The lot greets her with the usual oil freckles and gum constellations. She noses the bike into her slot by the busted bollard, kills the engine, listens to the heat tick down inside the casing like a polite countdown.
The building's front glass throws her back at herself: a thinner version, a little out of focus, helmet under one arm, jacket half-zipped like a compromise.
She pats her pockets halfway to the door—back pocket, jacket pocket, inside breast.
No key.
The realization arrives all at once, a cold coin dropped down the spine. She checks anyway, then again, as if repetition can conjure metal.
— "Fuck."
The lobby smells like old mop and someone else's cologne trying to be brave.
The elevator dings, doors parting with a sigh.
Stainless walls repeat her into infinity, each version a little more tired and a little more honest.
She jabs her floor, leans her head back against the panel, feels the hum climb through the cable into her teeth.
Phone out.
Thread open.
Thumb moving.
[ "Open up." ]
[ "I forgot my key." ]
The reply arrives in a tumble—drunk text at an angle, letters like loose screws.
[ "luccccciiiiaaaa" ]
[ "im home dont yell" ]
[ "door keeps moving 😵💫" ]
[ "i lay down just 4 a sec" ]
[ "my stomach hates me" ]
[ "water tastes like pain" ]
[ "ur mad?" ]
[ "Not mad." ]
[ "Just open the door." ]
[ "mmmmm" ]
[ "ok" ]
[ "gimmie 5" ]
[ "or 10" ]
[ "or forever lol" ]
[ "jk jk" ]
The elevator dings again, doors part to their familiar hallway—carpet with a permanent damp, paint that gave up halfway through forgiving its previous color.
She walks the length by muscle memory, past the buzzer that never works, past the fire hose cabinet with the hairline crack.
Their door waits with its peeled number and stubborn deadbolt.
She pockets the phone and leans into the wall beside the frame, shoulder to cinder block, helmet hanging from two fingers.
The building makes its small noises—the pipe that knocks, the vent that coughs, someone's TV laughing at a show without a laugh track.
Her eyes blur, refocus on the brass of the knob as if it might twitch under observation.
The phone vibrates in her palm.
[ "cominggggg" ]
[ "hold on" ]
[ "world spins" ]
[ "ur my fav" ]
[ "dont leave" ]
She doesn't.
She closes her eyes and lets the hallway hum carry her a few inches off the ground, then set her down again.
The deadbolt stays quiet.
The fan down the corridor kicks on, pushes a tired thread of cool across her knuckles, fades.
She waits, head tipped back to the wall, counting breaths and the seconds between them, listening for Sofia's feet on the other side.
The chain drags, the deadbolt grudges, and then the door yawns.
Sofia fills the frame like a storm that forgot where it was going—makeup smudged into war paint, breath hot with cheap sugar and worse decisions, eyes wet and bright.
She sees Lucia and folds forward, gravity claiming her in one easy motion.
Her forehead finds Lucia's collarbone with the accuracy of habit.
Pain lights up under the stitch like a struck match.
Lucia's teeth find her own lip and hold there until the taste of copper says enough.
Sofia doesn't notice.
She never does when the room is spinning and Lucia is the only unmoving thing.
— "You're here," Sofia sighs, voice slipping on its own consonants.
— "I was… the door… it was doing, like, gymnastics. Did you see it? Don't leave."
— "I'm here."
She slides an arm under Sofia's, shoulders the rest, and nudges the door shut with her heel.
The apartment sighs in its sleep—fan sawing, fridge murmuring, a dish somewhere deciding to rattle and then thinking better of it.
Sofia's weight is all sloppy trust. Lucia takes it, walks it to the bed that thinks it's a raft, and lowers her sister into the soft.
— "We went to—" Sofia begins, then loses the noun and replaces it with a gesture.
— "And Nico said—ugh, never mind Nico. I hate him. He's funny. You'd like him. Don't like him. He's… whatever. I'm hungry. No I'm not."
— "Okay."
Lucia sits on the mattress without taking off her boots.
The springs remember her shape; the day tries to climb off her shoulders and fails.
Sofia rolls closer like an incoming tide and clamps onto Lucia's shin, cheek pressed to denim, arms threading around her calf like she's hugging a life preserver. Then she shifts, slow as a cat, and pillows her head in Lucia's lap.
— "You smell like… sky," Sofia mumbles, already falling through the floor of her own voice.
— "Don't go to work. Stay."
The collar of Lucia's jacket hides the new seam at her shoulder; Still human breathes under the cotton.
She looks down at the crown of Sofia's head, hair smelling of salt and someone else's perfume, and for a second the noise of the day drains out through a crack she didn't know was there.
She lifts a hand—rings cool against her palm—and sets it gently on Sofia's hair.
She smooths it back from the temple, slow, careful, the way you pet a frightened animal until it remembers a simpler world.
She keeps stroking, the motion small and steady, as if she can comb the night out strand by strand.
She sits there, boots on the comforter like a crime she's too tired to hide, and lets the room breathe around them.
Sofia's weight anchors her to the bed in a way gravity never quite manages.
The fan saws the air into patient slices. Outside, a siren changes its mind and fades.
In the quiet, a movie starts up behind Lucia's eyes—one of those cheap alternate-timeline reels you play when the body's too used up to argue.
In it, she finishes school with a robe that fits and a future that has shape.
In it, she circles courses in a college catalog with a highlighter that doesn't run dry: anatomy, pharmacology, animal behavior.
A vet clinic smells like antiseptic and wooly, living warmth.
She comes home to her dad, Rafael alive on the couch, yelling at a game and pretending not to care about the score.
Camila, her mom is in the kitchen, hair tied up, flour on her wrist, oven door wincing open to a casserole that has no idea it's supposed to save anyone.
Sofia barges in, breathless, squaring up to their mother over a boy with a scooter and a smile that will wilt under the first real summer.
The house holds all that noise without dropping any.
The reel burns out. The room returns.
Instead, there is this: a dead man whose absence learned new tricks.
A mother who calls like a storm that refuses to move on.
A sister who loves you the way a drowning person loves the hand that keeps showing up—desperate, grabbing, sometimes biting.
A girl on a bed who only gets to be a girl when no one's looking. A ledger with too many columns and a hole where the answers should go.
Lucia's face doesn't break because if it breaks, something else has to hold.
The mask stays on because someone has to look like a wall when the house is all doorways.
Cold and unfeeling reads as reliable.
Soggy and true reads as lazy.
She knows which version keeps the lights on.
She keeps stroking Sofia's hair, slow and even, detangling the night one loop at a time. The crown of Sofia's head is warm against her thigh; the rings on Lucia's fingers make a small, accidental comb.
The phone lights up in her hand—white rectangle carved out of the dim. A banner slides into place with the dispassion of a verdict. MOM.
Sofia's breath warms the denim at Lucia's thigh, steady now, finally shallow. The fan keeps time.
Lucia thumbs the notification open and the thread blooms up—a long corridor of old asks and older apologies.
She scrolls to the bottom. New messages are stacked like unpaid bills.
[ "I need $1200." ]
[ "Today." ]
Lucia stares.
Last time had been seven hundred. It hadn't been enough to make silence.
[ "Why do you need that much." ]
A pause, then the tap-dance of dots. The replies come fast—angled, mean, familiar.
[ "Don't start with me." ]
[ "It's not your place to question me." ]
[ "I said I need it." ]
Lucia's jaw clenches. Her thumb hovers. Another volley arrives, sharper.
[ "You think you're better than me now?" ]
[ "You mop floors and flip burgers and suddenly you're a banker?" ]
[ "Ungrateful little girl. I fed you. I kept you alive when your junkie father left us." ]
[ "You can't even keep a classroom. Dropped out and think you get to judge me?" ]
She swallows. The wound under her collarbone warms at the edge, a small red mouth biting down. Camila keeps going.
[ "What do you even do at night, Lucia? Come home with bruises and dirty money and expect me to clap?" ]
[ "Whore yourself to those jobs and won't give a dime to your mother?" ]
[ "God is my witness, I didn't raise you to be this cold." ]
[ "I need the money. Don't make me ask again." ]
Lucia types slowly.
[ "You asked for $700 last time. Why $1200 now." ]
The answer dodges on instinct.
[ "Because I said so." ]
[ "Because I'm your mother." ]
[ "Because you owe me for eighteen years of my life." ]
[ "Because I carried you and this is how you repay me?" ]
[ "You play strong but you're still that scared little girl who couldn't finish anything." ]
[ "Sofia will end up just like you. Is that what you want?" ]
[ "Send it. Stop making me beg." ]
Each line slides in like a blade she recognizes the weight of. You mop floors. Dropped out. Dirty money. Whore. Scared little girl. They stack on her chest until breathing becomes math.
She looks down at Sofia, asleep and small and heavy on her lap, clinging like gravity chose her.
Lucia lifts her free hand and keeps stroking hair; the other hand types what she knows will quiet the noise, at least for tonight.
[ "I'll send it tomorrow." ]
Three dots flare and vanish. Then a last message, neat and cruelly simple.
[ "Good. Don't be late." ]
Lucia turns the screen off.
The room goes back to dim.
She pockets the phone, feels its rectangle settle against the small ache above her heart, and exhales slowly through her nose, as if she might not disturb the sleeping world that needs her to be unbreakable.
She keeps her hand moving over Sofia's hair, steady as a metronome.
The room is a low hum of appliances and sleep when the phone vibrates—one long pulse that finds her spine and learns it.
Lucia's eyes slit open.
For a heartbeat she mistakes it for Sofia's breathing moving through her, for the old building's sigh.
Then it insists again, a second buzz, cleaner, like a tuning fork held to bone.
She slips the phone out with two fingers, careful not to jostle the crown of Sofia's head pillowed on her lap.
The screen blooms her face in miniature; the caller ID isn't an ID at all—just a number that changes every time, a geometry of digits that never memorizes her back.
She doesn't clear her throat.
She doesn't breathe differently.
She draws the line across the glass.
The voice is a machine taught politeness and nothing else. Flat. Genderless. A hospital hallway without doors.
— "Location."
— "Neptune Sauna & Spa. Sunny Isles Beach. Employee entrance. Twenty-three hundred."
A map unfolds in her head without pictures—just corridors and thresholds and the feel of wet tile under cheap sandals that don't belong to her.
The air tastes like eucalyptus and old secrets.
Sunny Isles.
Little Moscow.
She could draw the skyline blind.
— "Target description."
— "Male. Fiftys. Shaved scalp. Gold canine. Right hand: bear tattoo holding Orthodox cross. Linen jacket. Two companions. No wedding band. Answers to 'Mitya.'"
The bear crawls up the inside of her eyes and sits there, breathing.
Gold flashes when a mouth opens to laugh at the wrong thing.
— "Payout."
— "Fourteen thousand. Seventy-two hours. Standard routing. Bonus for discretion."
The numbers arrive like rain on a tin roof—impersonal, exact, inevitable.
Fourteen.
Mom's twelve folds into it, shoes into the corner, rent into the seam, a little left over to pretend tomorrow is a continent and not an island.
She says nothing.
Silence is the signature; silence is consent.
The line clicks, just once, like a lock that approves.
Sofia murmurs, a soft vowel that used to mean Lucia's name when she was small and unafraid of needing things.
Lucia slides her palm from hair to temple, soothes the ripple away, then lifts gently. The weight of her sister's head leaves her lap with a warm reluctance.
She lowers it onto the pillow, tucks the thin blanket up to the hollow of a throat that breathes without asking permission.
Sofia's fingers find Lucia's sleeve, fail to hold, fall back into a small fist.
The apartment watches. She stands, joints popping like tiny door latches, and crosses to the dresser without letting the room learn about the decision.
The gray pouch knocks her ribs when she moves; her jacket's zipper teeth whisper; the fan paces the air and loses count.
The bathroom's light is a bruise.
She flips the switch and it stutters into certainty.
Tile remembers older tenants, older failures; the plastic curtain clings to itself like it's afraid of what it saw last. The mirror is the same liar as always—mercury freckles, warped at the edges, good enough for the truth that matters.
She closes the door halfway, leaves the space for sound to move through. Water runs cold into the sink, then colder. She cups it, lets it make a hard halo in her palms, presses it to her face until the skin protests and the sleep scurries.
The coat hanger on the back of the door taps once in a draft she can't feel.
She lifts her head.
The mirror lifts it, too.
A girl looks back with night ground into the soft parts and iron welded across what still bends. The stitch at her collarbone is a quiet seam.
The dotted lines on her wrists vanish under shadow and then return. Still human crouches under cotton and a story she keeps telling.
Her eyes hold the room the way a hand holds a small animal—gentle enough not to break it, firm enough not to lose it.
She watches her own face arrange itself into the version that pays.
She doesn't practice the mask anymore; the mask knows its cues.
Behind her, the fan clicks in the other room. Ahead of her, a door she will open at twenty-three hundred in air that smells like eucalyptus and money.
She rests both hands on the porcelain until the sink hums a little with the weight, then releases it.
She looks at herself until the reflection blinks first.
The mirror throws her back in a harsh wash of fluorescent, and the room lists a few degrees to the left—sleep debt doing its slow sabotage.
She palms open the medicine cabinet.
It's a crowded graveyard of intentions: orange pharmacy bottles with polite labels (sertraline, lamotrigine, bupropion), blister cards with bitten corners (quetiapine, clonazepam), hydroxyzine like dull pearls; sutures in sterile foil, butterfly closures, antiseptic swabs, gauze folded into obedient squares; a scalpel sealed in paper like a confession; nitrile gloves that remember the shape of panic.
Behind a toothpaste box with a folded mouth, a small zip bag waits. Pressed tablets wink their flat, chalky smiles.
Methamphetamine.
The word doesn't feel dramatic anymore.
It feels clinical. Accurate the way a verb can be.
She doesn't think about it. Not in the way people mean when they say think.
The bag's weight transfers to her palm; bitter dust ghosts the creases of her fingers; a chemical aftertaste blooms at the back of her tongue as if her body recognizes the invoice before the shipment's signed.
She caps water, swallows on a practiced hinge.
It's not courage. It's arithmetic. It's the lie that keeps the ledger neat.
For a moment—nothing. Just the bathroom's cheap music: the fan's tired blade sawing air, the pipe behind the wall coughing, the bulb buzzing with a faint, insect wrongness.
Then the first wave skims in, thin as a razor in milk: a cool lift along the scalp, a lightness in the face, pupils slipping wider to drink the room.
A second pulse rolls after it, heavier, like something stepping into an empty house and hanging pictures in her head at speed.
The migraine that's been dragging its nails through her skull hesitates, blinks, and tears down the middle like paper. The hurt doesn't vanish; it's recategorized—background, then subtext, then a fine line in a large map.
Her heart ratchets up half a gear, then another—tachycardia with neat handwriting. The sympathetic switch flips: breath shallower but more available, skin prickling as capillaries pull tight; fingers go a fraction colder while her core warms; a slick of sweat beads along the lip of her hairline despite the cool tile.
The light's halo sharpens into hard rings. Edges get opinions.
The mirror's mercury freckles look like a pattern she could solve if she leaned in close enough.
Her jaw finds itself clenched; the masseter hums; tongue presses against molars as if to check the gate.
Bruxism—a word she knows, a habit she hates—sidles in like an old friend who owes money.
Sound opens.
She hears the fan blade graze its casing once every rotation, a nick she'd missed for weeks. Water in the P-trap sighs as the building settles.
Outside, a neighbor's TV favors the higher harmonics; she can tell it's a game show by the cadence of claps.
The refrigerator in the other room speaks in compressor vowels, low and even. Everything's louder without being noisy.
Her attention tightens and tunnels; the field of view narrows to the work of being awake.
Dopamine, norepinephrine—her brain writes the chemicals on a whiteboard and underlines them twice.
Motivation climbs up on the desk with its shoes on.
Focus arrives not like a hug but like a grip.
Perceived effort drops; possibility swells: she can sort the kit, scrub the sink grout, re-wrap the gauze, replace the cracked bulb, plan the route to Sunny Isles down to the lane changes, choose the corner of the employee entrance that the camera doesn't watch, find the bear tattoo in a crowded room.
She could clean the apartment with a toothbrush. She could pick the night itself apart with tweezer
Under the shine, the risks sketch themselves: BP rising in quiet increments; a hot prickle at the nape that says you're running hotter than you think; a tightness behind the sternum that isn't pain but knows its way around the word arrhythmia. The cocktail in her system—SSRI, bupropion, the benzo sediment still in her blood—doesn't cancel this out so much as complicate it.
Serotonin in the mix means a faint, electric edge—teeth of potential; bupropion's lowered seizure threshold whispers statistics she refuses to memorize. Anxiety paces the hall; confidence drags it back by the collar.
Paranoia peers through the mail slot, decides not to knock yet.
Her mouth dries to paper; saliva becomes a rumor.
She drinks and the water turns metallic, tinny, as if the pipes learned a new trick. Sweat breaks in small, honest beads along her sternum; the Still human tattoo feels like a label on a warm bottle.
Her fingertips tingle—paresthesia mapping her with invisible pins. Tremor? Not quite. Micro-vibration in the extensors, an invitation to fidget.
Compulsions line up: smooth the towels, check the lock, check it again; trace the mirror's chipped corner; peel the label; unpeel memory; wrap and rewrap.
She stands through the crest and decides to sit before the floor decides it for her.
She slides down the wall until the tile greets her spine with a cool, impartial kiss. Knees bend; boots plant; back of her head touches plaster that hums faintly with the building's old heart.
The bathroom's geometry becomes comforting—rectangle inside rectangle, the grout's grid, the predictable seam where wall meets floor.
Her pupils eat the room; her breath calibrates to something efficient and small. The dizziness she'd been dragging all day doesn't disappear; it recalibrates into a clarity edged enough to cut.
She sits there, anchored to the tile, the engine finally turning over inside her chest—revving toward the night, toward the eucalyptus air and the linen jacket and the bear's black paw—while the mirror watches from above, reflecting a girl who looks like she could stay awake forever and knows exactly what it will cost.
The floor steadies under her, tile cool against the backs of her calves.
She breathes once, twice, palms the sink to stand.
The bathroom light throws a hard white around her as if trying to see what she'll do next.
She wipes her hands on her thighs and reaches for the gray pouch—its zipper teeth glint like a smile that's learned better.
Bottles knock gently as she lifts it; she slides the little sleeve of pressed wakefulness in among the labeled weather—sertraline, lamotrigine, bupropion, the dull pearls of hydroxyzine—then closes the mouth on all of it.
The pouch sits right in her palm.
Practiced weight.
Practiced lies.
The apartment greets her with its same old orchestra: the fan sawing air, the refrigerator murmuring to whatever lives behind it, traffic laying a thin ribbon of noise along the window seam.
Sofia murmurs something that used to be the shape of Lucia's name and rolls onto her side, hair an unruly tide across the pillow.
Lucia tucks the blanket up without waking her, a half-inch of kindness performed because it costs nothing and pays more than it should.
Kitchen.
She pulls the drawer and it shrieks halfway—cheap runners, old grit—before surrendering.
Inside, the clutter has learned to arrange itself around one truth: a bulldog revolver, matte and heavy, the kind of object that makes a room feel like it knows a secret.
She doesn't check it; she doesn't need to.
She's carried it more than she's ever used it, a small insurance policy that mostly insures the idea that she might not have to be afraid.
The metal's cool through the glove; it goes into the jacket's inner pocket and disappears, turning into weight instead of shape.
She takes stock without looking like she is: phone; wallet thin as a confession; keys; the pouch; the ache under the stitch that isn't asking permission; the ring on her index finger that always clicks against the helmet buckle.
By the door, the bat leans in its usual corner like a tall, patient shadow.
Tape grips the handle in black spirals; the barbed wire kept in its own bad dreams for now.
She lifts the bat and it settles along her forearm as if it remembers the line of her bones. She hates that truth and accepts it anyway.
In the window, afternoon has already begun to rust at the edges, the color of a coin handled too long. Neptune Sauna & Spa. Employee entrance. Twenty-three hundred.
The message writes itself across her thoughts, clean and simple as a stencil.
Fourteen.
Seventy-two hours.
Discretion.
Her jaw ticks once.
The ledger in her head tries to balance and, for a rare moment, doesn't wobble.
She looks back toward the bed. Sofia has found the center again, limbs slack, face unarmed. Lucia's throat tightens in a quiet, practical way. She sets the bat tip to the floor, just long enough to lean and adjust the blanket that has already slipped from a shoulder.
— "Back soon," she whispers, and the room holds the words like a coin it promises not to spend.
Helmet. She hooks it by the strap from the chair back, visor catching a slice of light and throwing it across the wall.
She cracks the door slowly, the hinge objecting in its small, habitual whine. The hallway's cool air drifts in and fingers the sweat at her temples. She steps through, bat in one hand, pouch and phone a familiar press against her ribs, the revolver a quiet truth nested under the fabric.
She pulls the door shut behind her until the latch clicks, a soft, sealing sound that the building knows by heart.