,” he said, though his voice lacked conviction. “Don’t you wanna, like, decompress?” He tried not to stare at her mouth, but the way she grinned at him made it difficult.

Samara rolled her eyes, an exaggerated gesture that managed to be both flirtatious and slightly mocking. “I wanna celebrate. I’m the manager of the best tag team in the world.” she said, leaning in so her lips brushed the shell of his ear, a move she’d clearly learned from Penta, though her version was less calculated and more reckless. “We beat the best. The company’s finally giving you a push. Please…”

The idea of them, alone together in a hotel room, sent a jolt through Manny’s chest. He cleared his throat, “Just me and you?” The question came out smaller than he intended.

Samara pounced on the opportunity. “Yeah,” she said, pulling at his arm as if testing the tensile strength of his will. “Let’s see where the night takes us.”

Penta, who’d been idling by the monitors, watching the show, called back to them with a singsong lilt. “Oh, so I’m chopped liver now?” He draped the championship belt over his shoulder, but his eyes were fixed on Manny, waiting to see if he’d take Samara’s bait. Samara shot him a look that was half fondness, half challenge.

Manny felt a warmth creeping up his neck, the kind of blush that made him remember every embarrassing thing he’d ever said or done in Samara’s presence. “Didn’t mean to…” he started, but Samara cut him off with a bright laugh that echoed through the noise.

Samara turned back to Penta, the glint in her eyes daring him to say more. “You can come if you can keep up, old man.”

Penta grinned, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening, and he leaned in low, conspiratorial. “My room, two hours, you bring the food, I got the beer. I’ll show you how to keep up!”

“Deal,” Samara said, “You want sushi or Thai?”

Manny’s tongue felt thick. He knew he should say “sushi” or “Thai,” whichever she actually wanted, but the thought of going back to the hotel and sitting on the bed, the three of them with their takeout boxes, the crackle of cheap beer and the possibility of all the things not said between mouthfuls, he’d never craved anything and dreaded it so thoroughly in the same breath.

“We could do tacos,” he said, and immediately hated it for being so painfully normal, a safe, stubby answer.

But Samara just grinned, so sharp it almost hurt to look at her. The wrestler in her, the part that could summon a stadium’s attention with a flick of her wrist, she aimed it all at him. “Tacos are good,” she said, like she’d never heard a better proposition in her life.

Penta’s room overlooked the far end of the Strip, where the casino lights bled together in the weathered window glass. Manny showed up first, still in the clothes he’d worn to the arena, a case of beer in hand. Samara arrived five minutes later carry two bags of tacos from a random taco truck.

The three of them sat circled around the table in the corner of the hotel suite. Their spoils from the taco truck lay scattered between them; crumbled napkins, half-squeezed lime wedges, and the dull, greasy sheen of cooling carnitas. Samara’s hair was still damp from the world’s fastest shower; she’d towel-dried and let it fall in syrupy coils down her back. Manny nursed his first beer, swirling the mouth of the bottle in small, anxious arcs. Penta sat across from him, still wearing his suit from the arena.

Penta set a deck of battered playing cards on the table, the pack so worn the edges looked soft. “Let’s play,” he said, voice smooth and predatory, the barest hint of a slur leaking in at the edges.

Manny cocked his head, a slow suspicion clouding his features. “Cards? We could just go downstairs and play for chips like normal people.”

“Not chips,” said Penta, his tone loaded with promise. “Not that kind.” He thumbed the flop of cards, watching Manny over the top of his bottle like a cat regarding a wayward mouse. “Strip poker,” he announced finally, with a flourish.

“Fuck no,” said Manny, the words out before he could throttle them down. “I’m not that drunk. Yet.”

Penta fanned the cards out with a magician’s flourish, then sipped his beer like that settled it. A smile curled along the edge of his mouth, the kind that made you think he never stopped smiling, only took breaks.

Samara’s laugh was a sharp, delighted yelp, pure mischief. “Oh my god, yes, yes, yes!” She clapped her hands together so hard a drop of beer arced from her bottle and landed on the table. “Let’s do it.”

Manny stared at her, stunned. “You’re serious?”

She grinned, teeth bared. “Come on. You go out there in the world's tiniest gear but you’re scared of a little skin?”

“It’s not that I’m scared,” he said, but his voice cracked, and Samara’s eyes flickered, catching the tell. “I just think it’s a dumb game.” He looked at Samara, then at Penta, who seemed to be vibrating with anticipation, and realized it was already over; he’d lost before the cards were even dealt.

Samara slumped back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest. “Fine. Play for dares, then. Or something...”

Manny tried to picture what sort of dares Penta would dream up, and it made him sweat behind the knees. “No, it’s fine,” he sighed, reaching for the deck and feeling the rough, greasy finish under his palm. “We’ll play.” The word felt heavy in his mouth, but he said it anyway.

Penta’s laugh was low, almost a purr, and he dealt the first hand. The cards slid out in neat arcs, each slap on the table making Samara rock forward in her chair with delight. She tilted her head at Manny, her hair grazing the surface of the table, and said, “Winner gets to keep their clothes on…so there’s that?”

“More fun for you,” Penta muttered, but the tension was bleeding out of him, replaced by something looser, floating and warm.

Manny fumbled with his cards, the glossy surface slick against his clammy fingers. As Penta shuffled and dealt, a low hum of uncertainty buzzed beneath his skin. The weight of Penta’s gaze felt like a spotlight, turning the air electric; the warmth from Samara’s proximity was a heat that both soothed and unnerved him.

“First round, everyone in,” Penta said, the smoothness of his tone betraying nothing about what lay ahead. Manny’s heart raced as he looked at his cards, half expecting some revelation that would set him apart. Instead, he saw only the commonplace: a pair of threes and a six. It suffocated him, that dullness, and he glanced at Samara, who seemed so vibrant, her laughter spilling over like the beer in her hand.

With each card Manny lost, he felt the tightening of his stomach, a pressure building like the moment before a slam into the mat. Samara won the first round, her delight infectious as she tossed her hair over her shoulder, full of bravado. “Okay, losers, what’ll it be?” she asked, her eyes dancing with a mix of mischief and challenge.

Penta shrugged off his jacket with the casual grace of a man who’d known for years that his presence alone carried most rooms. He folded it, set it neatly on the back of his chair, then straightened the black shirt clinging to his chest. The suit jacket had always seemed an extension of his bravado, so seeing it pooled on the upholstery left him oddly softened, less a looming threat than a man at ease in his own skin. Still, the flash of tattooed forearms, the flicker of muscle beneath fabric, was a deliberate show, and he held Samara’s gaze as he rolled up each sleeve, a silent promise that this was only the starting salvo.

Manny, on the other hand, bent down and pulled off his left sock, a maneuver performed with the sheepishness of a child sent to the principal. He balled it in his hand, as if unsure where to put it, then dropped it on top of his shoe under the table, a tiny surrender flag in their private battle. Samara, watching, let out a peal of laughter that was equal parts affection and mockery; she might’ve been the ringleader of their circus, delighted each time her players performed the act she’d goaded them into. The air between the three of them seemed to shimmer with possibility, equal parts ridiculous and intimate, and for a moment Manny forgot his lingering embarrassment, caught up in the currents of their shared dare.

Penta reached for the deck, his hands deft as ever, and began to shuffle with a flourish. “Next round, no mercy,” he declared, cutting a sly glance at Samara, who grinned back, her eyes sharp with challenge. Manny flexed his toes against the carpet, acutely aware that every loss would be a tightening spiral, every forfeit a step deeper into the unpredictable. But when Penta dealt the cards again, Manny found himself leaning forward too, anticipation beating louder than dread, hungry for whatever would come next.

Samara lifted her chin with mock solemnity, elbows on the table, and said, “This time, loser has to take off two things. Let’s make it interesting.”

The sound of the cards hitting the cheap laminate table was the only noise in the room, save for the hum of the mini-fridge. Samara fanned her hand out, a pair of fours and a handful of nothing. She looked up, her expression unreadable, and watched Manny flip a pair of Jacks.

Penta didn't even show his cards; he simply leaned back, his smirk widening as he tucked his chin. "Two things, Sam," he reminded her, his voice a low, gravelly hum. "Your rules."

Samara didn't hesitate. She didn't flush or look away. Instead, she leaned back in the wobbly chair, the damp coils of her hair catching the dim light.

She reached down first, unlacing her shoes one by one. She dropped them with two heavy thuds that seemed to echo Manny’s heartbeat. But she didn't stop there.

With a slow, deliberate shrug, she reached for the buttons of the oversized flannel shirt she’d thrown on after her shower. She didn't rush. She unfastened the middle two, then the bottom, before sliding the fabric off her shoulders. It pooled on the back of her chair, leaving her in a thin, ribbed tank top that left very little to the imagination in the chilly hotel air.

"Shoes and the shirt," she said, her voice steady as she met Manny’s eyes, which were currently glued to the floor. "Happy?"

Penta reached for the deck, his eyes never leaving Samara. "I think Manny is the opposite of happy, cara mia," he murmured. "He looks like he’s forgotten how to breathe." He began to shuffle, the snap of the cards sounding like tiny gunshots. "Round three. Who's feeling lucky?"

“Deal the cards, Penta,” Manny grunted, his voice dropping into a low, flat tone. He didn't look at the floor anymore; he looked right at the man across from him, his eyes hard.

Penta’s smirk didn't vanish, but it sharpened. He liked the shift in gravity. He snapped the cards onto the table, the sound like a sequence of small gunshots in the quiet room.

Manny didn't even look at Samara as the cards fell. He was reading Penta’s tells; the way his fingers lingered on the corner of his beer bottle, the minute tilt of his head.

“Bet,” Penta murmured, sliding his half-empty bottle into the center of the table as a placeholder.

“I’m in,” Samara said, her voice light, though she was watching Manny with a newfound curiosity. She could feel the heat radiating off him.

Manny didn't hesitate. “Raise.”

Penta’s eyes narrowed. He looked at his cards, a strong hand, likely, then back at Manny’s stony face. “Bold for a man with only one sock, Emmanuel.”

“Less talk, more cards,” Manny countered.

When the final cards hit the table, the room seemed to hold its breath. Samara folded early, leaning back to watch the collision. Penta flipped his hand with a flourish: three Sevens. A killer hand in a game like this. He started to reach for the center of the table, his fingers already curling in victory.

“Not so fast,” Manny said. He flipped his cards one by one. A straight.

The silence that followed was heavy. Manny didn't smile; he just let the victory sit there, a silent demand.

Penta stared at the cards for a long beat before he let out a short, dry laugh. He held up his hands in a mocking gesture of surrender.

“Two things, right?” Penta said, his voice smooth as silk despite the loss. He didn't look bothered; he looked impressed.

He reached for his feet first. With a slow, deliberate movement, he kicked off his expensive leather loafers, letting them clatter against the floor. Then, his gaze locked onto Manny’s, he reached for his belt.

The click of the buckle was loud. He slid the belt through the loops with a rhythmic hiss of leather on fabric, tossing it onto the table right over Manny’s winning hand.

“The shoes and the belt,” Penta said, leaning forward until he was in Manny’s space. “But don’t get too comfortable, hermano. The deck is still in my hands.”

Samara leaned back in her chair, the tendons of her forearm tensing as she pointed the bottleneck at the ceiling. “I need more beer.” Her words sliced through the silence; there was a brittle edge in her voice, a challenge or a plea depending on how you angled your ear. For a moment, neither man at the table spoke. The tension of the last hand lingered like ozone. Penta, who had only just set his jaw back in place after the loss, didn’t move. He watched her with a glint of admiration, pushing his own half-empty bottle closer to the center of the table as if daring her to return with something stronger.

Samara didn’t wait for an answer. She stood, the movement abrupt enough to knock her chair into the wall behind her. The motion broke the spell; Manny let out a low whistle, shoulders dropping as if some current had been switched off. She padded to the shadowed corner where the mini-fridge hummed against the baseboard, bare feet silent on the cheap carpet. The blue glow from the fridge’s interior splashed her face, painting sharp hollows under her eyes and cheekbones. She yanked out three bottles, balancing them awkwardly against her hip, and shut the fridge with a knee.

For a moment, she just stood there, eyes hooded, letting the cold glass leech the heat from her palm. She could feel the stare of the room on her, Penta’s predatory amusement and Manny’s uncertain loyalty both like invisible hands at the back of her neck. She wondered, as she sometimes did, if she liked the attention or merely needed it to keep from vanishing altogether. Then, as quickly as the thought came, she shrugged it off. There was another round to win. Or lose. Either way, she was done with hesitation.

She returned to the table, sliding the three bottles across its surface, one for each of them. The labels were already beaded with sweat. Samara didn’t sit right away, just hovered over her chair, chin tilted. “Next round, stakes go up,” she declared, voice bright but eyes narrow, like a poker player already planning her own funeral.

She twisted her cap off, took a sharp pull, and finally sat. The moment she did, the air shifted again. She could feel it: they were all in this now, for real, and the veneer of casual bravado had peeled away to something rawer, more dangerous. Her pulse thrummed with it.

Penta took his bottle and tipped it towards her in a kind of mock salute, a single brow arched in anticipation of whatever she had planned.

She set the bottle down without breaking his gaze. “I hope you’re ready to lose the shirt, Penta. Or more.”

The table was reset, hands reaching for cards, and the game rolled on. Manny picked up his new hand, the cards sticking slightly to his damp palm as he fanned them out. The pair of eights stared back at him, mediocre at best, but he kept his face blank, refusing to let the knot in his gut show. The beer tasted flat on his tongue now, the fizz gone, leaving a bitter edge that matched the twist in his chest every time Samara’s laugh cut through the air, light and teasing, directed at Penta again. He glanced up, catching the way Penta’s fingers lingered on the deck, that smug tilt to his head, and felt the heat crawl up his neck, not anger, exactly, but a sharp, uncoiling pressure that made his jaw clench. This was stupid, reckless, but the thrill of it hummed in his veins, louder than the doubt.

He bet low, sliding his bottle forward with a nudge, the glass scraping against the table’s worn surface. Samara’s foot brushed his under the table, accidental maybe, or not, her bare skin warm against his socked one, sending a jolt up his leg that he tried to ignore. Focus on the cards, he told himself, but his mind kept replaying her shrugging off that flannel, the way the tank top hugged her curves in the dim light, and now this challenge hanging in the air like smoke. Penta called, his voice a lazy drawl that grated on Manny’s nerves, and when the card came down, a queen, a four, another eight,nhe felt a spark of hope ignite, faint but real, pushing back the dread of losing more than just his other sock.

Samara folded early again, her bottle clinking as she set it down, and he could hear the shift in her breathing, quicker now, like she was riding the same edge he was. Penta raised, eyes locking onto his, that predatory glint making Manny’s stomach tighten further, but he matched it, pushing his own bottle in without a word. The turn card hit, a useless two, and he bluffed hard, staring Penta down, willing him to fold. Sweat prickled at the back of his neck, the chair creaking under him as he leaned forward, every sense tuned to the flicker in Penta’s expression, the way his fingers tapped once against the table.

When Penta finally called and flipped his hand, a flush draw that hadn’t connected, Manny laid down his cards with steady hands, the victory tasting sweeter than the beer ever could. He didn’t gloat, just let the cards sit there, but inside, a rush of triumph surged through him, hot and satisfying, easing the coil in his gut for the first time that night. Penta chuckled, low and resigned, kicking back his chair to stand, and Manny watched him unbutton his shirt slowly, the fabric parting to reveal inked skin and muscle that gleamed under the lamp’s glow. The shirt hit the floor with a soft thud, and Penta sat back down, bare-chested now, rolling his shoulders like it was nothing.

Samara’s gaze flicked between them, her lips parting in a grin that Manny felt more than saw, the air thickening with unspoken possibilities. He reached for the deck, his turn to deal, fingers steady despite the pulse hammering in his ears, ready to push this further, to see where the night cracked open next.

“Alright, new rule, if you fold, you take something off.” Manny’s voice rang out with a certainty that surprised even him, slicing the tension like a coin drop in a silent room. For a half-beat, nobody moved. Penta’s lips curled in appreciation, but it was Samara he watched, the way her pupils dilated and her tongue pressed tight against the inside of her cheek. She didn’t even flinch, not at first; she just blinked, once, slow, as if to savor the new arrangement before responding.

Instead of answering, she leaned back farther in her chair, arms crossed under her chest, the bottle balanced on her thigh. There was a heat in her stare now, directed at Manny, not Penta, a current that ran both electric and dangerous. For a second, it looked like she might say something cutting, a joke or a jab, but it never left her lips. She just smirked, the corners of her mouth twitching up, and set her bottle down with a single, deliberate clink.

“Your rules, then?” Samara said. Her tone was teasing, but Manny heard the dare threaded underneath. If anything, this was the exact provocation she’d been hungering for, and he was the one to serve it up. “Fine. But don’t be a wuss when your luck runs out.”

Penta waggled his brows, shifting on his seat to bring the deck closer, his bare chest a study in self-confidence. “It is a pleasure to play with such fearless company,” he said, shuffling with a flourish intended to show off his hands. The cards sounded like a deck of knives.

Manny’s hands were steady now, the beer’s bitterness fading into a heady, adrenal hum. He liked the way she looked at him, even when it was a threat. Especially then. He caught the faintest flicker in her eyes, a dare, or maybe a kind of gratitude. She wanted the stakes to matter. She wanted to see who’d break first.

Her deal came fast, the cards flicked with a practiced wrist. Manny’s hand, a king and a four, nothing special, felt heavier, more consequential. He slid a bottle into the pot without hesitation, never breaking eye contact. Samara mirrored him, chin lifted.

The first round went brutal and quick: Penta folded, stripped off his watch with a flourish, and Samara won on a flush, her laugh a little too loud, her smile too sharp. “Your turn, Manny,” she said. “Let’s see if you can handle the heat you brought.”

He didn’t know if it was the beer or the new rule, but he was burning up. His next hand was a disaster; he barely made it before Samara’s raise forced him out. He hesitated for a second, then peeled off his t-shirt, heart hammering as the cotton stuck to his skin, his breath coming shallow.

Samara’s smile softened, almost imperceptibly, as she took in the sight of him. She dealt again, and the game went on, the stakes now as real and raw as the flesh they bared.

Samara’s leg brushed his under the table, firmer this time, not at all by accident, and the air between them arced and snapped, a pulse of something that neither of them named. Penta played it cool, but his hands trembled slightly as he drank, watching the two of them with sly amusement.

With each round, more clothes pooled on the floor, the room growing tense and electric. Samara’s tank top went next, and her black lace bra gleamed in the lamplight, collarbones sharp against the shadows. Nobody joked now; the game was an engine, running hot and fast toward something neither of them could call out loud.

Another hand, another loss, Manny stood to unbutton his jeans, fingers stiff, but he made himself meet her eyes as he did it, refusing to flinch. The tension, the risk, the proximity, he realized this was the only thing keeping him from flying apart completely. She knew it, too.

The next deal, his luck turned: trip sixes, enough to flatten Penta and force Samara into the fold. She stood, unhurried, and untied the string at her waistband, letting the shorts drop to the floor with a soft exhale. She sat again, legs crossed, as unashamed as a statue, and reached for her next card.

“Your move, Manny,” she said, voice low and even.

He swallowed, tasted the metallic air, and reached for the deck, ready for whatever came next.

After another beer, Penta drew Samara’s leg across his lap. His fingers traced her thigh, each touch sending electricity through his veins. The weight of her leg against him, the subtle shifts of her body, it woke something dormant inside him. 

Samara turned her head slightly, catching his gaze. Her lips curled into a playful smile, one that promised mischief and something more. Penta’s heartbeat quickened, syncing with the pulsing rhythm of the bass from the music playing softly in the background. He shifted slightly, aware of the way her leg pressed against him, the heat radiating from her body almost palpable. He wanted to explore that closeness, to close the space between them.

With deliberate slowness, he let his thumb drift along the arch of her calf, tracing lazy circles that summoned a faint shiver in her muscles. He watched her reaction closely, hungry for each involuntary flicker; the way her mouth tensed at the corners, the flutter of her eyelids, the gradual parting of her lips.

He flexed his hand, squeezing gently, and her leg rolled slightly under his palm, yielding to the pressure. She bit her lip, and he could see the pulse at her throat, steady but unmistakably faster. The game was still going, somewhere; he could hear Manny’s laugh at the edge of his attention, brittle and bright, but it barely registered. All he could think about was how close she was, the possibilities stacked on a razor’s edge.

Samara’s hand slipped from her own lap to his, fingers grazing his knee and then settling there. The contact was feather-light but electric, a point of focus so severe it made the rest of his body blur. She didn’t look away; if anything, her stare sharpened, drawing him in until he was certain she could see every thought flickering behind his eyes.

He didn’t look away, not when her grip tightened on his leg, not when her bare foot pressed suggestively into the hollow of his hip, not even when Manny, oblivious to the shift in power dynamics, called for another hand. Penta was locked in, unable to break the circuit they’d formed, waiting to see who would fold first.

The buzz of the alcohol suddenly hit Samara in a warm wave. With an abrupt, clumsy motion, she pulled her leg off Penta’s lap. The sudden loss of contact made the air in the room snap.

She stood up, swaying just a fraction of an inch, and rounded the corner of the small table. Before Manny could react, she dropped into his lap, her bare legs straddling his thigh.

"Penta’s getting too comfortable," she murmured, resting her hand on Manny's broad shoulders and leaning in until her breath fanned over his mouth. She gave him a lopsided, devastating grin. "Show him how a real main-eventer plays the game, Manny. Deal the cards."

Manny barely had time to register the heat of Samara’s body settling over him before her lips brushed against his ear, sending a rush of adrenaline through him. He could smell the lingering shampoo from her shower, something light and citrus that enveloped him, intoxicating and heady. The sensation of her weight, pressing into him with warm urgency, sent his heart racing, pounding against his ribs like it wanted to break free.

“Deal the cards,” she whispered, her breath a tantalizing caress, and he felt the sharp edge of desire pulse through his veins. There was an authority in her tone, a challenge laced with something more primal. He was acutely aware of the soft thud of her heart against his chest, mirroring his own frantic rhythm.

With shaking hands, he reached for the deck on the table, fingers trembling slightly as he shuffled the cards, the sounds of the casino outside fading into a dull murmur. The anticipation hummed between them, charged and electric, and he focused on the feel of the cards, their slick surface grounding his thoughts amid the chaos of her presence.

Penta leaned back in his chair, his posture loose, angles open, as if he owned the room and the air they breathed. He crossed his arms over his chest, every inch of his expression dripping with the kind of smug self-certainty that Manny found both irritating and faintly awe-inspiring. The guy radiated the easy arrogance of someone who’d never once doubted himself, or if he had, had papered over the cracks so effectively that even doubt itself would have trouble clawing its way back in. Penta’s grin, sharp and wolfish, seemed etched into his face, and for a moment his gaze flickered to Samara and then back to Manny, as though daring him to respond, to match his calm, to expose some falter in the mask.

But for all of Penta’s bravado, Manny felt it only as background noise, a distant vibration in the periphery of his attention. His senses had collapsed into a tunnel, vision pinwheeling down to the woman in his lap, the weight and heat of her, the way her skin sparked along his thighs and arms.

He found himself memorizing everything about her;  the way her hair fell forward, brushing his cheek every time she moved; how she twisted her wrists, fingers flexing and unflexing with restless confidence; the slight tremor that ran through her, not from nerves, but from a kind of kinetic joy, as if she was barely keeping herself from erupting into motion. Manny could feel the shape of her, the length of her, the press of her thighs against his, the skin-to-skin warmth that made his whole body hyper-aware. It wasn’t just lust, though there was plenty of that, hungry and insistent, but something sharper, hungrier, a gravitational pull that distorted the space between atoms.

He tried to steal a glance at her face without being obvious, but Samara caught him anyway, pivoting her gaze onto his so abruptly he felt himself flush. Her eyes were impossibly clear, the color of river rocks just beneath the surface, and right now they were locked onto his with a concentration that bordered on predatory. She didn’t speak, didn’t even smile, but she didn’t need to; the message in her stare was loud enough to rattle his teeth. Play your hand, the look said. Let’s see what you’ve got.

Dealing the cards with Samara straddling his thigh was an exercise in pure agony. Manny had to reach his arms around the curve of her waist to deal, his forearms brushing against her bare hips with every motion.

He forced his eyes down, focusing entirely on the slick surface of the cards. He dealt a King, a Nine, and a Two.

"Bet," Samara murmured. She didn't look at her cards. She didn't have to. Her entire strategy was sitting right beneath her, and she could feel the rigid, trembling tension in Manny's muscles. She leaned a fraction of an inch closer, the warmth of her chest radiating through the thin fabric of her bra.

Across the table, Penta watched the display with a tight, unreadable expression. He tossed his bottle cap into the center. "Call."

Manny's hand was shaking as he flipped the next two cards. He wasn't even playing the game anymore; he was just surviving it. But when the final card fell, he glanced at his own hand. A pair of Kings.

"Show them," Penta prompted, his voice rougher than usual.

Samara flipped her cards with a lazy flick of her wrist. A pair of Fours. She clicked her tongue in mock disappointment. "Shame."

Manny exhaled a shaky breath and laid his cards flat. Kings over Fours. He had won the hand, but as he looked up into Samara's dark, predatory eyes, he didn't feel like a winner. He felt like prey.

"A deal is a deal," Samara whispered, her breath fanning over Manny's lips. “Can you help me?”

His hands hovered, paralyzed by the gravity of the moment, the trembling in his fingers contagious as it pulsed up his arms and burrowed into his chest. He hesitated at the clasp, the little patch of fabric and metal suddenly more complex than quantum mechanics. Her breath was steady, her eyes unwavering, and he felt her heart thud, a steady drumbeat against his own hammering pulse. His first attempt slipped; his hands were too slick, too jittery, and he felt the flush of embarrassment crawl up his neck. Samara didn’t mock him, she only shifted, arching her spine to make his task easier, her lips parting with a soft, approving exhale that made him ache. When he tried again, the clasp gave way with a tiny, liberating snap that echoed in his skull like a starting gun. The straps slid from her shoulders, and he ran his thumb along the exposed skin, the curve of her shoulder blade delicate and fierce at once.

The bra dropped to the floor, and for a moment he simply stared, struck dumb by the reality of her, the way she met his gaze with absolute, unblinking certainty. In that instant he was a machine of nerves and want, every molecule straining toward her, incapable of thought or speech.

Across the table, Penta’s gaze dropped to her breasts, the shift in his attention so sudden and seismic that it tilted the very axis of the room. For an instant, the cocky, performative mask he wore so well wavered, replaced by a raw, unfettered hunger that seemed to shock even him. He tried to play it cool, rolled his shoulders, jaw tensing, arms still in that calculated bracket across his chest, but the blood had drained from his face and pooled somewhere lower, betraying him utterly.

Samara, still perched in Manny’s lap, noticed. Of course she did; she noticed everything. Her mouth curled, not a smile but a baring of teeth, a warning and an invitation. She slid her arm around Manny’s shoulders, pressing her body even tighter to his, as if to claim her space, to flaunt it, to dare Penta to look again. She stretched herself upward, catlike and languid, a slow arch that put her on full display. The gesture was both challenge and reward, and for the first time all night, Penta had nothing to say.

Manny felt the effect of that gaze like a punch, a secondhand jolt of adrenaline that made his whole body tense. He wanted to shield her, to pull her closer, but he also wanted to stand back and admire–no, worship, the audacity of her. The way she could own a room just by existing in it. The way she could make both of them, two men who had never given up anything in their lives, feel like they might surrender everything for another second of her attention.

The silence was thick and primal, a pressure front settling over the table. Penta’s tongue darted over his lower lip, a sharp, involuntary motion. He finally spoke, but his voice cracked on the first word, and he had to start again: “You think you’re gonna rattle me?” He tried to laugh, but it came out hoarse, a cough instead of a chuckle. “You got nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Samara flipped her hair over her shoulder, “I’m not here to rattle you. I’m here to win.”

The room seemed to constrict around them, the background noise evaporating until all that was left was the pulse of three bodies locked in orbit, two of them barely breathing and one of them, Samara, completely, terrifyingly in control.

Penta's usual grace is finally starting to fray. He’d been playing the long game, but the alcohol and the sight of Samara on Manny’s lap have made him reckless.

Manny dealt the cards with a newfound, stony confidence. He didn’t even flinch when Samara’s fingers traced the line of his jaw. He flipped the cards; a Full House.

Penta stared at his own hand, three of a kind and for the first time tonight, the wolfish grin faltered. He looked at the cards, then at the two of them, and let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh. "The deck is cursed," he muttered, though his eyes were dark with something that wasn't frustration.

"Your rules, hermano," Manny said, his voice a low rumble that Samara could feel against her chest.

Penta didn't hesitate. He stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the floor. He didn't look embarrassed; he looked like he was making an entrance. He unzipped his trousers with a slow, deliberate metallic hiss that seemed to echo in the small room. He stepped out of them, kicking the expensive fabric toward the pile of discarded clothes near the middle of the room.

Penta leaned over the table, his bare, inked chest just inches from them. "Are we done being polite?" he asked, his voice dropping to that dangerous bedroom whisper. "Because I'm tired of playing for clothes. Let's play for something that actually matters."

Samara looked up at him, her eyes bright and predatory, her hand still resting on Manny’s shoulder. She could feel Manny’s heart racing under her palm, a frantic, heavy thrum. She wasn't just managing a tag team anymore; she was managing a powder keg.

Samara stretched her spine, letting her bare shoulders roll back as she considered Penta’s proposition. The old rule, clothes as currency, vulnerability meted out in careful, calibrated increments, had become background radiation, a familiar danger. Now she sensed a shift; Penta’s eyes had lost their playful glint, replaced by something wilder and more naked than the skin they’d already revealed. The room’s stale heat seemed to pulse in time with their held breaths.

She hooked her ankle around the leg of Manny’s chair, stood up and closed the gap between herself and the table, eyes locked on Penta’s. “What’s the new rule then?” Her tone was almost lazy, but the challenge in it was a razor under silk.

Penta leaned in, hands braced against table. His biceps bunched, tattoos flexing. “Winner names their dare. Loser does it. No limits. No takebacks.” He let the words hang for a moment, testing their weight.

Samara’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite a threat. She didn’t look at Manny, “That’s it?” she said, tilting her chin up. “I was expecting something with teeth.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Penta nearly growled, and suddenly his voice was low, private, meant only for her.

The silence was more dangerous than anything spoken. Manny’s hands hovered over the deck, but he couldn’t move until Samara did. He felt himself shrinking, atomizing, becoming a background field to the two predators circling above him. Samara met Penta’s gaze for a long, measured beat, and then she nodded, once, sharp as a gunshot.

“Deal, let’s see what you’ve got,” she teased, her voice low and sultry, a clear challenge as she settled back into Manny’s lap, the pressure of her weight igniting a fire in his veins.

“Don’t get cocky,” Penta said from across the table, his expression becoming predatory. 

Manny's fingers itched to touch her, but he stayed grounded in his seat, feeling the weight of Penta’s gaze, challenging and alive, an unspoken battle heating the already charged atmosphere. 

Penta shuffled the deck with practiced ease, breaking the taut silence as he looked at Manny, an amused glint in his eyes that only deepened the unease in Manny’s gut. He thought of the burgeoning intimacy of the last few rounds, the way the fabric stripped away could somehow feel more exposed than skin itself.

“Ladies first,” Penta drawled, his words honeyed but edged with provocation, a throwdown disguised as chivalry. He flicked the cards across the table with a flourish, the deck bending to his will, but his eyes never left Samara. They glittered, hunger layered with something darker; admiration, maybe, or the anticipation of a worthy opponent. Manny felt it like static, the way Penta’s attention zeroed in on Samara, as if she was the only real player left at the table.

Samara’s lips curled at the edges, acknowledging the dare. She never broke eye contact, her posture unflinching. She reached for the deck with a deliberate slowness, letting her hand brush Manny’s in the process. He caught a whiff of her, skin and sweat and a touch of perfume, and it nearly short-circuited his brain. She drew her cards, fanned them like a poker queen, and arched an eyebrow at Penta, your move. The silence pressed in again, thick with the knowledge that whatever happened next, the boundaries of the night had been redrawn.

She considered her hand, then looked right at Penta and said, “Fine. I call.” There was a sharpness in her tone, a promise of escalation, as if she was daring Penta to go further, to match her audacity, to see if he could keep up with the game as she redefined it.

For the first time all night, Penta’s smile faltered, a barely perceptible tremor in the taut line of his jaw, the practiced coolness draining from his eyes as Samara’s words speared him. He looked at Samara not as a rival or a conquest, but as something altogether more dangerous; a person who could dismantle him with a glance, who saw straight through his pantomime and dared him to blink.

Manny witnessed the moment, the shift in power, the silent capitulation. He’d always known Samara was fearless, but this was something else; a kind of predatory self-possession that made him, for the briefest second, afraid of her. He wondered if Penta felt the same chill run down his spine, if he, too, understood the new terms of engagement. The contest was no longer about luck or bravado; it was about who could command the most space, whose will would bend the other’s to breaking.

Manny caught the flicker in Penta’s eyes, not defeat, not exactly, but a recalibration. The man had been bested, and now he was recalculating the distance between himself and the table’s new center of gravity. Samara had become the axis, the rest of them merely satellites.

“Show me your hand.” she commanded.

Penta didn’t move for a long second, his eyes tracing the line of Samara’s bare shoulder down to where she was pressed against Manny’s chest. Finally, his fingers twitched. He flipped his cards one by one, the sharp snap against the table top sounding like a surrender.

A pair of nines.

Samara didn’t even look at his hand. She simply fanned hers out, three Queens, their regal faces mocking him in the dim light. She’d known she had him. She’d baited the trap and waited for him to walk right into it.

“You lost, Penta,” she whispered, the words humming against the back of Manny’s neck.

Penta’s jaw worked, a muscle jumping in his cheek. He looked at the discarded pile of his own expensive clothes, then back at her. "The dare, then," he said, his voice a low, rough growl. "Name it."

Samara leaned back, her skin warm and soft against Manny’s chest, her weight a grounding anchor as she considered the man standing before them in nothing but his ink and a pair of boxers. A slow, predatory smile spread across her face, not a playful grin, but something sharper, more clinical.

"I don’t want your boxers. That’s too easy," she said, her voice dropping to a sultry, dangerous silk. She reached out, her fingers curling around the neck of her beer bottle, but her eyes never left Penta’s. "I want you to get on your knees. Right here, at Manny’s feet."

Manny’s heart nearly stopped. He felt the air leave the room.

"And once you're there," Samara continued, her gaze flickering to Manny with a spark of pure, unadulterated mischief, "I want you to tell him exactly what we did last night. Every word. No edits. No lies."

Penta froze. The recalibration in his eyes hit a dead end. The cool, detached wolf was gone, replaced by a man who had finally been forced to play a hand he couldn't bluff his way out of.

Manny felt a surge of something hot and triumphant bloom in his chest. He tightened his grip on Samara’s waist, pulling her closer, his eyes locking onto Penta’s. The power had shifted. The backseat games were over.

"Well?" Manny prompted, his voice a low rumble of command. "We're waiting."

Penta didn’t move at first. He looked like he was weighing the cost of his dignity against the crushing weight of the silence. Then, with a slow, agonizing grace, he lowered himself. The sound of his knees hitting the thin hotel carpet was a dull, final thud.

He was at Manny’s feet, stripped of his suit, his bravado, and his secrets. He looked up, his eyes catching the dim, yellow light of the bedside lamp, and for the first time, he looked caught in a trap of his own making.

"It wasn't even a plan," Penta began, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that barely carried over the hum of the air conditioner. He didn't look at Manny; he kept his eyes locked on Samara’s, forced to witness the hurt he was about to inflict.

Manny wrapped his other hand around Samara’s waist. He felt her shift against him, her breathing shallow and rhythmic.

Samara didn’t give Penta a chance to gather himself. Already the air was brittle, the silence splintered by his shame, and she pressed the advantage. Her voice was syrup-slow and unyielding as she said, “Not the story you’d want to tell, but the one that happened.” She punctuated it with a slow tilt of her bottle, the beer catching the light as she drank deep, her throat working in a way that seemed deliberately obscene. She made a show of savoring it, as if she had all the time in the world.

Penta’s jaw clenched so hard Manny half expected to hear a tooth crack. The man’s tattoos almost seemed to writhe on his skin, alive with the humiliation that flushed his chest and neck. It was obvious this was the precise moment Samara wanted: the wolf, muzzle to the floor, forced to speak as a supplicant.

But Samara wasn’t here to make it easy. She shifted in Manny’s arms, one knee digging pointedly into his thigh, and Manny could feel the heat of her anger, her triumph, her hunger for more. She was remaking the space between the three of them, setting the rules, and it was clear Penta understood; no more games, no more bluffs, just the naked truth, handed over like a Penta dragged air into his lungs like a drowning man. “She was right where you are now,” he said, each word seeming to cost him something. “You’d crashed already in your room. We kept drinking, bourbon, straight from the bottle and she–“ He stopped, met Samara’s amber-flecked, unflinching stare, and his broad shoulders sagged beneath the weight of invisible chains. “Fine. I made the move. We fucked, right there, in that chair. There it is.” His mouth clamped shut against whatever else might escape, but Samara’s smile only grew, a predator savoring the moment before the kill.

Manny’s hands moved, almost without thought, bracing her hips, grounding himself as the room seemed to shrink down to the three of them and the ugly little truth Samara was determined to wrench into the light.

He felt his heart thump like a war drum in his chest, each beat a chaotic reminder of the game they were now playing, the stakes uncomfortably clear. Penta was kneeling at his feet, stripped of defenses, and as much as he tried to maintain an air of authority in this moment, he couldn’t ignore the slight tremor that ran through Penta’s posture, the way his gaze flicked anxiously between him and Samara. The dynamics had shifted in ways Manny hadn’t anticipated.

The silence stretched taut, an invisible line, waiting for someone to snap it. What did it say about them, he wondered, that they had arrived at this point? They had made a pact from the beginning not to cross any lines with each other, that this was all just business. It struck him then how raw and dangerous this was. Samara’s presence was magnetic; her confidence wrapped around them like a warm blanket, but for Penta, kneeling there in only his underwear, it must have felt like standing naked in front of a crowd.

He stole a glance at Samara, her lips curling into a wicked smile, a mix of triumph and mischief dancing in her eyes. She leaned back against him, every inch of her radiating a bold energy that enveloped him.

Samara’s voice sliced through the haze of tension, seductive but merciless; “Show him how you kissed me.” She didn’t say it as a dare, but as a decree, her tone teasing the edge of cruelty. The words landed like a slap against the raw surface of Penta’s pride, and for one exquisite instant, all the bravado in the room evaporated. Even the hum of the air conditioner seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the inevitable collision.

Samara leaned back, her back arching slightly, presenting her throat and mouth with feline confidence. Manny’s hands felt huge and immovable on her waist, as if anchoring her to the moment, refusing to let her drift or escape. She tilted her chin, her lips parted just enough to promise more, and the smirk on her face was half invitation, half command.

Penta rose from his knees just enough to close the distance, his movements stripped of swagger, raw with something unpolished and desperate. He reached for her, cupping her jaw. The contact was gentle, almost reverent, a wordless apology buried in the press of his thumb beneath her cheekbone. He kissed her, and it wasn’t possessive or performative. It was the kiss of a man who knew he was being watched, who had no illusions left to protect. It was a confession and a capitulation all at once.

Samara let him, but she didn’t relinquish control. She deepened the kiss, drinking from him, making a spectacle of it, as if to show Manny, and maybe Penta himself, who owned the memory and who was merely its instrument. The air thickened with the electric current of humiliation and arousal, and Manny felt his pulse throb in strange, unfamiliar places.

When Samara broke away, she did it slowly, savoring the finality, her lips wet and bruised. She fixed her gaze on Manny, steady, unblinking, a silent challenge written in the curve of her mouth.

The moment snapped tight, drawn thin as a wire between the three of them, and Manny knew without question that something irreversible had happened.

Samara drew in a breath, a long, measured inhale, then, with a gentle but unmistakable authority, released Penta from the crucible of her attention. “You can go back to your seat now,” she murmured, the words so gentle that, for a split second, it almost seemed like a kindness.

To be continued... (I'll post part 2 tomorrow)

The air in Conference Room B was aggressively conditioned, designed to keep the creative team sharp, awake, and slightly shivering. Lola sat near the far end of the long mahogany table, tracing the rim of her lukewarm coffee cup with a manicured thumbnail. For the last forty minutes, she had successfully maintained her "listening intently" face while a junior writer pitched a convoluted betrayal angle for the tag team division.

She was physically in Stamford, Connecticut, but mentally, she was still tangled in the sheets of an Atlanta hotel room. She could still feel the phantom weight of Penta’s arm across her waist, the faint scrape of his stubble against her collarbone. Three months. Three months of stolen nights and weekends, text messages, and a secret so heavy and hot she felt like she was swallowing a live coal every time she walked into the Corporate office.

"Alright, let's pivot," Hunter said, his voice cutting through her daydream like a guillotine. He capped his dry-erase marker with a sharp snap and leaned against the whiteboard. "We need to talk about Penta."

Lola’s hand went still on her coffee cup. She kept her eyes fixed on her open laptop screen, forcing her breathing to remain perfectly, boringly even. Work first, always, the voice in her head reminded her.

"The Mexico vignettes you produced, Lola… incredible stuff," Hunter continued, gesturing vaguely in her direction. A few heads around the table nodded. "The audience is eating it up. The metrics on his unmasked teases are through the roof. But it’s too artistic for the weekly cable crowd. It’s got prestige, but it doesn't have hooks. We need to ground him. We need crossover appeal for the female demographic."

"You wanna soften him up?" Jason, one of the senior producers, asked, frowning. "He’s a killer, Hunter. That’s his whole gimmick."

"I don't want to soften him, I want to complicate him," Hunter corrected, tapping the table. "We need to give the audience a reason to care about the man behind the mask, not just the Luchador. And there is only one universal language for that in this business." He looked around the room, a shark waiting for the guppies to catch up. "Soap opera, guys. We need a romance angle."

Lola felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. The fluorescent lights overhead suddenly seemed blindingly bright.

"A love interest," Hunter confirmed, nodding at his own brilliance. "A damsel, but modern. Someone he has to protect. We bring up one of the girls from NXT–maybe that blonde, Cassie? We script some backstage run-ins, build the tension. Give the fans a will-they-won't-they. We culminate in a ring-side save and a kiss at the next PLE."

Lola’s throat closed. She pictured Penta in the dim light of his kitchen in Ecatepec, his voice dead-serious; I want to show my people. The history. Not the soap opera. The truth. She pictured the way he had looked at her just two nights ago in Atlanta, breathless and murmuring against her skin.

"He's gonna hate it," Lola said. The words slipped out before she could catch them. Her voice sounded too thin, too tight, but she quickly cleared her throat and armored herself in her professional persona. "I mean, with respect, Hunter. You know how protective he is of his character's tradition. A fake TV girlfriend is exactly the kind of Americanized melodrama he despises."

Hunter didn't miss a beat. He just smiled, pointing the capped marker directly at her. "Which is exactly why you are going to pitch it to him, Lola."

Her lungs stopped working. "Me?"

"He listens to you.," Hunter said, oblivious to the cruel, literal truth of his words. "He trusts you. You got him to open up his home to the cameras. If anyone can sell him on playing ball for the sake of the ratings, it's you. Write up the treatment, cast the girl, and break the news to him before TV on Monday." Hunter clapped his hands together, signaling the end of the discussion. "Make it authentic, Lola. I want it to feel real."

Lola stared at her blank laptop screen, the cursor blinking back at her like a mocking metronome.

"Consider it done," she lied.

———

The hum of Manhattan traffic twenty stories down was a steady, abrasive white noise that usually helped Lola sleep, but tonight, it only made the silence in the hotel room feel louder.

Penta emerged from the bathroom with a towel slung low on his hips, his hair damp and curling slightly at the ends, water beading over the ink on his chest. He looked entirely stripped of the operatic arrogance of his ring persona, just a tired, beautiful man who had spent the last hour throwing himself at the mat for a house show crowd.

Lola sat cross-legged on the edge of the unmade king bed, her laptop closed on the nightstand beside her. She had spent the last two hours pretending everything was fine. She had kissed him in the elevator, ordered them late-night room service, and let him fuck her against the heavy hotel door the second the deadbolt clicked. She had taken exactly what she wanted, knowing that what she had to say next was going to poison the air between them.

Penta paused, catching the stiff line of her shoulders. He was too observant; he always had been. The soft, unguarded look in his eyes sharpened slightly. He crossed the room, the carpet silencing his steps, and dropped a heavy, warm hand onto her bare knee.

"You are a million miles away," he murmured, his thumb brushing a slow circle over her skin. "Qué pasa, hermosa?"

Lola felt a physical ache in her chest at the nickname. She forced herself to gently pull her knee away from his touch. It was the hardest physical movement she’d made all week.

"We need to talk about TV on Monday," Lola said. Her voice sounded thin, so she cleared her throat and reached for the only shield she had left; her professional armor. She sat up straighter, crossing her arms. "I had a meeting with Hunter and creative on Wednesday."

Penta’s hand dropped to his side. He didn't move away, but the distance between them suddenly felt oceanic. The metaphorical mask was already sliding back over his features. "And?"

"The Mexico vignettes are pulling massive numbers. The network loves them. But..." She swallowed the lump in her throat and forced herself to use the sanitized corporate vocabulary that protected her. "They want hooks. They want crossover appeal for the female demographic."

Penta stared at her, perfectly still. "Speak plainly, Lola."

"Hunter wants a romance angle," she said, the words tumbling out like a confession. "A soap opera. He’s calling up Cassie from NXT to play your on-screen girlfriend. Backstage run-ins, ringside saves. A will-they-won't-they that culminates in a kiss at Money in the Bank."

The silence that followed was suffocating. Penta didn't yell. He didn't pace. He simply looked at her, and the absolute coldness in his dark eyes was terrifying. He looked at her not as the woman he had unmasked for in Ecatepec, but as a suit. As a producer.

"I told you," he said, his voice dropping into a register that was dangerously quiet. "The very first day we spoke. No soap opera. I am a Luchador. I do not play the fool for the cameras."

"It's not playing the fool, it's… business," Lola countered automatically, her corporate reflexes kicking in to defend herself. "It's a work, Penta. We all play parts to drive the narrative."

Penta’s jaw ticked. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on the mattress on either side of her hips, trapping her in his space but entirely devoid of the warmth from an hour ago. "You want me to touch another woman," he stated, the words flat and heavy. "You want me to look at her, in front of the world, the way I look at you?"

"It's not real!" Lola’s voice cracked, betraying her. She hated the desperation leaking into her tone. "It's a script. It means nothing."

"A script," Penta repeated. He tilted his head, studying her with a brutal, dissecting gaze. "And who is writing this script, Lola?"

Lola’s lungs stopped working. She looked down at the comforter, unable to hold his stare. "Me," she whispered. "Hunter told me to make it authentic."

Penta let out a short, hollow laugh that held zero humor. He pushed off the bed, putting distance between them, and grabbed his gym bag from the armchair. He pulled out a clean t-shirt and dragged it over his head, effectively covering the skin she had been memorizing just moments before.

He stood with his broad back to her, the muscles in his shoulders tense and unforgiving beneath the thin cotton of his shirt. For a moment, he looked like he was trying to bore a hole through the window with the force of his anger. When he spoke, his voice was a low, lethal monotone.

"So, my producer who is also my girlfriend uses our real life to write our fake TV show," Penta said. He did not turn around. Instead, he gripped the windowsill so hard the tendons in his hands became stark, pale ridges. "Tell me, Lola. In your script, do I call this girl Amor? Do I whisper in her ear all the same things I say to you? Tell me what pieces of us you sold to Hunter to keep your job."

The accusation landed with the weight of a thrown belt across bare skin. Lola flinched, as much at the clarity of his insight as at the bitterness in his voice. She opened her mouth, searching for something to say, but the words caught on the barbed wire of her own guilt.

Penta kept tearing into her, each word impossibly calm and methodical, as if he were laying out match tape and calling every spot before it happened. "Did you tell them that we slept together the first time you came to my home?" he pressed. "Did you write down all the stories I told you about my brother, or what I said about my father before he died?" He finally turned then, the lines of his eyes pinched and dark with betrayal. "How much is left for me if you spend all our truth on camera?"

Lola’s anger flared; a small, defensive flicker trying to keep her head above water. "Don’t you dare," she bit out, but it sounded weak, even to her. She tried again, louder. "Don't you dare pretend I’m the only one who has to play a role here. I am fighting for both of us. If I don't keep this job, if I don't keep you relevant, you know what happens? You get replaced by someone who can stomach this shit without complaint."

He shook his head, almost pitying. "So you protect us by selling us?"

"It wasn’t my idea!"

"You think I don’t see what’s happening?" Penta said. "This is the same game, Lola. They want you to think you can keep some part of yourself safe, but you can’t. Not when the story is more important!"

She wanted to punch a wall. Instead, she grabbed for her own defense, the only thing she knew how to wield: words. "This isn’t real," she said, hating how desperate she sounded. "It’s a television angle. It’s not us. I would never–" She stopped herself, realizing that was a lie, that she already had. She felt suddenly hollowed out, every protest she could think of sounding cheap and borrowed even as she said them. "I'm not the bad guy here, Penta. I'm just trying to keep you in the main event. I’m trying to do my job, so you can do your job.”

The words hung in the air, limp and impotent. Penta stared at her, unblinking, his expression giving nothing away. "You say it is for us," he said, softly now. "But it feels like it is for you."

Lola wanted to argue, to build some elaborate defense, but all she could do was grit her teeth and look away. The gulf between her and Penta, so small and surmountable in the dark anonymity of a hotel room, now yawned wide enough to swallow them both. She stared at her hands, suddenly ashamed of the expensive manicure, the way her thumbnail glittered pink under the bedside lamp. She had always believed she could separate the work from the life, but now it was plain: the work had never left her untouched, and the life she wanted was slipping like sand through her fingers.

"Do you think I want to watch you kiss another woman?" she said, softly, but Penta was already zipping his bag. She wanted to reach out, to touch his arm, to anchor him in the room with her one more time. But he was already gone, even before he closed the door.

Lola sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after, staring at the city lights through the hotel window, her reflection ghosted in the glass. When her phone buzzed, she ignored it, knowing it was only a calendar reminder to file her story notes with Creative before morning.

She was good at her job. She had to be. And that was what terrified her most.

———

The two days of silence had felt like walking around with a mouthful of glass.

Lola had spent forty-eight hours sequestered in her condo, staring at a blinking cursor, trying to perform the impossible alchemy of turning her private sanctuary into a public commodity. Every time her phone buzzed, her heart had hammered against her ribs, but it was only ever production assistants or Hunter asking for an ETA.

Now, sitting in a windowless backstage production office hours before doors opened for Monday Night Raw, the silence was finally about to break.

The door clicked open. Penta stepped in.

He was already in his gear, black and white, heavy boots, and the mask securely in place. The man she had tangled with in the sheets of a Manhattan hotel room was gone, replaced entirely by the untouchable Luchador. He didn't offer a greeting. He simply pulled out the metal folding chair across from her and sat, crossing his arms over his chest. The room suddenly felt incredibly small.

Lola’s throat was dry. She reached out and slid the manila folder across the cheap laminate table.

"Here are the pages for tonight, and the outline for the next three weeks leading to the PLE," she said. She hated how crisp, how painfully corporate her voice sounded. "Hunter signed off on it this morning."

Penta didn't touch the folder. He just stared at it, then slowly lifted his gaze to her. Through the eyeholes of the mask, hidden behind contacts, his eyes were unreadable, devoid of any of the warmth she’d grown so used to.

"I told you I do not want to do this," he said, his voice flat.

"I know," Lola whispered, dropping the producer voice for a fraction of a second. "I know. But I didn't have a choice. If I didn't write it, Hunter was going to give it to Jason, and Jason would have made it a cartoon. I tried to keep it grounded. I tried to make it… respectful."

Penta finally reached out. He flipped the folder open. The silence stretched so tight Lola thought her eardrums might pop as she watched his gloved finger trace down the printed lines of dialogue and stage directions.

She felt sick. She knew exactly what he was reading.

His finger stopped halfway down page three. He went entirely still.

"Stage direction," Penta read aloud, his voice dropping an octave, razor-sharp and laced with ice. "Penta corners Cassie backstage. He reaches out, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. His thumb rests on her jawline. He leans in close and calls her 'hermosa'."

Lola closed her eyes. She couldn't look at him.

Penta tossed the script back onto the table. It landed with a heavy smack.

"Respectful," he repeated, the word tasting like venom in his mouth. "You tell me you want to protect my culture. You tell me you want the truth. And then you take the things I do to you in the dark, the words I give to you, and you print them on paper for a blonde girl who doesn't even know me."

"Hunter said he wanted it authentic!" Lola’s voice cracked, defensive tears pricking the corners of her eyes. "He said he needed it to feel real, or he'd scrap your whole push! I had to give him something he believed!"

"So you gave him us," Penta said quietly.

That hit harder than if he had shouted. He stood up, the metal chair scraping harshly against the concrete floor. He towered over the table, the intimidating, untouchable talent once again.

"You did your job, Producer," He said as he tapped a gloved finger against the script. "I will memorize the lines. I will touch her face. I will play the fool for you. But do not ever ask me to show you the truth again. Because clearly, you do not know what to do with it."

He turned and walked out, letting the heavy door slam shut behind him, leaving Lola alone with her perfectly formatted script.

———

The camera followed Cassie, a bright-eyed NXT call-up with a choreographed look of distress, as she hurried through the backstage hallway. Then, the frame shifted. Penta stepped out of the shadows.

He was perfect. That was the problem.

He didn't just walk; he stalked. He used the same slow, predatory grace that Lola had watched in the dimly lit hallways of his home in Ecatepec. He cornered Cassie against a row of equipment trunks. It was a mirrored image of how he had backed Lola against the hotel room door in Manhattan.

Lola felt a cold stone settle in her stomach as she watched his gloved hand rise. With brutal delicacy, he tucked a stray blonde curl behind Cassie’s ear. His thumb lingered on the girl’s jawline, a gesture of ownership that Lola knew wasn't in the playbook. It was theirs.

Then came the line. The one Lola had typed with shaking hands.

Penta leaned in, his mask inches from Cassie’s face. The arena went silent, hooked by the sheer gravity he brought to the moment. He didn't shout; he didn't need to. His voice, caught perfectly by the boom mic, was a low, intimate rasp.

"No tengas miedo, hermosa," he murmured. "I am the only one you need to watch."

The crowd erupted. The romance angle was a certified hit.

Lola looked away from the monitor, her throat tight. She had wanted to show the world the truth of him, but seeing him weaponize their intimacy for a three-minute segment felt like a violation.

A moment later, the curtain pulled back. Penta stepped through, the adrenaline of the performance still radiating off him like heat. He didn't look at the producers or the cheering stagehands. He looked directly at Lola.

The mask was back on, but the man behind it was cold. He didn't stop to talk. He didn't offer a good job for the ratings-gold script. He simply walked past her.

As he passed, he spoke just loud enough for her to hear, his voice devoid of the warmth she loved.

"Was that enough truth for you, Lola?"

Lola stared at the space where Penta had just been, her heart thrumming in her chest, a raw indignation swelling beneath her skin. The air felt thin; she could barely breathe, choked by a cocktail of confusion and a sickening sense of betrayal. She had always known this was a risk, merging their personal lives with business, but seeing Penta, her Penta, shift into a role, into someone's fantasy, felt like a wound reopening.

—---

The heavy security door to the locker room clicked shut, cutting off the distant, muffled roar of the arena. Penta was seated on a low wooden bench, his back to the door. He hadn't started unlacing his boots yet. He sat perfectly still, the black and white mask still pulled tight, making him look like a statue carved from leather and spite.

"Penta," Lola said, her voice echoing too loudly against the cinderblock walls. She didn't stay by the door; she marched into his space, her heels clicking a sharp, frantic rhythm. "Don't do this to me."

He didn't turn. "I am doing exactly what you asked for. I am staying in character. I am protecting the story."

"You know that’s not what I meant," she snapped, reaching out as if to touch his shoulder, then pulling back when she saw the rigid set of his spine. "That scene… the way you looked at her. You didn't just follow the script. You weaponized it."

Penta stood up then, the movement so sudden it made her catch her breath. He turned to face her, towering over her in the cramped room. Up close, the black paint around his eyes made him look demonic, but the voice that came out was low and dangerously human.

"You wrote the words, Lola," he hissed. "You put the hand on the jaw. You put 'hermosa' on the page. You took the only things that belonged to us, the things that weren't for sale and you handed them to Hunter on a silver platter."

"I’m doing my fucking job!" Lola cried, her professional composure finally fracturing. "Hunter was going to give that storyline to someone who would have made it a joke. He would have had you doing comedy skits in a week. I used what was real because it was the only way to keep the gravity you wanted!"

"You did not keep the gravity," Penta countered, stepping into her personal space until she was backed against a row of lockers. "You stole the truth to sell a lie."

He reached up, his gloved fingers hovering near the edge of his mask, but he didn't pull it off. The man she had fallen for was buried under layers of pride and professional hurt.

"Tonight, when I touched her face," he whispered, "I didn't see you. I saw a script. I saw a job. And I realized that to you, Lola... that is all that matters."

Lola felt the sting of tears and blinked them back, refusing to let them fall. "That’s not fair. You know what we have."

"I knew what we had," Penta corrected. He reached into his gym bag, pulled out a fresh towel, and draped it over his shoulder, a clear signal of dismissal. "But tonight, the audience loved the show. Hunter is happy. Your ratings will stay up. You should be celebrating."

He walked past her toward the showers, the heavy thud of his boots sounding like a funeral march for the last three months. At the doorway, he paused, but didn't look back.

"Tell Cassie she did a good job," he said coldly. "She’s a very convincing actress. Almost as good as you."

———

Lola sat hunched over her drink in the hotel bar, swirling the ice with her straw, watching the thin ripples settle each time she put the glass down. The lobby was thick with the after-midnight hush that came only when the day’s shows had wound down and the only people left were the diehards and drunks, or the ones with nowhere else to go. She counted herself in the last category, though she wondered if that was a kind of self-pity. Every so often, someone would glance over at her, recognizing the WWE lanyard tucked into her purse or the producer’s shirt she wore, but nobody approached. Not until Rey appeared, sudden and silent at her side, as if conjured from the shadows.

She hadn’t seen him come in. He didn’t sit down, just planted himself next to her stool, arms crossed over his chest, eyes sharp and searching, the way Penta’s eyes used to look at her before the fight got too big to see around.

"Some of the guys told me you were here, alone," Rey said, nodding to the bartender, who slid him a bottle without asking. He didn’t look at her at first, just stared straight ahead, his reflection fractured in the mirror behind the bar. "Where is my brother?"

There was something accusatory in the way he asked. Like maybe she’d left Penta behind somewhere, or maybe she was supposed to know his exact coordinates at all times. But she was only half sure herself where Penta might be right now. And that made her feel exposed, as though she’d forgotten some basic obligation of loving him.

She tried to sound casual, but her voice came out brittle. "I figured he’d be with you. He left before I did."

Rey didn’t answer right away. He drummed his fingers on the bar, a nervous staccato. "He’s not answering his phone."

Lola’s mind flashed to the coldness in Penta’s eyes, the edge in his voice as he told her she didn’t know what to do with the truth. She wondered if she could track him through the Life 360 app, but decided she didn’t have the energy or the right to try.

"Maybe he just needs to cool off," she said, taking a measured sip. "It was a rough night."

Rey’s mouth twisted, part skepticism, part concern. "That’s not like him. He always checks in. Even when he’s pissed."

Lola didn’t know how to respond to that. There was a point, she thought, where you stopped being the person someone checked in with, and started being the reason they vanished. Maybe she had crossed that line tonight.

Rey finally slid into the stool beside her, his shoulders slumping just slightly. "You know him better than anyone," he said quietly. "What happened out there?"

Lola picked up her glass and finished the rest in one gulp. “Turns out that maybe I don’t know him at all.”

Rey shook his head, his brow furrowing with confusion. "You know that’s not true." His voice held an accusatory edge that made her squirm. "This isn’t just another storyline for him. You know that, right?"

Lola picked at a stray thread on her sleeve, feeling the fabric fray under her fingers. "This is what he does," she replied, keeping her eyes locked on the bar top as if it might reveal some secret she desperately needed. "He’s always been a performer. He puts on the mask and… becomes someone else."

Rey leaned closer, the bar's dim light catching the worried creases in his brow. Lola could smell the faint edge of the beer he had just opened, a sharp, tangy scent mingling with the heavier aroma of her drink. She rubbed her palms against her jeans, fingers fidgeting, almost aching with a need to pull away from this conversation, from him, from everything.

“This isn’t just another storyline for him,” Rey said, his voice imbued with an intensity she hadn’t expected. “He cares about you. You know that, right?"

The weight of his words pressed down on her, a quiet pressure that made her throat tighten. She couldn’t meet his gaze; instead, she swallowed hard as she processed the sincerity in his expression.

“You’re not hearing me, Rey,” she said, her words slower, more deliberate. “I’ve been trying to keep us separate from work, and I thought that's what he wanted. But I’m not–” She hesitated, raising her glass for a moment, feeling the cold against her palm. “I’m not here to explain myself to you.”

“Then to who?” Rey asked, the question landing between them with a gravity that was all the more striking for its softness. He reached for her hand, his callused fingers brushing the thin skin of her wrist, but Lola pulled away with a small, involuntary flinch, a motion so fast and automatic it felt less like rejection than self-preservation. She tucked her hands under her thighs, anchoring herself to the sticky barstool as if she might otherwise float away or collapse entirely.

Rey exhaled sharply, as if deflated by her retreat, and then tried to catch her gaze in the bar mirror. “You can’t just keep running from this,” he said, his voice lowering so that only she could hear. “If you keep hiding it from yourself, it’s only going to get worse, for both of you.” Lola stared at the array of liquor bottles behind the bar, tracing the neat, bright rows with her eyes, wishing she could line up her own feelings so tidily. She could sense Rey’s sincerity, feel the pulse of it coming off him in waves; but the more he tried to reach her, the more she wanted to shrink away. She didn’t want to be explained to. She didn’t want to be rescued.

“He won't listen to me.” Lola’s voice was barely above a whisper, but every word came out raw and splintered. She stared down at her empty glass, tracing the rim with a finger that trembled ever so slightly. “I didn't have a choice.” For a moment she let herself imagine what it would feel like to shed the weight of the entire night, just peel it off her body and leave it slouched and empty on the barstool. But even that fantasy felt too indulgent. She could feel Rey watching her, his concern a slow, circling pressure against the side of her face.

She resented him for it, and yet she wanted to be near it. Maybe that was what made her so reckless with Penta in the first place. She had always been drawn to proximity, to the heat of someone else’s urgency, so different from the calculated detachment she’d been taught to keep. But that never ended well. She pushed people away with the same force that she pulled them in.

“I mean it, Rey,” she said, her voice sharpening. “He stopped listening the moment I told him. He made up his mind, and I just…” Lola shrugged helplessly, as if the gesture might conjure the right words from thin air. “I have to keep the show running.”

Rey was silent, absorbing her confession with the same gravity he brought to every fight. Lola remembered watching him wrestle once, years before she knew Penta, saw how Rey let himself get battered, thrown, battered again, just to draw his opponent in close enough to take them down. She wondered if that was his plan now, if he would let her keep talking until she wore out her defenses and collapsed into the truth.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, her voice so much smaller now. “But I couldn’t–” She stopped herself, and for a moment Lola wished she could just evaporate into the bar top, become an unremarkable stain that no one would ever notice or remember.

Rey reached out, set his hand gently on her forearm, and this time she didn’t pull away. The touch was brief, but it lingered in the air between them.

“Let me talk to him,” Rey said, his voice so steady it almost sounded like a promise. “Maybe he’ll listen to me.”

Lola let her breath out in a slow, shaky exhale, not quite trusting herself to believe him or anyone else.

Rey laced his fingers in front of him for a moment, the offer gathering in the air before it left his lips. “Let me walk you to your room,” he said, quieter now, as if he were afraid that the weight of the night might shatter if he spoke too loud. His hand hovered in open invitation, not quite touching her, but close enough that she felt the implied warmth of it, a small, unspoken assurance that there was a way out of the bar, out of the tension, out of the spiraling stories running loops in her head.

For a long, humming moment, Lola didn’t move. She just studied his hand as if it might morph into something else, as if she might misread the gesture for what it was: not an overture, not a threat, but something like mercy. Rey’s skin was rough with calluses, and in the soft-lit gloom of the bar it looked like the hand of someone who’d spent a lifetime patching up other people’s messes. He didn’t repeat himself, didn’t push, only waited, a kind of patience, just like his brother.

Her stomach twisted as she considered what it would mean to accept. Not just the walk, but the wordless concession it represented; that she was tired, that she was vulnerable, that she maybe, just maybe, wanted someone to care how she got back to her room. The admission stung, but the alternative, sitting another minute in that dead-air silence with nothing but the taste of regret, felt worse.

Lola felt the exhaustion pressing down on her body, in her feet, in her head, but she walked with Rey step for step, letting the silence grow between them until it felt less like a barrier and more like a blanket.

At the elevator, he pressed the button for her floor. The mirrored doors caught their twin reflections, close but not touching, and for the first time Lola realized how small she looked next to him, how the slope of his shoulders eclipsed her own. Rey rocked back on his heels, glancing at her sideways but never quite meeting her eyes.

When the doors slid open, she stepped inside. Rey hesitated at the threshold, then followed. The hum of the machinery filled the space between them. Lola stared at the numbers above the door as they ticked up, up, up, and for a moment, she imagined herself as a little red light, blinking forward into some new version of the night.

She didn’t speak, didn’t need to. Rey’s presence was enough. When they reached her floor, he let her exit first, then trailed behind at a respectful distance. At her door, she stopped and turned. Rey was still there, hands in his jacket pockets, waiting for her signal. There was something in his face now, a flicker of concern, yes, but also something softer, almost reverent, as if he held her heartbreak like a fragile relic.

“Thank you, Rey ” she managed, her voice steadier than she felt.

He nodded. “You need anything, you call me. Any hour.”

She nearly laughed, but the sound died in her throat. Instead, she gave him a small, tight smile, then clicked the keycard and let herself in. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, the cool wood at her back. For a moment, she pressed her palms flat against the surface, as if holding it closed could keep the rest of the world away.

Then she slid to the floor, knees drawn up to her chest, and let herself feel the full weight of what she’d lost.

And what she might still have left.

———

The atmosphere backstage was the usual controlled chaos, the hum of the generators, the distant roar of the crowd, and the frantic energy of producers with headsets. But for Penta, the noise was a background blur. He was looking for the one person who made the concrete walls of the arena feel less like a cage.

He found Hunter in Gorilla, hunched over a monitor with a headset pushed back off one ear.

Penta didn't wait for a lull in the action. "Lola. Where is she?"

Hunter didn't look up at first, his eyes tracking a sequence on the screen. Then, he sighed, a heavy, professional sound that made the hair on the back of Penta’s neck stand up. He straightened, turning to face the masked man.

"She’s not here, Penta," Hunter said, his voice flat.

Penta’s brow furrowed beneath the mask. "She’s late? That is not like her."

"She’s not late. She resigned. First thing this morning."

The words hit harder than any chair shot. Penta stepped back, the air in the cramped space suddenly feeling thin. "Resigned? Why?"

Hunter rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking more like a tired father. "She met me in the hotel lobby at 7:00 AM looking like she hadn't slept in a week. Handed me her badge." He paused, his sharp eyes cutting through the mesh of Penta's mask. "I didn't accept it. Not yet. I told her to go home, and take a few days to actually think before she throws a career like hers in the trash."

Penta remained silent, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. Hunter stepped closer, lowering his voice so the nearby techs couldn't eavesdrop. "Look, I’m not an idiot. I’ve been in this business a long time. I see how she looks at the monitors when you’re out there. I see how you linger in Gorilla."

He shook his head, a mix of frustration and genuine confusion on his face. "Why didn't you guys tell me you were dating?" Hunter asked, throwing a hand up in exasperation. "I wouldn't have pushed this storyline with Cassie. If I’d known it was her life too, I would’ve pulled back. I wouldn't have put her in a position where she had to choose between being a good producer and being a good girlfriend."

"She is at home?" Penta asked, his voice a low growl of urgency.

"I hope so," Hunter said, turning back to his monitors. "Go. You’re not in the main event, get out of here. But Penta? Fix it. She’s too good at her job to lose it over this."

– – – 

Lola was sitting on the couch, knees drawn tightly to her chest in the quiet of her apartment, when the knock came. It wasn't a tentative tap. It was three heavy, deliberate thuds that rattled the wood.

She didn’t need to look through the peephole.

When she opened the door, Penta filled the frame. He was in his street clothes, a dark jacket over a black t-shirt and jeans, his chest heaving slightly as if he’d run up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. He stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, the sheer force of his presence displacing the stagnant air in her apartment.

"You quit," he said. It wasn't a question. His voice was a low, rough scrape in the quiet room.

Lola crossed her arms, suddenly feeling entirely too exposed in her own living room. "Hunter told you."

"He told me to fix it," Penta replied, taking a step closer. "But I do not care about Hunter right now. I care about this." He gestured between the two of them. "Why did you run, Lola?"

"I didn't run," she fired back, her defensive instincts kicking in. "I made a choice. You made it pretty clear that we were done. Why should I stay?"

"Bullshit." The word was sharp, cutting straight through her practiced corporate armor. He closed the distance between them, his bare face hard and uncompromising. "You threw away six years of work. For what?”

Lola felt the sting of tears on her cheeks and hated herself for it. "Yes! I couldn’t stand the way you were looking at me! Like I’d ripped your damn heart out!" She threw her hands up, the exhaustion and frustration of the last twenty-four hours boiling over. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't sit in Gorilla and feed the best thing that’s ever happened to me into the corporate machine."

Silence stretched between them, thick and heavy. When Penta finally moved, it wasn't to argue. He reached out, his large hands gently but firmly gripping her shoulders. He waited until she had no choice but to look up at him. His hands slid up her neck, his thumbs tracing the line of her jaw. "They do not own this," he said fiercely. "They own the man in the ring. They own the merchandise. They do not own the man standing in front of you." He rested his forehead against hers, forcing her to breathe the same air, to feel the steady, grounded reality of him. "You don't quit the thing you love because someone else tries to make it ugly," he murmured, his breath warm against her skin. "You set a boundary. We tell Hunter no. We give him a story, but we keep us for ourselves. But you do not shrink your life for me, Lola. I won't let you."

Lola closed her eyes, a tear slipping free to track down her cheek. The suffocating weight in her chest was finally beginning to lift, replaced by the terrifying thrill of actually standing her ground. "What if he fires me anyway?" she asked, the vulnerability bleeding through. “Because I won’t follow his orders?”

Penta let out a low, huffing laugh, his lips brushing hers as he spoke. "Then we let him. And I walk out the door right behind you. But you don't surrender before the bell rings."

The fight drained out of Lola all at once, leaving behind a sudden, bone-deep exhaustion. She leaned forward, resting her forehead against the solid warmth of his chest. Penta’s arms wrapped around her instantly, pulling her flush against him. One large hand settled at the base of her spine, the other cradling the back of her head.

His voice dropped to a rough whisper against her hair. "Lo siento. I have not slept these last three days without you."

For a long time, the only sound in the apartment was the hum of the refrigerator and the steady, synchronized rhythm of their breathing. "Have you eaten?" Penta asked, his voice vibrating through her cheek where it rested against his collarbone.

Lola let out a breathy, half-hearted laugh. "No."

He gently untangled himself from her, though he kept one hand firmly on her waist. "Sit," he commanded softly, nodding toward the couch. "I am going to see what you have in this kitchen. Though, knowing you, it is probably just coffee and… hot sauce."

"There might be some leftover takeout in the back," she offered weakly, sinking onto the sofa. She pulled her knees up, watching him navigate her small kitchen.

He found a half-empty bottle of red wine on the counter, poured her a glass, and brought it over with a kiss before returning to scavenge through her fridge. He settled on making an impromptu omelet with the random ingredients he managed to salvage; some spinach, a little cheese, and eggs.

The smell of butter and cooking food began to fill the apartment, chasing away the sterile, anxious air that had settled there all day. When he finished, he didn't sit in the armchair opposite her. He sat right beside her on the couch, the cushions dipping under his weight, and handed her the plate.

"Eat, Amor" he said, bumping his shoulder against hers.

Lola took a bite, surprised by how ravenous she actually was. "You're too good at this," she murmured between mouthfuls. "Taking care of people."

"I take care of what is mine," he replied simply. He reached for her wine glass, taking a slow sip, his dark eyes never leaving her face. "And you took care of me. Even if your method was… extreme."

Lola set the empty plate on the coffee table and curled her legs beneath her, shifting so she could face him fully. She reached out, her fingertips lightly tracing his arm. "I just couldn't stand the thought of sitting in that control room, watching something I didn’t agree with. I love you, Penta. I wasn't going to let them ruin it."

It was the first time she had said the words out loud, dropping them into the quiet space between them without fanfare or hesitation.

Penta’s breath hitched. The guarded, intense expression he usually wore melted away entirely, leaving him looking open and beautifully vulnerable. He set the wine glass down with a sharp clink and pulled her into his lap. His mouth found hers, and the kiss was different than the desperate, hungry ones they had shared before. This one was a vow. It was slow, deep, and grounded, tasting of red wine and the overwhelming relief of a shared burden.

When they finally broke apart, he rested his forehead against hers again. "Te amo, Lola," he whispered fiercely, the Spanish rolling off his tongue with a gravelly weight.

Penta shifted, pulling her back so she was lying against his chest, her head pillowed over his heartbeat. He reached over to the end table, grabbed her cell phone, and deliberately powered it off, dropping it face down.

"Tomorrow is tomorrow," Penta murmured, his fingers trailing lazily through her hair, massaging the tension from her scalp. "Tonight, there is no Hunter. There is no storyline. There is just us."

Lola closed her eyes, the last of her anxiety dissolving into the dark. The wrestling world, the cameras, and the corporate machine were still out there, waiting. But as Penta's steady breathing lulled her toward sleep, she finally felt completely safe.

———

The morning light in Lola’s apartment was usually something she ignored, a harsh reminder to check her phone and start putting out the day’s fires. But today, the sunlight spilling through the blinds felt different. It was softer, catching the dust motes dancing above the bed and illuminating the heavy, tattooed arm draped over her waist.

Lola blinked awake, her senses slowly coming online. The first thing she registered was the heat radiating from Penta’s chest against her back. The second was the quiet. There were no ringing headsets, no frantic text notifications, just the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of his breathing. She turned carefully, trying not to wake him, but as she shifted, his arm tightened instinctively, pulling her flush against him.

Penta’s eyes fluttered open. Without the mask, his face in the morning light looked impossibly soft, the sharp, guarded edges replaced by a sleepy contentment. He blinked, focusing on her face, and a slow, genuine smile spread across his lips.

"Buenos días," he murmured, his voice a gravelly rasp completely devoid of its usual arena projection.

"Morning," Lola whispered back, reaching up to trace the line of his jaw. "You take up a lot of space, you know that?"

Penta chuckled, a low rumble against her collarbone. He leaned in, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to her forehead. "I told you. I take care of what is mine. That includes the bed…and the woman in it."

He rolled onto his back, stretching his arms above his head with a groan of popping joints; the physical toll of his profession momentarily visible before turning his dark eyes back to her. The reality of the past few days was beginning to seep into the room, creeping under the door like a draft.

He reached for her blindly, his arm snaking out from beneath the tangled sheets to seek the warmth that had already become indispensable. He caught her wrist and tugged her forward, gentle but insistent, until their faces were level and she hovered above him, hair tumbling across his chest in a waterfall. For a moment she propped herself up on her elbows, taking in the incongruous sight of him flat on his back, maskless, morning-stubbled, and smiling up at her like a man who had never once considered the possibility of heartbreak.

She laughed, breathless, unable to resist the gravitational pull of his hands guiding her to straddle his hips. The motion was effortless, practiced, as if they'd spent every morning of their lives reconciling the space between bodies. His fingers traced slow, absent-minded circles over her thighs, drawing patterns that felt at once ancient and brand new. She braced herself with a palm on either side of his head,  and he grinned, teeth flashing sharp and white in the diffused light.

"Is this how all the best luchadors wake up?" she murmured, voice husky and soft, her body already fitting itself to the lines of his chest and the ridges of the scars he wore with such ease.

"Only the very, very lucky ones," he replied, the words a low rumble that vibrated through her. He reached up to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, thumb lingering on the delicate line of her cheekbone. His eyes, so fearsome in the ring and so devastatingly earnest now, searched her face with unhurried affection.

She bent down until their foreheads touched, the tip of her nose brushing his. "I could get used to this," she whispered, meaning more than just the shared bed or the slow sunrise or the easy laughter. She felt it in her bones, the possibility of a life uncoupled from perpetual crisis.

He nodded, the motion barely perceptible, and let his hands settle on her lower back, anchoring her there like he intended to keep her in that moment indefinitely. "Then you should," he whispered back, and before she could answer he rolled them both in a single, fluid motion, the way he might reverse a pin in the ring. She let out a startled yelp that dissolved into laughter as he pinned her arms above her head, his weight deliciously solid on top of her.

She squirmed beneath him, feigning protest, but he just grinned wider and dipped his scrape his teeth over her earlobe, "You're ridiculous," she said, and he nodded solemnly.

"Sí," he agreed. "Ridiculous for you."

Her arms were pinned overhead with a single, sure grip, Penta’s fingers easily circled both her slender wrists, holding them against the mattress as if she’d ever truly wanted to escape. His body pressed her into the sheets, heavy and immovable, and she felt both owned and worshipped, each nerve ending awake and greedy for his touch. He grinned over her, a wolfish glint in his eyes, and then bent his head, catching the hem of her tank top between his teeth. The fabric stretched tight across her stomach, riding up slowly, every inch a calculated tease. His stubble rasped against her skin as he tugged the shirt higher, inch by inch, the heat of his breath ghosting over her belly, her ribs, the curve of her breast.

She arched up, trying to help or maybe to dare him further, but he only tightened his hold on her wrists, a silent command to stay put. Light and shadow played across his face as he shifted, the morning sun turning his usually intimidating features strangely gentle, almost boyish in their anticipation. He let go of her wrists for just a moment, just long enough to pull her shirt over her head in one smooth, practiced motion. Then his hands returned, not to restrain her this time but to cradle her face, his thumbs stroking over her cheeks.

For a moment he hovered, just looking at her, as if trying to memorize the precise arrangement of freckles and scars and sleep-creased skin. She found herself holding her breath, waiting for the next move, and sensed that he was doing the same. It wasn’t about rushing or taking; it was about savoring the rare, precious seconds when they could pretend there was no war, no vendetta, no monstrous expectations waiting for them outside this narrow bed.

"You are so beautiful like this," he said, voice low and reverent, and even though Lola had always thought herself immune to cheap lines, the way he said it made her believe it, just for a heartbeat. She reached up, tugging him down by the back of his neck until their mouths met, slow and greedy at once. His hands skimmed down her sides, relearning the length of her, his touch alternately gentle and rough, always exactly what she didn’t know she needed.

She wondered if he felt the same sense of suspended reality, this fragile, unsustainable peace. Maybe that was why he held her so tightly, as if to keep her from dissolving when the morning inevitably broke.

He shifted his weight, rolling them again until she was back on top, her knees bracketing his hips. She braced herself on his chest, feeling his heart race beneath her palms. He just looked at her, hands resting lightly on her thighs, grounding her in the moment.

"Your move, boss," he murmured, softened with affection, and she laughed, surprised at the catch in her own voice.

"Oh, I’ll make my move," she promised, and in the golden morning light, she believed it.

She pushed herself upright, palms planted on the hard muscle of his chest, and rocked her hips back until she perched on his thighs. The sheets bunched up behind her, pooling around her waist, leaving the two of them exposed to the rectangle of warm sunlight that sliced across the bed. Lola felt the shift in air as she drew herself up, her hair falling in loose tangles down her back, and looked down over him with a sly, appraising gaze. She let her fingers trail down his torso, following the dark line of hair that arrowed toward the waistband of his boxers, the motion deliberate and almost lazy in its confidence.

She hesitated for effect, she could feel Penta’s attention sharpen, his breathing quicken and slow, waiting for her next move like a predator biding his time. Her nails scraped lightly over the ridges of his abs, a teasing threat of pain, before she hooked her fingers beneath the elastic. She didn’t tug, not yet. Instead, she made a show of tracing the edge, pulling it away from his skin and letting it snap back with a soft pop. Her grin was wicked; she met his gaze and held it, daring him to break the spell.

He didn’t. He watched her, eyes dark and hungry and unwavering, mouth slightly parted. He made no move to stop her, or to urge her onward, he simply waited, muscles tensed and ready, surrendering the initiative to her in a way that said everything about the kind of power they could safely trade here, in private, with nobody watching. It was a luxury neither of them had ever really believed in, and she wasn’t about to waste a second of it.

The sun caught the tattoo on his hip, distorted by the flex and release of muscle as he shifted beneath her. She leaned over, brushed her lips over the ink, then straightened again, hands returning to the band of his boxers. Her pulse thrummed in her wrists; she had the dizzying sense that she could do anything, say anything, and he would simply receive it, hold it, give it back. So she pushed her luck.

"You gonna just lie there and look pretty?" she asked, voice low but full of mischief.

He lifted his head just enough to see her more clearly and shrugged, a single fluid motion. "If the boss says so," he replied, echoing her words from earlier.

She laughed, and this time it was bright and unselfconscious, the kind of laugh that left her feeling a little off-balance and utterly alive. She let her hands resume their exploration, finally easing the waistband down, inch by inch, exposing more of his skin to the light and to her touch. She watched his eyes go half-lidded, saw the way his breath shivered as she went lower, saw the anticipation transform into something raw and unguarded.

She leaned forward, hair falling forward like a curtain, and nipped at his collarbone. "I think I like this version of you," she whispered.

"Good," he said, voice gravelly with want. "It’s yours."

She felt something clench and spark in her chest, sharp and bright, a pulse of sensation that was almost vertigo, as if the ground beneath her knees had abruptly tilted toward a drop. It wasn’t just lust, though God knew that was there, coiling hot and urgent in her belly, but a heady, terrifying sense of consequence, of what this morning meant, of the thousand futures that might unspool from a single, deliberate act. She hesitated, her hands gripped tight around the band of his boxers, thumbs pressing into the lines of his hipbones, feeling the wild, steady thrum of his pulse beneath her fingers. His gaze was fixed on hers, face slack with anticipation, the slight furrow of his brow the only sign that he was as thrown by this as she was.

The next motion was deliberate, ceremonial. She tugged his boxers lower, the elastic resisting for a moment before yielding, then sliding over his hips, down his thighs, bunching around his knees. The exposed skin was impossibly warm, alive in the cold air that sliced across the bed, and she marveled at how familiar and alien it felt at once, this man she was beginning to know better than her own reflection, suddenly revealed in a context that made him a stranger again. 

She paused, let her gaze wander the length of him, the contrasting lines of violence and vulnerability etched into his body. Scars, old and new, interrupted the topography of muscle; she traced one with her finger, not as an afterthought but as a promise, a worshipful acknowledgment of what he’d survived.

He made a small, involuntary sound, somewhere between a sigh and a growl and reached for her, but she swatted his hands away with a look that said, Not yet. She wanted to memorize him, unguarded and unmasked, for just another moment. The light caught the sheen of sweat already starting to bead at his sternum; she leaned down and licked it away, salt and warmth, and felt him shiver hard beneath her. His hands fisted in the sheets, the only concession to his need, and she felt power and tenderness twist together inside her, indistinguishable.

She closed her fingers around him, the motion slow and almost reverential, as if she were handling something rare, or breakable, or both. The heat of him startled her even now, every time; it was as if some private furnace lived just below his skin, as if beneath the veneer of muscle and ink lay a coal seam that would never cool. She took her time, mapping the shape and texture of him with thumb and palm and the lightest press of her nails, learning him anew with every flex and twitch. He hissed a breath through his teeth, the sound all the more satisfying for how he tried to muffle it, and she smiled, a wicked, lazy thing that was all satisfaction and promise.

She shifted her weight, sitting on her knees between his legs, and let her free hand splay across his hip, holding him down as if he were in danger of bolting. The power in the gesture surprised her, the sense of control both intoxicating and delicate, as if she could steer the whole future by the angle of her wrist or the pressure of her grip. She moved slowly at first; deliberate, almost clinical strokes, a metronome of pleasure designed to keep him at the edge but never push him over. She watched his face for every tremor, every tightening of his jaw, and relished the way his composure would flicker and nearly fail with each pass of her hand.

He reached for her, then, a reflex or maybe a challenge, but she stilled him with a look; a warning or a dare, she wasn’t sure. He let his arms fall back, fingers digging into the sheets, surrender absolute except for the pulsing insistence of his need. She felt a surge of fondness and something more dangerous, a desire to mark him with this memory, to leave him ruined for anyone else who might try to touch him this way.

She leaned in, her hair brushing his lower belly, and pressed a kiss to the inside of his thigh, soft, almost apologetic, a benediction before the breaking. He shuddered, his whole body taut as a bowstring, and she trailed her tongue upward in a slow, meandering path. She kept her eyes on his, wanting him to see her, to know that this was no accident or mercy but a choice she was making, again and again, for as long as the world allowed it.

She let her tongue flick over him, the taste sharp and intimate. She sucked him into her mouth, slow at first, and closed her eyes at the violent tenderness of the sensation, how it filled her, how it erased everything except the press of her tongue and the impossible heat of his skin and the quiet, ragged breaths she drew between each motion. Her jaw ached, but she wanted that; she wanted to remember it later, the soreness a reminder of her choice.

Above her, she heard the start of a curse, a raw sound that trailed off into a groan as she took him deeper, hollowed her cheeks, and worked her hand at the base to match the lazy rhythm of her mouth. She set the pace to drive him crazy, incremental increases in pressure, then slackening off, then building again; she wanted him helpless, wanted him to have no control over the pleasure that she gave, wanted to prove that she could hold him together and then break him apart with nothing but her mouth and her will. She could almost feel the fight inside him: the urge to thrust up or to grab her hair, the pride that made him want to hold on and the need that would eventually make him let go.

“Look at me.” 

He obeyed; the effect was electric, seeing him lock in on her, seeing the raw, helpless need there, the war between wanting to let go or to hold it back forever.

The hunger in his eyes was almost an electric current, thrumming from him to her and back. His hands gripped the bunched sheets at his sides, tendons straining, every muscle locked. For a moment it was just them, the bed, the sunlight, and the wet, obscene sounds her mouth coaxed from his body, growing wetter, dirtier, needier with each desperate flick of tongue and twist of wrist. She let herself play with him, savoring the way he moaned her name, the broken whispers of Lola, Amor, por favor, as if the words alone might save him from flying to pieces.

Lola slipped her hand between his legs, cupping, squeezing, rolling the weight of him in her palm the way she remembered he liked, and he bucked, losing the careful rhythm they'd built together. She relished the loss of control, the way his head thudded back against the pillow, the way his hands finally invaded her space, fisting her hair in desperate handfuls, cradling and guiding but never forcing.

“If you don’t stop…amor, por favor.” he begged softly.

She released him with a soft ‘pop’ and stretched, catlike, over his body, letting her skin brush and drag along his, savoring the friction. Her hair swept over his ribs and hips, and she felt the way his hands twitched, wanting to seize her, to flip her, to take, and how he held himself back, letting her set the terms with a trust that was as rare as it was fragile. For a heartbeat, she hovered there, just breathing him in, letting the weight of what she was about to do settle between them. She kissed her way up his body, slow and exploratory, tasting sweat and skin and morning, and when she reached his mouth, he met her with a hunger that was half gratitude, half plea.

She broke the kiss, grinning against his lips. “You gonna behave?” she whispered. He smiled back, a dazed and crooked thing. “Not if I can help it.”

She felt his hands tighten on the fleshy backs of her thighs, thumbs pressing out against the muscles, then sliding inward in a slow, kneading motion. It made her shiver, sparks jumping from her knees to her sternum, but she kept her balance and her cool, rocking her hips forward just enough to feel how hard he was for her, the heat of it pushing up against her and making her catch her breath.

He held himself there, letting her set the pace, letting her feel every inch of his want. It was the patience that undid her. The way he could take all of her teasing and not rush to tip the board. That, more than anything, drove her pulse into frantic staccato.

She reached out, threading her fingers into his dark hair, still messy from sleep and whatever complicated dreams had brought him into the morning this soft. She pulled him up, brought his mouth to her collarbone, her neck. He kissed her like he was trying to start a fire with just his lips, nuzzling at the tender spot under her jaw until she writhed.

His hand drifted from her thigh, fingers hooking into the curve of her ass, then sliding further up, tracing the bottom edge of her breast. He slid his other hand up her bare back, fingers splaying wide under her shoulder blades, and bucked his hips once, hard, so she collapsed against his chest with a muffled curse.

She felt, before she registered, the thickness of him pressed against her, the steady heat of his hunger shameless and unmasked. She smiled thinking, he’d wake up to a five-alarm fire and try to fuck it into submission. She ground down, slowly at first, then with purpose, and watched his face contort with a rush of pleasure so sharp it bordered on pain. She loved that.

Neither of them wanted to drag this out; there was too much history, too much muscle memory, driving them forward. With the patience only barely earned, he reached between them and fit himself to her, the heavy, blunt pressure of it so impossible not to think of anything but how perfectly, monstrously good it felt to have him inside her again. She pushed down, the initial burn fading to fullness, anchoring herself on the bones of his hips as she took all of him. She could feel every pulse, every twitch, the answer to some question she’d forgotten she’d ever asked.

Penta let out a gasp, the sound so intimate and so full of need it felt like a secret she needed to guard. She set the rhythm, a slow undulation, savoring the friction and finding a groove that felt less like fucking and more like a territorial claim. His arms wrapped under and around her, dragging her down until her torso pressed tight against his, nipples grazing his chest, her heart smacking the inside of her ribs, running triple time against his. He set his chin on her shoulder and whispered her name, rhythmically. 

She wanted him wild. She wanted him to lose the leash, to come apart under her. So she upped the tempo, flexing her thighs, grinding in little circles that made both of them see flashbulbs on the insides of their eyelids.

He matched her pace, hips thrusting up, then pulling back, then up again. The pressure inside her grew with alarming speed, until the only sound in the room was the slick, desperate cadence of bodies colliding, hers driving the pace, his driving the depth. Neither of them said a word, as if even a syllable might shatter the spell. She heard only the rough scrape of his breath, the groaned curses in Spanish and English.

She rode him harder, chasing something beyond the quick, dirty heat of orgasm; the sense of being seen, of being claimed, of knowing that no performance for any camera could touch the unfiltered truth of this. She felt her own orgasm building, an ache that gathered low and slow until it twisted sharp behind her ribs. He dug his fingers into her ass, holding her steady so he could fuck up into her, the force of each movement making her gasp that much louder. She realized, in a flash of lucidity, that she wanted the neighbors to hear, wanted the world to know that she was taking this for herself, and for him, and for every unguarded morning they’d ever doubted was possible.

Lola had always considered herself composed, a woman who could master her own appetites, keep her body in check even as she let the world think she was running loose. But when it finally hit her; when the pressure inside her snapped she wasn’t prepared for how total the detonation would be. Her thighs locked around him, trembling with an intensity that bordered on violence. It was like being struck by a live current, her body arching and caving and grasping for some impossible anchor as the contraction overtook her.

She ground down with a force that threatened to bruise them both, and the sound that tore from her throat was nothing she’d meant to release; half shriek, half sob, as if pleasure and pain had fused into a single, wordless demand. For a moment she floated at the edge of herself, blind and shuddering, helpless to anything but the bright, obliterating pleasure radiating out from her center. The bedframe rattled, the sunlight shimmered behind the red scrim of her eyelids, and all she could taste was the salt of his skin and the blood-sharp tang of her own bitten lip. She clung to him, nails digging into his shoulders, desperate to ground herself in the heat of his body, the reality of his hands and the wild, animal sounds he made as she broke apart above him.

The involuntary crescendo of her climax snapped something in Penta. He’d been holding back, even when he’d begged her to stop, even when he’d surrendered to her every whim, but hearing her lose herself, hearing her cry out, shattered the last of his willpower. He bucked up into her, hard, the urgency in his body suddenly feral, his control gone. She felt the way his grip on her hips shifted from tender to bruising, how his whole body went rigid, then shuddered in perfect sync with her own tremors, his release as immediate and wild as hers had been. He clutched her to him, gasping and cursing into her hair, his fingers splayed so wide it was as if he wanted to memorize the shape of her body, to hold it inside himself forever.

She tried to move, to shift the weight of him from under her, but before she could accomplish more than a twitch of muscle, Penta’s hands locked hard around the rise of her hips. She grunted in surprise. The pressure of his fingers, calloused, hot, flattened the air between them into something bright and tensile. “Not yet,” he said. His tone was calm and rough, the fray of restraint underlaid with a promise.

Lola stilled, poised and alert, bracing herself on his chest with both hands and feeling the desperate throb of his heart beneath her palms. He flexed his grip, thumbs digging deeper, pressing her down until she could do nothing but yield to what he wanted. She grinned, tried to wiggle free anyway, but he just laughed softly and manhandled her back into place, pinning her with a kind of reverence. The words, not yet, hung between them like a magic spell, and she felt herself go pliant; amused, curious, turned on by the sheer gall of him.

He coaxed her back into a slow, rolling grind, guiding her hips with both hands, dictating the rhythm and pace until even the fleeting thought of escape felt ridiculous. There was no room for pretense, no daylight between their bodies, just the slick, delirious heat of flesh on flesh and the fine tremor of muscles exhausted but unwilling to quit. His hands roved, one slipping up her spine to cup the nape of her neck, the other holding her steady, and she realized he wanted her to ride the aftershocks, to wring every last fragment of sensation from the moment before letting it go.

She gave in. She let him tilt her forward, let him keep her so close she could barely breathe without tasting him. Her hair fell into his face, and he didn’t brush it aside, just nosed through it, lips grazing her jaw as he drew her down. Each movement felt like the end of the world: tiny detonations rippling outward, echoing in her bones. She closed her eyes and let herself be piloted, steered by his insistence, until all that remained was the rhythm and the bright, empty space inside her head.

He whispered again, lower this time, as if it belonged only to him, "Mi principio y mi fin." (My beginning and my end)

*Side note: There is some Spanish in this story however, I put translations directly after because I hate reading a story that doesn't give translations! The native Spanish speakers also speak English in my story ... just go with it! It's easier for me to write😅

Part 1

Alexandra pressed her cheek to the warm glass of the office window, the sun-hot pane branding its memory into her skin as she watched the ballet of cargo lifts and weather worn dockworkers orchestrating the rupture and reassembly of global trade below. Every hour, it seemed, the port of Veracruz delivered a new permutation of chaos.

A chorus of shouts in Spanish and other languages she couldn’t distinguish, the shrill warning beeps of forklifts as they maneuvered pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped electronics, agricultural inorganics, crates of indistinguishable items branded for markets she'd never see. The sheer volume of movement, the purposeful disorder, had at first overwhelmed her. Now it only made her pulse slow, like a complicated equation she could solve in her sleep.

It was early, barely 9 a.m. and already the humidity had turned her hair to a curly mess. Alexandra wiped at her forehead, then checked her reflection in the glass, noting the way her hair, once a weapon of professional self-presentation, had grown long and wild in the tropical air. She tried to picture herself as she’d looked 237 days ago, on the morning she and her Stepbrother, Santos had left New York.

It seemed impossible, but Santos now owned a large, successful shipping company in Mexico. He had always been the hustler of the family, the only one willing to treat the world as raw material, not an adversary. Alexandra envied him that; her own upbringing was defensive, predicated on never showing a weakness, while Santos seemed to specialize in finding the seams of any system and sliding through unscathed. It was only a matter of time before he’d built something out of the wreckage of their parents, out of the long story of their separate exiles.

She could see Santos through the window,  framed by the morning light spilling into the office, his features obscured but the unmistakable confidence radiating off him like heat. His laughter carried up to her, a rich, rolling sound that seemed to cut through the din of the laborers. It reminded her of their childhood days, the way he had always known how to ease the tension in the air, how to make everything feel possible, even in the aftermath of their family’s unraveling.

Even now, as he spoke to a group of men, gesturing animatedly, she noticed the way they hung on his every word, brows furrowing in concentration, faces lighting up in agreement. It was all so effortless for him. 

Santos had promised her a fresh start, a blank ledger, a page scrubbed of the past. But Alexandra had learned that nothing stayed erased for long. Even now, with the Gulf wind combing through her hair and the sun making lacework shadows on her bare arms, she felt the pulse of the old world quicken behind her ribs; a catalogue of debts, half-spoken resentments, and the strange, hungry nostalgia that sometimes left her dizzy for the chaos she had left behind.

She could not say exactly what she missed about her former life, only that there was a hole in her chest, a Tama-shaped vacancy, that made every gain in freedom feel counterfeit. She missed the way Tama could corner her in a crowded room with only a glance, the way his voice could flay her to the bone or make her feel invincible. She missed his terrible, immaculate sense of timing, the compulsion to push against the world until the world either bent or broke. It was a kind of gravity, the way he could draw out the worst or best in her and make it feel like a discovery, never an accident.

Sometimes she wondered what her life would look like if she’d never met him, whether she would be as sharp or as restless, or whether she would crave disorder with the same intensity. She tried, occasionally, to will herself into contentment, to believe that she could become the kind of woman who could lose herself in the tick of routine and the small, private consolations of safety. But it was like trying to inhabit someone else’s body, everything fit wrong, and the old restlessness returned, more insistent for having been denied.

Then there were also nights when she dreamed of Loa, of the way his smile could tilt a whole room off its axis, the impossible gentleness of his hands against her spine, the private language they’d built from scraps of memory and glances. It was always night in these dreams, the two of them floating through a city whose architecture was made entirely of secrets and half-remembered promises, their bodies moving through shadowed corridors and starlit doorways as if they’d been designed for nothing but this kind of trespass. In these dreams, the world felt just on the verge of being remade, as if there was still time to reroute the past toward some kinder version of itself.

When she awoke, she could almost taste the salt of his skin, the smoke of his laughter lingering in the dark. Sometimes she would reach for her phone in those first, unguarded seconds, just to check for a message from him, knowing, even as she did it, that there would be nothing but the old, silent void. Loa was the only person who had ever made her feel understood without commentary or precondition, and she resented him for it, for making her hunger for that kind of recognition even in his absence. The more she tried to relegate him to the status of a closed chapter, the more the edges of his memory seemed to sharpen, slicing through the routines she was trying so hard to cultivate. Alexandra told herself that this was what grief did; it reanimated the ghosts at the worst possible moment, teasing them into the present until the distinction between before and after was obliterated.

She wondered if Loa, wherever he was, still thought of her in the same atomized, inconvenient way. She both hoped and dreaded it. She wanted to believe that the logic of cause and effect, the tidy sequence of consequences that Tama had always worshipped, didn’t apply here; that some piece of her could remain unfinished, immune to the accounting that had come to define the rest of her life. There were times, late at night, when she pictured Loa walking the streets of a city much like this one, maybe even Veracruz, his hands buried in his pockets, his gaze fixed somewhere just beyond the reach of the lights, and she would feel a wave of longing so acute it left her breathless.

Veracruz was a city built for forgetting, or so Santos had insisted when he first brought her here. But all Alexandra could do was remember.

———

Alexandra drifted through the days with a rigor that bordered on simplicity, her world shrunk to the fluorescent-lit of the shipping office and the late afternoons spent balancing ledgers and troubleshooting the endless cascade of logistical headaches that Santos tossed her way. She spoke to almost no one except him and the secretary, Marisol, a chain-smoking single mother with impeccable nails and a predilection for telenovelas, who treated Alexandra as a temporary fixture, polite, but never quite one of them. The rest of the staff, older, weathered men who packed shipments and unloaded cargo with the dead-eyed efficiency of assembly-line veterans, skirted around her as if she were made of glass.

Santos, for his part, seemed determined to insulate her from anything resembling meaningful risk. She was always assigned the most predictable accounts, the least volatile English speaking markets, the clients who paid on time and rarely called after hours. Santos was kind, almost studiously so, but Alexandra sensed a calculation in this kindness, a desire to give her only what he was prepared to watch her lose. He kept her busy, yes, but in the way of a man who believed that keeping a watch wound tightly was the only way to keep it from breaking.

Yet even on the busiest days, when the phones wouldn’t stop ringing and the air in the back office grew thick with the scent of Marisol’s cigarettes and the distant tang of diesel, Alexandra’s mind darted off on its own. She found herself constructing elaborate alternate histories, parallel versions of herself who had made a single different choice somewhere along the line; who had said yes to grad school, or no to Tama; who had taken the money their father left and vanished into the interior, or burned it all on something spectacular and final. In these daydreams she recast herself as a saboteur, a sabbatical, a bright and feral nobody; anything but the cautious, incrementally useful person she’d become.

Sometimes, when she caught herself spacing out at her desk, she would try to recite the details of her current life like a catechism: the address of the office, the length of time she had been in Veracruz, the password to her work computer, the most recent joke Santos had told her. She repeated these facts until they felt less like constraints and more like talismans, proof that she existed somewhere real and not just in the fugue state between memories of Tama and the prosaic grind of the present.

Despite herself, Alexandra found that she was growing not unhappy, but hungry in a way that office work and familial routine could not satisfy. The more Santos tried to shield her, the more she longed for some small taste of drama, some visceral shake-up, something to prove she still had a pulse beneath the glacial composure she wore like armor. She began to see the outlines of her restlessness everywhere; in the way her fingers drummed against the keyboard, in the way she lingered at the edge of conversations, in the way she caught her own reflection and almost didn’t recognize it.

So when Santos finally knocked on her office door, a rare frown creasing his forehead, and told her he needed her to run an errand, “Something a little outside your comfort zone, Ale,” he said, using the nickname only he could get away with, she felt not dread, but a small, predatory thrill.

The assignment arrived wrapped in the most casual of packaging, as if Santos were asking her to run down to the corner store instead of threading herself through whatever thicket of risk he’d been paid to ignore. “I want you to deliver a contract for me,” he said, his inflection easy but the smile mechanical, as if he’d rehearsed this line in anticipation of her reaction. Alexandra searched his face for some indication of the job’s true weight, but Santos only offered that lacquered confidence of his, the same expression he used as a shield against the world’s uncertainty. “My head of security will escort you,” he added, almost as an afterthought, as though adding a bodyguard to the mix was standard procedure for the family’s glorified errand girl.

Alexandra’s mind zipped instantly to all the reasons Santos might attach such a shadow to her movements. Was this a test, or some veiled gesture of protection? Or did he just not trust her to complete a simple handoff without getting mugged, lost, or otherwise compromised? She had little experience with the truer edges of his business; her job, after all, was spreadsheets and emails, not whatever fell beneath the table. Still, the prospect of stepping outside her prescribed orbit, of making herself useful in a way that mattered, made her heart flutter with a reckless, adolescent excitement. 

She straightened, suddenly self-conscious and asked, “Where am I taking it?” even though she already knew the answer wouldn’t be simple.

Santos waved away the question. “Details in the envelope. Just follow the plan, por favor. Penta will meet you in the lot.”

Penta. The name alone made Alexandra’s pulse jump. Santos’s head of security was a man rumored to have once worked for a cartel, or the special forces, or maybe both…no one around here could ever keep the stories straight. And the idea of being watched over by him was both reassuring and vaguely terrifying.

With a nod, took the envelope from Santos’s hand, noting the weight of it in her palm. She left the office, pulse quickening, and crossed the open warehouse floor, where the men paused just long enough to mark her passage with unsmiling eyes. Out in the parking lot, the heat had already begun to pool on the asphalt, and Penta was waiting at the edge of a pristine, blacked out SUV, leaning against the hood as if he owned the entire expanse of concrete.

His sunglasses masked his eyes, but Alexandra felt the full force of his scrutiny anyway. “Listo para ir?” (ready to go) he asked, voice as dry and unyielding as the Veracruz sun.

Alexandra nodded, swallowing whatever nervous quip had risen to her lips. She slid into the passenger seat and buckled herself in, cradling the envelope against her chest as Penta started the engine.

They pulled away from the loading dock, the gate receding in the rearview mirror with the same finality as a closing stage curtain. The air conditioning blasted, giving Alexandra a shivery clarity she hadn’t anticipated. She tried to focus on the road, but her attention kept snagging on the man beside her, the so-called Penta, whose bulk seemed to crowd the entire driver’s side. His arms, thickly corded with muscle and scored by pale, old scars and way too many tattoos, rested at near-perfect ten and two on the wheel, betraying a law-and-order rigidity belied by the slouch in his seat. He wore mirrored sunglasses even in the dim of the underground ramp, and his jaw was flecked with a day’s worth of stubble, giving his profile an ambiguous, age-resistant quality.

They sped through the city’s outskirts with no soundtrack except the whine of the engine and the click of Penta’s molars as he ground his teeth, a tic Alexandra clocked almost instantly, then tried to ignore. She wondered if he’d ever actually worked for the cartel? There was something about the way he traced the intersections, never signaling, always scanning, that suggested a hunter’s mindset, a man who assumed every shadow concealed a rival. Alexandra stole glances whenever she thought he wouldn’t notice, cataloging the details she’d heard about him; that he never blinked at violence, that he had a weakness for imported liquor and women and that he’d once stitched up his own leg in the back of a moving truck.

She was almost disappointed to find that his hands were perfectly steady, his breathing regular. If he was nervous about this errand, he didn’t show it. For all she knew, he did this ten times a week. But Alexandra couldn’t shake the sense that they were both being auditioned, for what, she couldn’t guess. Maybe Santos wanted to see if she could keep her composure with a wolf in the car. Maybe Penta was meant as a message, a reminder that even the smallest jobs could turn ugly if you were careless.

The drive unspooled in a series of traffic lights and abrupt lane changes; Alexandra tried to memorize every turn, every landmark, as if this would somehow inoculate her against whatever waited at the other end. Penta never glanced her way until they were already out of the city, the SUV climbing the undulant hills above the port. Then, and only then, did he tip his sunglasses down, just far enough to reveal a flicker of brown, incongruously gentle eyes.

“You been up here before?” he asked, voice so low it was almost a rumble.

Alexandra shook her head. She wanted to ask what exactly was in the envelope, who they were meeting, but she swallowed the questions. Penta’s presence was meant to answer them all, or at least remind her that answers were above her pay grade.

Instead, she watched the city shrink in the side mirror, and wondered what it would feel like if she just asked him to keep driving, past the checkpoints and the last ratty Oxxo, past the memory of every mistake she’d ever made, until the whole world was a blur of trees and sky.

She pressed the envelope tighter to her ribcage, as if it might set her pulse in order. The hills grew steeper, the road more switchbacked, and Alexandra realized, with a kind of delicious fear, that she had absolutely no idea where she was going.

“Where are we going?”

Penta turned the wheel with methodical precision, his focus on the road ahead as he navigated the twists and turns. “Business,” was all he said, his voice gravelly and confident. The one-word reply hung heavy in the cabin, a wall between them, impenetrable and loaded with a promise of secrecy.

The horizon opened up, hills rolling into the distance, each incline cloaking them in more unknowns. The air changed, thick with the scent of wild grass and salt from the distant coast, a sharp contrast to the urban decay of Veracruz. Alexandra watched the landscape shift, trying to map her thoughts to the terrain, but the pull of curiosity had her caught off guard.

“What kind of business?” she pressed, her voice quiet but emboldened by the isolation of the road. The question hung in the air, delicate and uncertain against the vast stillness of the hills.

He shot her a sideways glance, barely lifting his gaze from the road. “Just business. Trust that.” 

Frustration clawed at her ribs, but she swallowed it down, forcing herself to stay calm. She glanced out the window again, watching a few distant houses break the expanse, their shapes slow to emerge from the haze. 

They took one more turn, a sharp right off the highway and onto a gravelly access road, the kind that immediately coated the black SUV in a fog of white dust. Penta slowed but did not hesitate, guiding the vehicle through a battered metal gate that Alexandra had not even registered as a possible destination. The farm sprawled out on either side, an expanse of cultivated symmetry: rows and rows of low crops, a few lopsided outbuildings that looked more like repurposed shipping containers than barns, and a handful of bored dogs that half-heartedly chased the car before collapsing in the shade.

The driveway wound past a cluster of greenhouses, their skins clouded with condensation, and a heap of rusted irrigation pipes. Alexandra squinted: there were no signs, no cheerful branding, no visible workers. The only movement was a distant tractor weaving between the fields. She tried to read the place, the way she read a spreadsheet or a stranger’s posture, what was cultivated, what was allowed to run wild, what belonged and what was hidden. She expected danger, not irrigation. She expected cartel outposts, not compost heaps.

“Is this it?” she asked, more to herself than to Penta. He parked with a neatness that bordered on ritual between two battered pickups, then killed the engine. The silence was its own kind of shock. Alexandra watched as he scanned the perimeter, then checked his phone, then finally turned to her with a nod that was almost polite.

She followed Penta’s lead, clutching her envelope, and felt her shoes sink a little in the dirt. This was not the kind of place she’d imagined for a handoff. She’d pictured a bleak motel, a shipping container at the docks, maybe some ruined bar with a single working fan. This was…agricultural. Open. Almost wholesome.

From behind one of the greenhouses, a figure emerged, moving with slow confidence along the rutted path. He was older, probably late seventies, with the stoop and shuffle Alexandra associated with men past a certain age. His face was dark and carved, creased from decades in the sun, but his smile was soft.

He wore a clean button-down tucked into slacks, the shirt a little too crisp and the belt cinched awkwardly above a belly that had survived a lifetime of tamales. Alexandra watched as the man ambled toward them, waving once with a practiced, economical gesture. He started with Penta, greeting him in Spanish, the words too fast and colloquial for Alexandra to catch. There was laughter, Penta’s, surprisingly warm and a familiar clasp of hands, but nothing exaggerated or performative. Alexandra tried to track the exchange, scanning for any sign of nerves, any sign that this was the “business” Penta had mentioned. But the man’s eyes, when they flickered to her, were just curious and kind.

Penta motioned Alexandra forward, his voice suddenly formal. “Don Enrique, this is Alexandra Escobar.” There was a pause as both men looked at her, waiting for her to respond the right way. She offered a polite “Buenas tardes, señor"” and Don Enrique nodded, pleased.

He turned to Penta again, and the two of them had a brief, animated discussion, something about harvest timing, to judge from the hand gestures. Then Don Enrique addressed Alexandra directly, his English careful and lightly accented. “You are here from Santos Escobar?”

Alexandra nodded—“Sí, yes, I’m with him. The office,” she clarified, uncertain whether this was a point of pride or embarrassment.

Don Enrique smiled wider. “You know what you carry?” he asked, gesturing toward the envelope.

Alexandra hesitated, feeling the weight of the thing in her palm, wishing she’d opened it after all. “Not exactly.”

He laughed, not unkindly, and turned to Penta to translate her answer. The men shared a brief, knowing look. Alexandra caught only bits: “trabajo difícil,” “importante para todos,” and, weirdly, “paz.” 

“He asks if you speak Spanish,” Penta translated, this time more for Alexandra’s dignity than necessity.

“Poquito,” Alexandra replied, voice soft but a little stubborn, not wanting to be underestimated. The old man’s eyebrows rose, and he grinned approvingly. "It's been a long time since I've spoken it regularly."

“Ella habla más que un poquito.”(She speaks more than a little,) “Simplemente traduce despacio. No dejes que te engañe!”  Penta told the older man with a laugh, (She just translates slowly. Don't let her fool you.)

Alexandra rolled her eyes, "Listillo," (smart ass)

They stood in that patch of gravel as if not sure whether to continue with ceremony or proceed to business. Alexandra shifted her weight, feeling sweat trickle down her back, feeling the hot air settle around her like a weighted blanket. She wondered, suddenly, what she looked like to them? A woman out of her element, clutching a mystery, watched over by a man who never seemed to blink. She felt exposed, the way she sometimes did when she caught her own reflection in a window, out of place, but stubbornly present.

“Santos will do my shipping. My coffee,” it landed not as an announcement but as a matter already settled, like harvest schedules or the tide. Alexandra felt at once deflated and relieved. She’d come prepared for guns, for coded phrases, for the tense theater of criminal exchange; instead, she was party to an oddly wholesome succession plan. She fished the envelope from under her arm and passed it to Don Enrique, who received it with both hands, as if it were a gift or a sacrament.

Penta, who had hovered at Alexandra’s shoulder, now relaxed, the air around him softening by a degree. Alexandra watched as Don Enrique thumbed through the document, then nodded once, satisfied, and tucked it into his pocket. “Bien,” he said, and clapped her on the shoulder, not quite grandfatherly but not far from it. There was no further transaction, no payment, no coded signals, not even a second glance at the SUV that had ferried them here. Just a mutual, unhurried understanding that the deal was done.

Alexandra almost laughed at herself. This was the “business.” Not a narco handoff or a feat of violence, but a logistics arrangement sealed with a handshake, under the gaze of indifferent dogs and the faint chug of a tractor somewhere out of sight. She wondered if this was Santos’s idea of a joke, or a test of her ability to mask disappointment in the face of anticlimax. 

Then, just as casually, Don Enrique vanished around the greenhouses, his stride unhurried, as if he had a full afternoon of chores to attend and they were the least urgent of them.

————

The moment the door closed behind her, she found Santos in the kitchen, sleeves rolled and brow furrowed over a battered tortilla press. “You sent me to a farm?” she said, dropping her purse at the threshold, voice pitched somewhere between incredulous and amused.

He didn’t turn, but she saw the small twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Where did you think I was sending you,” he asked, “to buy cocaine or maybe black market weapons?”

Alexandra rolled her eyes, letting herself sprawl into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. She watched his back, the deliberate calm in the way he moved. “I was kinda hoping,” she said, trying to sound flippant. But he heard the edge under the joke, and let the silence thicken just enough before speaking.

He set the press aside and faced her, arms folded, like someone about to scold a wayward niece. “Ale, why do you always need the drama? Can’t you just live in the here and now and not look for danger?”

She bristled, how quickly he could flatten her with a single sentence. That was the thing about Santos: he could be gentle, and he could be ruthless. Alexandra searched his face, looking for the mischief, or at least the warmth, but found only a kind of weary exasperation.

She could have told him about the drive, about the hollow in her chest as the SUV climbed into the hills, how she’d spent every mile waiting for the other shoe to drop. She could have told him that she’d spent her whole life careening between boredom and chaos, never learning how to savor the stretches of unremarkable safety that other people seemed to crave. But that would have required a kind of honesty she’d reserved for airless, empty hours, not for these moments when she still wanted him to think of her as his little sister.

Instead, she shrugged and picked at the jagged scar on her knuckle, the one she’d gotten during the wreck with Tama. “I don’t need drama,” she lied, “I just wanna be useful.”

Santos let out a small, incredulous scoff, yet the familiar flintiness in his gaze softened, replaced by something perilously close to affection. “You think you’re only useful if someone is trying to kill you?” he asked, the words balancing on the knife-edge between mockery and concern, inviting her to laugh at herself or to bristle, either response, he could handle.

Alexandra found herself momentarily skewered by it, unable to muster a quip in return. She wondered if it was true, if she had internalized the conviction that a person’s worth was measured not by what they built or preserved, but by how far they could push up against the edge of oblivion before falling, if she was, in fact, nothing more than a well-groomed disaster waiting for the next adrenaline jolt and a new set of scars to show for it.

She grinned, but the smile was crooked. “No one has ever tried to kill me,” she said, as if that were an oversight she was determined to correct.

Santos’s face twisted into something halfway between impatience and a sad kind of amusement. “Bullshit,” he said, punctuating the word with a shake of his head, as if trying to dislodge whatever prideful idiocy Alexandra was intent on clinging to. “You think I don’t know about your nightmares?” There was no accusation in his voice, only a tedious familiarity.

Alexandra felt her jaw tighten. She wanted to bat the accusation away, to make a joke of it, to say, “They’re just dreams, everyone has ‘em,” but she tasted the lie before it could escape. Instead, she busied her hands with the basket of limes on the table, rolling them one by one, “I don’t have nightmares,” she said, softer this time, “I just… don’t sleep so well sometimes.” It was the lamest deflection in her arsenal, and Santos’s eyebrows shot up as if to say, Really?

He pressed his advantage. “You talk in your sleep, you know that?” He leaned over the counter, elbows planted in a way that made his shoulders hunch like a watchful animal. “Sometimes you scream. You beg for him not to hurt you, to let you go…” 

The words curled through the muggy air, slick and sticky, ricocheting off the tiled backsplash and lodging somewhere in the soft tissue behind Alexandra’s sternum. She remembered waking up in the dark, throat raw and body damp, the sheets twisted tight as a tourniquet around her thighs. She remembered the mingled taste of iron and bile, the wild certainty that something in the room wanted her gone. Sometimes, in the moments before dawn, she could still feel the pressure of unfamiliar hands on her wrists.

Alexandra managed to meet his gaze, but only for an instant. Santos picked up the press and started cleaning it with uncharacteristic force. “You don’t have to be ashamed, Ale,” he said, quieter now. “Nobody gets out clean. But you want danger so bad, but you carry it everywhere you go. Even in your sleep.” He paused, wiping his hands on a towel, and let the silence sit between them until it thickened.

She wanted to say something, anything, to break the spell, but the words lined up in her head like soldiers and none volunteered. Instead, she found herself wondering if her nightmares had changed, or if she’d simply grown used to their presence.

Santos finally looked at her, the mask of exasperation slipping to reveal something raw. “You don’t have to prove you’re useful. You’re not a weapon. You’re–” he groped for a word, shrugged, “enough. Even if you never do another damn thing.”

Alexandra looked at him, at the cut of concern and frustration in his face, and felt her own breath collapse out of her chest. She tried to picture what “enough” might look like, tried to imagine herself as a person untethered from the constant need for crisis and consequence, but the image came up blank or else filled with noise.

“I guess,” she sighed.

Santos rolled his eyes again, but this time the gesture was less dismissive, shaded with something like fatigue, or maybe even a bruised loyalty. He took a sharp breath, then let it out as if weighing whether it was worth the trouble to say what he was about to say. “Look, I don’t know what all Tama did to you. I mean, I know what you've told me, but knowing it and seeing it in you are different things,” he said. He turned from the counter, bracing himself on his hands, watching Alexandra as if she were a schematic he was trying to interpret without the legend. “You act like every time you let your guard down, the universe is going to come at you.”

Alexandra flinched, but only slightly, because the metaphor was too pointed and too apt. She hadn’t told Santos the particulars, but she knew he must have guessed. She wanted to interrupt, to say no, it wasn’t only Tama, or not even mostly Tama, but the way Santos spoke, slow, careful, like he was reading her internal monologue back to her, left her feeling both exposed and understood.

She folded her arms, defensive, not at the accusation, but at how accurately he’d mapped her terror.

Santos softened, voice dipping into that rare register reserved for her alone. “I’m not saying you need to be normal,” he said. “But you don’t have to keep auditioning for the role of collateral damage. There’s nobody here asking you to bleed for them.”

Alexandra looked up, eyes narrowed, unsure if the comfort was a trap or the closest he could get to actual kindness. “You make it sound easy.”

He laughed, “For you, maybe it is.” He reached over and flicked her temple, as if to reset the gears inside. “You’re the only person I know who could survive a car crash, an abduction, and a damn sociopath and call it a quiet week.”

“When you put it that way…”

“I need to know you’re okay,” he said, and this time the words landed heavy, as if dropped from a height.

Alexandra rolled a lime across the table, tracing its uneven surface with her thumb. The quiet between them felt less like a standoff now and more like a fragile truce.

Santos tilted his head, watching her. “I just want you to know, whatever Tama did, whatever anyone did–that’s not the only story you get to live.”

———

Penta leaned against the hood of the SUV, arms crossed, eyes scanning the expanse of the docks. He couldn’t shake the feeling that things felt different, more charged, since Alexandra had arrived. With every glance he stole at her, he felt an odd tug in his chest, a pull he didn’t want to acknowledge, a small thread of something infectious and hopeful. She was engaging, even with the weight she carried, and he found himself wanting to reach out, to ask her more, to draw her smile from beneath the shadows that darkened her eyes.

He tried to shake himself free of the thought, but it worked into his body, a buzz of shame and longing. She was Santos’ sister, or close enough to it that the distinction should have been sacred; a fact Santos had made brutally clear to everyone the first morning, voice lowered so the words would sink. "Si la tocas, te saco el puto corazón." (You touch her and I’ll cut your fucking heart out) he’d said, and Penta believed him, not because he thought Santos was a killer, but because he knew the man had nothing left to lose.

He told himself it was just curiosity, the magnetic pull of a person who lived at the edge of everything, but he could feel the difference. It wasn’t the usual curiosity; it was something altogether messier, a hunger he didn’t dare name, a desire he tried to starve out of existence by feeding it excuses. He tried to reroute the want, to remember every reason it was forbidden, Santos’s claim, the years of almost-family, her own disaster history, but it only made the wanting more acute, more intrusive.

He told himself he was being an idiot, that it was nothing, that the feeling would pass, but the more he tried to push it away, the more stubbornly it pressed against his ribs.

The only strategy left was to focus on the work, to redirect every errant surge of adrenaline into the world in front of him. So he watched the docks, scanning for the handoff, for strange cars or twitchy strangers, tracing the geometry of the shipping containers stacked like tombs and the distant wink of the harbor lights. If he concentrated hard enough, maybe he could overwrite the loop of Santos’s warning, or at least dull it to background noise.

He busied himself lining up the evening’s logistics in his head, ticking off checklists and contingencies, running through escape routes and fallback plans, all the while pretending not to notice how Alexandra’s presence made every sense feel like it was dialed up to pain. There was relief in this kind of vigilance, a purpose that blotted out anything softer or more selfish.

Alexandra’s declaration came quietly, but it pierced the hum of Penta’s vigilance like a tuning fork. “I’m ready.”

Penta straightened, forced the machinery of his face into what he hoped was a neutral expression, and followed, careful to keep three paces behind.

The wind off the docks was sharper now, he pretended to busy himself with the clatter of keys and the inventory of his pockets, giving Alexandra space to climb into the back seat and arrange her presence before he followed.

He thought about what he should say next, running options through his internal processor and discarding most of them as either too obvious or too desperate. What he wanted to do was ask her everything; what she dreamed about, what she feared, what she wanted that she hadn’t given herself permission to want but he knew better than to interrogate someone who was barely holding it together. Instead, as they pulled into the gated entryway Santos’s house, he shifted his weight toward her, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel, and said, “Santos said to stay at the house with you tonight, because he was away.”

It was a line designed to be casual, to slip past her defenses as a relay of logistics rather than a confession of concern, but the moment it left his lips, Penta felt a spike of something, embarrassment, anticipation, dread. He watched her face in the rearview mirror, looking for a sign that she’d caught the tremor in his voice, or worse, that she already knew the shape of the thing he was trying to hide.

Alexandra didn’t answer right away. She tapped her phone screen, thumb flicking through a cascade of unread messages, and for a moment he thought maybe she hadn’t heard him, or that she’d decided to ignore the arrangement altogether. But then she looked up, eyes catching his in the mirror, and said, “Okay.”

Penta adjusted the rearview mirror, feeling his pulse quicken under her gaze. He had been prepared for a myriad of responses, but this straightforward acknowledgment felt like an opening, a fissure in their guarded little world. He glanced ahead, refocusing on the road as the entrance to Santos’s property approached. The iron gates loomed large, a threshold lined by wild bougainvillea and manicured hedges, baring the stark divide between the chaos outside and the not-quite sanctuary within. The driveway rolled out ahead, sweeping past fountains and palm trees, a reminder of the lavish lifestyle Santos had managed to carve out for himself.

Each time he pulled up to Santos’s home, there was something jarring about the opulence that felt almost mocking. Penta turned off the engine, letting the silence settle, the tension crawling between them like an animal ready to pounce.

“Just for tonight,” he said, breaking the stillness, melding logistics with a hint of reassurance. “He’ll be back tomorrow.” His tone edged on hesitant; he didn’t want it to sound like an imposition, but he needed her to understand he was there to support her, not suffocate her.

A part of him wanted to reach out, to fill the silence with something meaningful, but the other part urged caution. Her silence was a protective shell, and he sensed the fragility beneath it.

“I should warn you,” she started, “I’m not that great of a cook. Like, not even a little bit. If there aren’t leftovers, I’m really sorry. I’m basically rolling the dice every time I use the stove.” Alexandra ducked her head, a twitch of amusement at the corner of her mouth. She set her bag down on the kitchen island and eyed the fridge, trying to recall if she’d ever actually cooked something edible in the months she’d spent here with Santos. She pressed the heel of her palm into the countertop, as if bracing herself for the next round of humiliation.

The domesticity of the moment felt staged, like two actors running lines for a scene they’d never rehearsed. Penta opened a cupboard in a show of helpfulness, then closed it again, hands useless. Alexandra stared at the arrangement of spices as if hoping the labels would spell out how to be a person who didn’t need an apology for showing up hungry.

“It’s okay,” Penta said, this time more gently. He looked at her, not away, trying not to let her discomfort infect him but finding it impossible not to mirror her tension.

They settled on the only food in the fridge, Tortillas, salsa and Modelo.

They ate in silence at first, but not the hostile kind; it was an uneasy truce, a rare space where neither had to perform. Penta’s presence was solid but not overbearing, and after a few minutes, Alexandra let herself settle into it. She washed down a mouthful of salsa with a pull from the bottle, the cold fizz scraping her throat, momentarily clearing the static that had been building all day.

Penta watched her for a long moment, he tried to memorize her posture, the way she hunched slightly over the island as if preparing for a blow, the set of her mouth warring between stoicism and the faintest curl of defiance. He realized how little he actually knew about her; not the stories Santos had relayed or the rumors that orbited her name, but the actual substance of her, the person now picking at the seam of a tortilla as if it held the secret to her own undoing.

He wanted desperately to pull apart the layers, to know what dreams she smuggled through her days, what memories she replayed when the world went quiet, what she truly feared beyond the ordinary threats of violence and abandonment. He saw, in the set of her shoulders, a person constantly bracing for impact, and he wondered what kind of childhood could shape someone into believing silence was safer than speech.

He found himself rehearsing a dozen ways to open the conversation, each more awkward than the last, each betraying too much interest or, worse, not enough. Should he make a joke, bring up something trivial, feign indifference until she volunteered something herself? But the clockwork of her manner told him she was an expert at deflection, a master of keeping things transactional, polite, untouched by sincerity. If he was going to get anything genuine, he’d have to risk the direct approach.

So he met her eyes, steadying himself for whatever fallout might come, and let the moment hang until she was forced to acknowledge it. “Tell me about you.”

Alexandra paused, tortilla halfway to her mouth, and Penta saw the brief flash of calculation in her eyes. He knew she was measuring his motives, weighing the odds that this was a trap, a way of gathering leverage or ammunition. For a heartbeat, he wondered if she would lie, offer up a carefully curated anecdote or some offhanded self-deprecation to deflect his curiosity.

But then she set the tortilla down, wiped her hands on her jeans, and looked back at him with a clarity that startled him. “What do you wanna know?” she asked, voice low but steady, testing, as if she were giving him the chance to change his mind, to ask something safer.

“Anything,” he replied, his voice steady as he took a swig from his own bottle, the cap popping off with a snap that punctuated the silence lingering in the room. “Just… something real.”

A challenge hung between them. She could feel it tightening the air, and for a moment, she considered retreating, throwing out something trivial, something that wouldn’t matter. But as she opened her mouth, the words rushed out before she could regain control. “You don’t really care do you?”

Penta didn’t flinch, didn’t avert his gaze or duck behind irony. “I do,” he replied, and in the hush that followed, Alexandra felt the words hum in her chest, more vibration than sound. For a second, she wondered if he even knew what he wanted, or if he’d only learned to say the right things, to sit with a woman and meet her stare and claim to care in a voice so calm it might almost be true.

She decided to test the theory, pushing the tortilla aside and leaning in, elbows planted on the kitchen island. Her smile came from somewhere practiced, a relic of a thousand encounters and negotiations, but behind it there was a challenge that was anything but casual. “I’ve met a lot of men like you, you know,” she said, voice syrupy with a mock intimacy. “All of them think they’re different, but you can spot the pattern if you look hard enough. The cocky ones, the good-looking ones, the ones who think they’re doing you a favor just by showing up.” She let the words settle, watching his reaction with an anthropologist’s detachment.

Penta grinned, but it faltered at the edges, as if he felt the ground shifting beneath his feet. “What’s the pattern?” he asked, and Alexandra could tell he already knew the answer, he just wanted to see if she’d say it.

She did. She always did. “They all want one thing,” she said, and waited, drawing the moment out, the tension coiling tighter around them. She took a long pull from her beer, then set it down with a soft thunk.

He hesitated, and she almost respected him more for not jumping to fill the silence. “What do they want?” he asked, keeping his voice even, almost gentle, as if a softer delivery would somehow make the words less sharp.

“A warm body.”

Alexandra’s words pricked at him, awakening that instinct he had long kept muted, the one that told him to be wary of beautiful women who played games without rules. He could see it now in her posture, every inch of her radiating a mix of challenge and vulnerability that set off alarm bells in his mind. She was testing him, and he hadn’t yet decided whether to rise to the bait or keep his distance.

“Really?” He feigned nonchalance, but his tone carried a trace of the tension that coiled beneath the surface. He leaned against the edge of the kitchen island, arms crossed, trying to project calm while the loud thud of uncertainty echoed in his mind. “You think I’m here for that?”

“That’s what men like you do,” she said, not flinching, not looking away, as if the words themselves were a shield she’d learned to hold up against everything that came her way. Alexandra’s tone was matter-of-fact, a kind of fatalistic shrug wrapped in syllables, and she sat back with the air of someone who had long ago taken stock of the world and found it wanting. “It’s never about the rest of it. The body comes first. It’s in the way you look at me, the way you talk, the way you even asked that question just now, like you’re waiting to see if I’ll give it up or tell you to fuck off. And then, once you’ve had what you wanted, you’ll act like you’re surprised there’s anything else underneath.” She laughed at that, dark and almost fond, as if recalling a private joke at the world’s expense. “You’ll say you’re different, but the pattern always repeats. You want to skip the part where I waste your time pretending I don’t notice?"

Her words hung in the air, heavy, almost tactile. Penta felt himself flush, not from shame but from the uncanny accuracy with which she’d mapped out the territory between them. He wondered how many versions of himself she’d met before, how many had tried to slip around her defenses with gentle hands and careful questions. He opened his mouth to answer, but Alexandra beat him to it, her momentum unbroken.

“It’s not personal,” she continued, “at least not at first. It’s just… survival. You learn how to spot the patterns early on, or you get eaten.” She tapped the scar on her jaw, the one she’d gotten in the wreck, and grinned. “I got good at seeing people coming before they even know what they want.”

There was something almost beautiful about the clarity with which she dissected her life, though the beauty was the kind that left a bruise when you touched it. He tried to find the flaw in her logic, the crack that would let him wedge in something softer, but he realized there wasn’t one. Not really.

“So why let me in at all?” he asked, quieter than before. “If you already know how this ends?”

Alexandra shrugged, her eyes never leaving his. “Becasue I want someone to prove me wrong.”

Penta hesitated, watching the way Alexandra’s face shifted when she drew her boundaries so effortlessly, as if she’d practiced it in front of a mirror. He tried to decode the composition of her pain; was it just the collected grievances of a dozen men who’d flattered and failed her, or was there something deeper, an origin myth that explained how she’d become so adept at playing defense? He couldn’t help but think of the stories he’d heard about the infamous Tama Tonga, the way his name always hovered around her like secondhand smoke, and he wondered if Alexandra even realized how much of her posture was still shaped by someone else’s hands.

He traced the outline of his beer label with his thumb, buying time, and said, “I’m sorry he hurt you.” The words came out soft, not as a jab but as an admission, an offering of sympathy. He saw her flinch, just barely, and knew he’d landed closer to some core than either of them wanted to acknowledge.

She looked at him, eyes narrowing, the muscle in her jaw tensing as if she were bracing for an insult. “If there’s anything wrong with me, I got there all by myself.” But then she laughed, sharp but not unkind, and Penta recognized the sound of someone daring the world to contradict them.

He leaned in, elbows on the table, and didn’t look away. “You don’t have to prove anything here.” The words surprised even him, but he meant them. He realized he didn’t want to win the argument or crack her open, he just wanted to see what happened if neither of them blinked first.

Alexandra stared at him for a long time, and Penta could see her sifting through possible responses, the practiced lines and the rehearsed indifference. In the end, all she did was sigh, a sound that was more confession than surrender. “You know what the worst part is?” she said, her voice low. “It’s not that he lied, or even hurt me. It’s that I let it keep happening. I thought if I could just be tougher, or smarter, or whatever, I could win.” She shook her head, a tiny movement. “But you can’t win a game when you don’t know the rules.”

She licked the salt from her thumb, and for a moment the air between them felt lighter, like she’d given herself permission to stop fighting. Penta nodded, unsure if he was meant to say something or just let her have the silence.

She did. “I used to think if I loved someone enough, it would fix everything.” Her laugh had a shape now, something like relief. “It took me a while to figure out that some people are just born broken.”

Penta recognized the line, more or less, but the way she said it made him think she finally believed it. He wanted to ask if she ever saw herself as one of those people, but he let it go. Instead, he raised his bottle in her direction, a muted toast. “To surviving.”

Alexandra clinked her bottle against his. “To not repeating the same mistakes twice.”

To be continued...

*I packed a lot into this first chapter... sorry! Let me know what you think. I appreciate any and all comments and shares. 💗