Chapter 3 - The Fortress of Stone and Salt
Forty minutes later, Saint Juniper was empty of diners, filled only with the quiet hum of refrigeration units and the silent, armed presence of Garza’s men.
Ava sat at table seven. The white linen tablecloth had been cleared except for Lily’s scattered crayons and the discarded rabbit. Lily sat in Roman’s lap now, her face buried against his chest, her thumb jammed into her mouth as she stared at Ava with heavy, exhausted eyes. She had finally stopped crying, but she refused to let go of Roman’s dark shirt, and every time Ava tried to move toward the exit, the little girl whimpered.
Roman sat across from her, perfectly still, his elbows resting on the table.
“Explain it to me,” Roman said.
“I already told you!” Ava’s voice shook with a desperate anger. She had tried to explain three times already, her throat raw with fear. “I work here. I started nineteen days ago. I live with my father in a two-bedroom on Zarzamora Street. I don't know you, I don't know your daughter, and I’ve never stepped foot on your ranch in my life!”
“People from Zarzamora Street don't look like you when they hear a flatline monitor in their heads,” Roman said softly.
Ava froze. The blood drained from her face.
“What?”
“I watched your eyes when you walked up to this table,” Roman said, his slate-gray gaze piercing straight through her defenses. “You didn't just freeze because you recognized my name. You froze because something inside you broke the moment Lily looked at you. You heard a monitor. You heard a hospital room. Don't lie to me, Ava. I’ve spent twenty years reading every lie told in the state of Texas. I know when someone is hiding a ghost.”
Ava’s chest heaved. Tears spilled over her lower lashes, hot and angry.
“You don't know anything about my ghosts,” she choked out.
“Try me,” he replied.
The weight of the room was suffocating. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Texas night was pitch black, whipped by a rising wind that rattled the glass.
“Six years ago,” Ava whispered, the words dragging out of her like rusted nails, “I was nineteen. I got pregnant. I was working at a diner in Austin. The father... he cleared out the second he found out. I had no money, no insurance, nothing. I went into early labor at twenty-seven weeks.”
Roman didn't blink. He listened with the terrible patience of a predator waiting out a storm.
“They rushed me to a county hospital,” Ava continued, her voice trembling so hard she could barely form the syllables. “The nurses were rushed, the machines were old. I woke up twelve hours later in a recovery room that smelled like bleach and copper. A doctor with tired eyes stood at the end of my bed. He told me the baby was too small, too fragile. He told me she didn't make it.”
“Did you see her?” Roman asked.
“No,” Ava wept, pressing her palms against her eyes. “They said it was too dangerous, too traumatic. They handed me a death certificate three days later and a bill for services I couldn't pay. I buried an empty casket in a municipal graveyard on the east side of San Antonio. I lived with that hell every single day of my life. So don't tell me about ghosts, Mr. Garza. I built a house out of mine.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
Lily shifted in Roman’s lap, whimpering softly, her little hand reaching out to touch Roman’s sleeve.
Roman stared at Ava. The hard, untouchable armor of South Texas’s most feared man seemed to crack, exposing something jagged, raw, and bleeding beneath.
Slowly, deliberately, Roman reached up with his left hand.
He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dark shirt, pulled the collar aside, and shifted his shoulder toward the amber restaurant light.
“Look at this,” Roman whispered.
Ava blinked through her tears and looked.
Spanning across his broad, muscular right shoulder and disappearing beneath his collar was a thick, jagged, silvery-white scar. It looked like the track of a massive burn or a horrific knife wound—not a clean surgical line, but a jagged tear from a weapon used in a desperate, close-quarters struggle.
“Do you know what this is?” Roman asked, his voice shaking slightly.
“No,” Ava breathed.
“Six years ago,” Roman said, his eyes darkening into pools of lead, “my wife died giving birth to our daughter in a private clinic in Austin. Except... the doctor who delivered her vanished that same night. The clinic caught fire twenty minutes after I arrived. Someone tried to burn the records, burn the child, burn everything.”
Ava’s breath caught in her throat.
“I pulled Lily out of that nursery with my bare hands,” Roman continued, his voice dropping to a harsh, haunted rasp. “I took shrapnel from an explosion in the hallway. That’s where I got this scar. And when the state investigators finally sorted through the ashes three weeks later... they told me my wife had twins. A boy and a girl. But only one body was recovered from the nursery fire.”
The room spun. The floor seemed to drop away beneath Ava’s feet.
“What... what are you saying?” Ava whispered, her voice barely a breath.
May you like
Roman stood up, carefully setting Lily in the high chair, and walked around the table until he was standing right in front of her.
“I’m saying,” Roman said, his slate-gray eyes swimming with tears he refused to let fall, “that someone stole a baby from that hospital in Austin six years ago. And someone stole a baby from a county ward in San Antonio the exact same week.”
