Chapter Text
[. . .]
"Amada mia."
[. . .]
Chapter 1
El Chico del Caballo Rojo
[. . .]
You're sixteen, handwashing clothes underneath the skin-peeling heat of the sun in the fields of your Master's home, when you meet the boy who'll change your life forever.
Your hands are scrubbed raw, flesh scoured a gnawing, corroding red, lathered in a fatty soap so thin that it'll break any day now. It gathers in your palms in a white, waxy, bubble-like substance that hardly fights against the heavy stains imprinted on the rough fabric you've been washing harshly against stone. Sweat and grime gather in your pores in due of a wash, your white, mandatory dress assigned by the head of the household sullied by the mud beneath your aching knees. You use your water and soap carefully, protectively honing them close because you don't know when the Don will provide you and the other working girls another bountiful dispensation.
Asking for more material is out of the question.
That man is as vicious as they come. You know this from experience, after being forced to watch your mother at a young age be used in ways that still peel your eyes and bleed your womb in front of an audience of many women who work for the family home. It's only because he has plenty of girls working for him to bother that he hasn't come to you yet. It's any day now, though, and you have no idea what you'll do when the dreaded day comes. Your mother was a lesson. You may one day come to be one, as well.
He has a particular fetishization of your mother's people. Those other than the societal beauty standards of fair skin, golden-threaded hair, and eyes the color of the aether. You aren't sure whether to think yourself fortunate to partially carry your mother's face, or saddened that the abuser is the master himself, a man you see in the mirror every day.
You do not like the way you look. Everywhere you go, you are considered wrong. A mistake. An abomination. You are the horror and the victim. You are the privileged and the disgraced. You are nothing at all.
Not even your mother wanted you.
But at the end of the day, she had given birth to her agony, her trauma, and now you exist, forever taunting her. A fault that must be yours, that is yours, because now she is gone, and you are here alone, without the heat of hate to give you comfort anymore.
You've already accepted that this is your fate. Growing in this place—where women are bred with hatred if they don't work, where women are lacerated and riven, where there is no escape from the abuse marring you so deeply it transcends skin to the delitescent of the soul—it has made you thick with silence. It is not cowardice. It is not fear. But it is a strategy that you keep to yourself, because speaking will mean you have individuality, because speaking means you have strength, because strength to them means something to break.
You do not belong anywhere. You are admired by women who think they are ugly when they are not. You are hated by women who think they deserve your face, when all you ever wanted to do was rip it off. You are a product of selfishness that they say they understand but don't, because at the end of the day, they are all victims.
Is it not fair, you think, to be hurt by them, too?
Since being separated from your mother a year ago, your emotions have been null. Nothing is going for you here except the constant work. For if you do not work, you don't forget. And if you don't work, then there is something worse waiting for you than death.
Until today, that is.
Sounds of loud claps, similar to gunshots, announce themselves in a ricocheting echo from the Don's mystic white home. The usual, pressing atmosphere becomes asphyxiating in under a second.
You and several other girls, varying from age—some older, some younger than you—all tense.
"You don't think...?" Yakatzi whispers fervently immediately, the local gossip of the group that is quick to peer around the sashaying whites hanging to dry, brown eyes wide with both fear and unwavering curiosity. She is younger than you by a year, and her mother loves her dearly. A mother who goes by the name of Yatziri, the same woman who had gallivanted about being jealous that your mother had the luxury of sleeping with the Don and creating something as magnificent as you.
Pamela, a girl older than you by two years, pulls Yakatzi and several others, including yourself, back into the mocking safety of the blankets. As if the cotton fibers will be enough to hide your shadows from bullets and fists. "We do not engage," She whispers, low and stern. "The master gets like this when drunk. With any hope, he will not come for us."
A morbid comment. It doesn't make you feel much, seeing as you're used to hearing things from her that sound off. Nonetheless, you question whether the queasy sensation in your stomach at the thought of others taking your place will ever go away.
"We will be lucky if Carmen will be of the blessed few," Says Grabiella, who is a nasty, nasty girl for being so young. She turns twelve this year. Had her older sister been alive, she would've turned seventeen and not so nasty. Not so hateful.
She is suddenly disciplined by the oldest, a girl who is twenty years old. Alba, whom you had once seen on her knees, much as your mother had been, with blood on her skirts and tears in her mouth. "Stupid, horrible little girl. You don't say those things." She hits her again, harder, a slap, and you watch unflinchingly as the little girl clutches at the darkened spot of injury, gathering tears in her eyes with a reared head.
More girls murmur. Some you know the name of, some you don't. They talk and talk, and you are forgotten with soap in your hands and dirt at your knees.
Chaos hits so unsuspectingly, a moment later.
Gunshots return. There is audible yelling coming from inside the home, and the girls talk more, trying to hide. But hide where? Where in this land is there nothing but the harsh sands and fences keeping wombs enclosed like cattle? There is no structure. No safety. Just duty.
The blankets do nothing. And soon, their pristine, innocent whites are spattered with the violence of red.
Grabiella is shot in the head.
Her skinny, prone body hits the floor with urine and human excrement just as screams erupt from Alba, who loved her like a sister, who is shot not a moment later through the side of her neck, gurgling her name, writing itself with blood. She drops to her knees in front of the listless eyes of Gabriella, whose brain matter is squelched by the dirty boots of running men who toss and shoot carelessly at an unknown attacker.
Girls you know are hit. Girls you don't know are hit. There is agony in the air as Pamela shoves past, grabbing you and the others she can with a rough grip that bruises you so badly it wakes you. There are screams of women hurt again, and the terrorized silence of corpses hitting the floor. Shock permeates, drenching your soapy hands with guts when Pamela is eventually shot through the stomach by an enraged man, the bullet just barely nicking your thumb through the thin waist.
There are men everywhere. Dead men, too. They wear clothes known to you, guests of whom the Don had been entertaining. Yakatzi, who is throwing up and on the floor, covered in Pamela's corpse just as much as you are, had told you they returned for more girls to sell. Daughters to give. And that you were going to be one of them.
You tug Pamela to the side, numb, ignoring her open mouth and bulging eyes. You pull a crying, bleeding, hyperventilating Yakatzi to you once you free yourself, dragging her hysterical body toward the safety of blankets that still sway despite the ash of gunpowder and the stench of iron. You place her behind bloody basins.
She begs. This is not the first time.
She begs so much, and she is so loud, and you wonder how to make her quiet. Because if you're not quiet, you will be next.
You look down. Your hands shake. Your soapy fingers are not soapy anymore. Your dress has more to cling to, other than dirt now.
Yakatzi is breathing too fast.
You place a calloused hand to her chest in a pitiful attempt at comfort.
There is a hole.
A puddle is forming beneath you. A shuddering, real introspection courses through you.
I thought. I thought I had you, at least.
But you don't. And just like Gabriella, just like Alba, just like Pamela, she is next.
"Don' wanna die, don' wanna die, don' wanna die," Yakatzi repeats, breathless and choking and dying. Her hands reach to you and call you mama, because you suppose you are a woman, at the end of the day.
And soon she says nothing at all.
You are sixteen.
She was fifteen.
You hold her for a long time, sitting there, waiting for mercy. The screaming continues. Glass breaks. Wood cracks. Horses come to life, hooves splintering past the mess of bodies lying for the dirt to eat and the sun to nurture. And soon, just as Yakatzi, there is silence.
Except.
For one.
A trot follows in the aftermath. A large, brown horse, with beautiful, elegant stripes across the fur of its widened hooves, stops just in front of you. A voice, distinctly male, just shy of puberty, speaks directly to you in a language you don't understand well.
You look up with blood in your hands and women at your knees.
A boy with glaucous eyes and a freckled sneer looks down at you, pointing a shining, copper gun, of which he doesn't seem particularly inclined to using, by how quickly you notice his eyes soften when yours lock together. He is dressed messily, strewn with a cerulean button-up and dark jeans that tuck neatly inside his frazzled boots falling apart at the seams. A black cowboy hat rests on top of his pretty, brown hair, shining gold in the sun.
He says something confident. "—comin’ with me?" It is a question. The last bit of it is something you understand. The Don said it much harsher than he does, though.
Your heart beats.
His eyes are kind, somehow.
You stand on shaking legs. You wobble.
His gun is no longer a gun but a hand reaching out to you.
You don't look at Yakatzi. Nor at Pamela. Or Gabriella, or Alba.
Your heart aches something grand. Fear fuels your actions, unable to see just what you are left with. For what else you are doomed to survive.
You take the hand and never look back.
You are sixteen when you meet Arthur Morgan, the boy who will change your life forever.