***Marisol's POV***
The air pressed down on me, thick as a wet grave shroud. The scent of damp earth flooded my senses, clinging to the back of my throat like a forgotten sorrow. I was back in that place. The ghost of my childhood home. Its adobe walls now sagging like rotten fruit. The courtyard tiles cracked and sprouting blackened thorns that wept a viscous, amber resin—sticky and smelling faintly of decay.
The bougainvillea, my mother's pride, was a withered skeleton against the pale sky of the dream. Its papery flowers replaced by husks that rattled like dried scorpion tails in the wind.
Mamá's voice surfaced, soft as the petals she once nurtured: *"Marisol, beauty is defiance here. Remember that." Her hands, soil-caked and steady, cupped the blooms. 'They thrive when neglected,' she lied. A lesson in survival."*
Now, the thorns pierced my skin, mocking her memory.
A low, thrumming dread vibrated through me, a sound like a thousand wings shearing bone. A deep resonance that settled in my chest like a cold stone. It wasn't loud, but it filled the air with an echoing presence that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
I tried to move, but my feet had fused with the earth. Roots entangling my ankles like grasping skeletal fingers. Their tendrils squirmed with maggot-like urgency.
A cold fear seized me—the same terror that had curdled my blood when Dragon was three. A primal instinct to protect him, when I'd clutched his tiny body, so fragile against mine, and sprinted into the Colombian night.
Then I saw them.
*Mariposas negras. (Black butterflies.)*
They weren't beautiful, not like the azules and amarillas that fluttered around Dragon when he was a child—innocent specks of color in his small world. These were dark and menacing. Their wings like shards of obsidian, sharp and glinting.
They poured from the crumbling walls, an endless stream of blackness against the decaying adobe. Wings armored like beetle chitin, glinting with miniature skulls etched into the blackness.
No—not just skulls. Faces. His face.
Esteban's scarred jaw, the jagged line a permanent testament to violence. His hollow eyes replicated a thousand times on fluttering wings—as if a legion of his hateful gaze descended upon me.
"Look at them, Marisol," hissed the swarm, their voices a dry, rustling chorus merging into his singular, venomous tone. "Our son's eyes are still mine. Blue gaslight. Poisoned, now."
They swarmed me, a living darkness blotting out the sun. Their razor-sharp legs slicing my arms as they landed, leaving thin, stinging trails of blood on my skin.
The butterflies latched onto my wrists, their needle-sharp feet burrowing into pulse points. It wasn't pain, not exactly, but a deep, unsettling violation. Like tiny leeches sucking away my will.
I tried to shake them off, a desperate, futile gesture.
Their wings, surprisingly strong, trembled with a malevolent energy. The black butterflies multiplied. Their numbers grew until my wrists were completely covered by a writhing mass of black wings. They began to bind me, imprisoning me. I thrashed, a silent scream trapped in my throat, but their bodies fused into obsidian manacles, cold and unyielding.
A memory surged, unbidden and sharp: Dragon at three years old. His laughter like wind chimes as harmless yellow butterflies kissed his small, upturned palms. Esteban watching from the shadows, a silent, brooding presence. His new scar still raw, an angry red line glistening like a centipede sutured to his face—a permanent mark of the darkness within him.
The dream fractured, the edges blurring like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
Now I was back in the chapel. The air thick with the metallic tang of old blood and the cloying sweetness of incense. Dragon's three-year-old body tucked under my arm like a ragdoll, limp with terror.
Esteban's men circled, their rough leather boots crunching on shattered stained glass. Their beautiful images now reduced to jagged shards underfoot. "¡Puta traidora! (Traitorous bitch!)" one spat, venom in his voice. Rosary beads clattering like dry bones as he raised his pistol. The cold steel glinting in the dim light filtering through the broken windows.
Then—engines. Louder than thunder, shaking the very foundations of the sacred space. Headlights, blindingly white, shattered the chapel doors. Danni's silhouette, framed against the chaos, a machete slick with blood glinting in one hand, a revolver in the other.
The dream shifted again.
The courtyard melted into the cathedral, the transformation unsettlingly fluid. The familiar stone morphing into cold, damp flagstones. Vaulted ceilings hung with cobwebs of barbed wire, glinting like cruel jewelry in the nonexistent light. Pews, once smooth wood worn by generations of prayer, warped into iron racks. Their edges sharp and unforgiving.
The altar loomed ahead, draped in a moth-eaten shroud the color of dried blood. A silver rosary coiled atop it like a viper. Its metallic sheen catching the faint, sickly glow of the dream. Black beads glinted along its length, each one intricately carved with the butterfly's twin-skull sigil, a silent, mocking testament to death.
"You know how this ends, querida (darling)," Esteban's voice echoed from the rafters. The rosary slithered toward me of its own accord. Its chain rattling like bones in a shallow grave. "Kneel."
My knees struck stone, the impact jarring through my bones. The thorns beneath me writhed like black vipers, piercing through the thin fabric of my nightgown. Their tips drew beads of blood that bloomed instantly against the pale cloth. The rosary wound around my throat. Its beads searing my skin— the feverish heat pulsing like infected hearts against my flesh.
"Pray," he commanded, his voice now a harsh rasp that scraped against my eardrums. "Pray like you did when you thought God would save you, Marisol. See how well that worked?"
The dark pool spread at my feet, its surface reflecting a stranger. My face gaunt, the skin stretched taut over bone, hair streaked with ash, as if I'd already emerged from the flames. The rosary's chain silver links grafted into my wrists now. The black beads embedded like shrapnel—a permanent reminder of his ownership.
"You thought thirteen years could erase me?" Esteban's voice came from inside my skull now, a spider-leg scrape against bone. "He carries my blood. My hunger. You've seen it—how he bites his jaw just like I did, a nervous tic that betrays the darkness within."
The rosary yanked me forward with brutal force, the silver beads sawing into my windpipe, cutting off my air. I choked on psalm verses, the words turning to ash in my mouth as blood bloomed on my tongue—a coppery, sickening taste.
"He'll kneel at this altar too," Esteban murmured, his breath reeking of sacramental wine and rot. "But I'll let him keep his teeth… if you beg, mi amor."
The butterflies inside my wrists thrashed. Their delicate wings shredding muscle, a silent, agonizing invasion. I screamed, a raw, tearing sound that echoed through the cathedral, but the sound dissolved into the dry, papery buzz of a thousand mandibles.
"He'll kneel at my altar, Marisol. And you'll watch."
The pool's water erupted, black and viscous, like spilled oil. Esteban's reflection surfaced—suit no longer ordinary fabric but crawling with pinstripe serpents. Their scales shimmering in the darkness. His scar glowing bioluminescent green.
In his clawed hand, he gripped the rosary. Its chain now alive—a silver centipede with skull-bead eyes that seemed to track my every move. He reached for me—
***
I woke with a gasp. My wrists burning phantom fire, fingers clawing at the invisible rosary still strangling my throat. The darkness of my room offered no comfort.
Somewhere, a clock ticked like a detonator.
******
***Dragon's POV***
The safehouse walls breathed.
A slow, wet rasping sound that sent shivers down my spine. As if the very structure was alive.
No longer the faded blue paint and bulletproof plywood we nailed up last month. Now, the plaster oozes a slick, inky resin, black as dried blood. The cartel's sigil bleeds through the cheap paint—a black butterfly, wings spread wide, each delicate tip adorned with a skeletal face. The skulls grin, their hollow eyes glowing like embers in the darkness, jaws unhinged as if caught in an eternal silent scream.
Rotting floorboards splintered underfoot, barbed wire and thorns erupting with every step—nature itself conspiring to shackle me.
Mariposas negras swarm in a dizzying cyclone, their wings shimmering with the same twin-skull pattern. A living kaleidoscope of death, slicing my arms like razors as I stagger forward.
"Papi's home, mijo." Esteban's voice slithers from the shadows. A caress of velvet laced with venom—a sound that promises pain wrapped in affection.
The mirror ahead isn't broken anymore. No jagged edges reflecting my fractured reality. It's pristine and flawless surface gleamed like a still pond on a moonless night—reflecting the man I haven't seen since Mamá ripped me from his shadow at three years old. A ghost with no face in my memory until now.
His hair is still ink-black, slicked back with a serpent's precision. Each strand seemingly glued to his skull, but time has clawed his features into a creature born of nightmare. A scar carves a jagged butterfly wing from his left temple to his sharp jawline, the raised flesh shimmering with an eerie green glow.
His suit wasn't just immaculate—it was alive. The fine pinstripes wriggling like a colony of centipede legs across the dark fabric. The lapels edged in teeth-like mother-of-pearl.
Gold rings crowd his long fingers. Each heavy band set with obsidian skulls that seem to absorb the light. Their hollow eyes tracking my every involuntary movement.
But his eyes…
Pupils swallowed by the void. Twin black holes that seemed to lead to an endless abyss, rimmed with a sickly bioluminescent blue. The same haunting shade as mine, as Mamá's—now corrupted, glowing with a toxic luminescence. The butterfly sigil pulses on his silk lapel, its delicate wings flexing with a life of their own.
The swarm parts. A silent parting of the black tide, forming his face in the smoky air.
"You wear my mark and don't even know it, mijo." He flicks his wrist and the butterfly on the peeling wall moves. Its skull wings peeled further from the plaster with a dry, scraping sound to hover in the thick smoke. "My enemies see this symbol and pray for death. You? You'll learn to love it."
I lunge for the door, a desperate act of defiance. It's sealed shut, heavy chains glowing red-hot as if freshly forged in the fires of hell. The safehouse isn't ours anymore, the fragile sanctuary we built now tainted.
Cartel graffiti crawls over Danni's defiant Kenbe La spray paint—¡LA SANGRE MANDA! (Blood Rules!)—and the worn couch where he often napped now reeks of gasoline.
"You're dead," I snarl. "Mamá said you were gone—"
"Mentiras. (Lies.)" He steps through the mirror—glass bending and shimmering like liquid night around him.
The scent hits me first, a cloying wave of vetiver and decay, a funeral parlor's cologne masking something far more sinister. My toddlerhood fear rises in my throat. A sour, bile-like taste that threatens to choke me.
"I let her run. Let her think she stole you, mijo. But a butterfly's wings always cast a shadow, mijo."
The butterflies dive-bomb me, a black blizzard of wings and malice. Their wings carving invisible X's into my chest. A phantom branding that burns beneath my skin. The cartel's mark for traitors—a silent accusation.
Esteban snaps his fingers and the room ignites. Not orange flames. Black fire. It writhes along the walls, consuming everything it touches without casting light. It devours Dru's worn sketchbook, her favorite grease-stained wrench, the seashell necklace I gave her. Turning them all to ash that swirls like dark snow.
The smoke thickens, coiling like black vipers. Spelling out that bullshit phrase—La sangre es destino (Blood is destiny)—like some messed-up tattoo etched onto the air itself.
Then I hear her. Dru's voice cuts through the silence, sharp and laced with terror, "Don't look!" But I turn anyway. Pendejo (Idiot). Always pendejo.
"DRU!"
She's there, trapped in the corner, backlit by the unnatural glow of the black fire. Her locs like a crown of burning thorns, the smell of singed hair acrid in the air. Her skin glows, but not like sunlight—like she's burning from the inside out. Mariposas negras cocooning her legs, their black wings like living shackles. Her eyes blazing with a fierce, desperate light, "Don't let him in your head! Fight, pendejo! Fight!"
Esteban tuts, circling her like a predator toying with its prey. His shadow doesn't match his physical form—it writhes on the wall, a monstrous thing, elongated and distorted. Antennaed and multi-legged, pinning Dru's wrists with grotesque, shadowy limbs.
A butterfly lands on his impeccably tailored shoulder, its skull wings flexing with a disturbing elegance. "Pretty little bruja. She'll burn brighter than your mamá."
Rage boils my blood, a fury that momentarily eclipses the fear. I grab a pipe wrench from the floor—the same one I used to fix Dru's battered bike—and swing with all my might. It passes through him like smoke, a sickening emptiness where his solid form should be.
"You're not real!"
""No?" His cold hand seizes my wrist. He yanks my chin toward the distorted mirror.
Mamá's voice surfaced through the nightmare haze, a relic from childhood: "Your hands, mijo. Look at them." She'd pressed my small palms to hers in our first New Orleans apartment. "See? My lines, your lines. Not his. You make your own map."
Now, in the dream, Esteban's rings seared my skin. Phantom heat intensifying as my hands morphed into his. Veins blackened, thick like cords, knuckles scarred and gnarled from beatings I never gave—a terrifying vision of what I could become.
"Mamá lied," his voice purred, a venomous caress. "All maps lead to me."
The mirror rippled, showing Mamá's face aging rapidly, her skin peeling like burnt paper. "You'll watch her die too," Esteban crooned. "Unless you kneel.
In the mirror, Mamá's face slowly shifted into mine. My reflection twisting and contorting—the dragon tattoo on my neck, my mark, replaced by the black butterfly sigil. Its skull wings seeming to burrow beneath my flesh, swallowing my identity. "This is your legacy, mijo. Lead my men. Rule at my side. Or…
The mirror cracks, a sharp, spiderwebbing fracture shattering into a thousand black butterflies that swarm Dru. Their razor wings tearing at her flesh.
She reaches for me, her hand outstretched. I lunge, but the heat slams me back. Her hollow scream tears through my ribs…
***
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