Just Another Liar

Chapter 19: Deandre

I stared as he slept in Aurelio's arms peacefully. He looked as innocent as a baby when he slept. Like nothing bad could ever happen, like he was impervious to harm.

In that state it was hard to see the monster I wanted him to be. The monster my brain refused to mold him into.

Was he even the monster, or was he the monster hunter?

Aurelio had killed with his bare hands and would go about his day as if he had not ended a life moments earlier. I could do the same without a second thought, I could do worse. I enjoyed killing those agents. I made some of their ends as gruesome as I could.

Some would have to have closed coffins.

I wished I had not become attached. He was great at his job, able to have me up thinking about him at three in the morning. Actors who had honed their craft for decades couldn't do what he had done in a few months. I would still kill for him.

How must it have felt to risk his life going undercover? He knew what we were capable of, the bodies of suspected snitches we had piled up with little more than rumors of them being snitches. The man before I met him would have killed him and made a show out of it to send a message.

The fear he must have felt when he first met Aurelio. He had told me how they had met in a bar. It was easy to find out that Aurelio was a functioning alcoholic. I had known he would be one from the first time I had seen him drink—the look of euphoria that bloomed on his face was something out of a cartoon — it would have been easy enough information to gather about him.

Invading our secret circle had been too easy. The more secure an organization is, the easier it is to stroll into the front door. A common phrase my father had taught me. His rule of the cartel had been less organized, but it had lasted. Under me it crumbled. I had gotten the people under me captured, killed, or forced into hiding. We had to hide in a motel room, scared to show our faces since it would cause us to have to run.

This was not the life I had curated for myself. This was my fault for making it easy to take us down. For refusing to take the red flags Milo had flown because I found him interesting, because of how it felt to have him and Aurelio around.

Aurelio's most recent burner phone buzzed on the table and I reached for it before it could wake the two up. We left it unlocked, so I swiped it open and looked at the notifications. Aurelio had put an alert on for when our names showed up in the media and there they were in a big Times New Roman font.

Spotted: Disgraced FBI agent Milo Eaton, in Northern South Dakota with leaders in the Río Dorado cartel, Aurelio Hernandez and Deandre Ortiz.

I wiped any chance of remaining in silence away when I read the words. Getting out of bed as quickly as my body was capable, I turned the lights on, waking Aurelio immediately. He had been in danger enough times to never sleep heavily. Milo was awake within a few seconds, unlike us he had learned to respond at a moment's notice to flee instead of taking the life of the person who dared to stir him. So when he woke, he shrunk in on himself instead of springing to his feet.

"What's going on," Aurelio asked in Spanish. He was not fully awake but making his way to a state of alertness.

"They know where we are, they published something in the news. They probably don't know our exact location, but we can't stay here any longer. We need to get out of this country," I replied in English. Milo got out of bed, tiptoeing around me before he began throwing everything we had to our name in a single duffle bag.

Quickly we exited the room, making sure that we left nothing that could lead back to us behind. The car we had stolen would get us to the forest near the border, but we would have to ditch the car and walk when we were within five miles of the tail.