The lone statue

[Matías]

For the love of the Light, had Jay Carpenter left his trail across the face of the world? Matías watched, thoughts curious, as Marta’s guardian, the man named Ricky, read the sudden tension in the air and began to shepherd the girl and her small wolf-dog away. It was a wise move, one Matías might have made himself.

He managed to call out, “Gracias, Marta,” the Spanish feeling like the only honest thing he could utter, before the distance made any further farewell impossible. The air grew immediately colder, heavier, stripped of her surprising grace. He almost offered the hollow phrase of a ‘Merry Christmas,’ but the words caught in his throat. It felt like a shallow joy given the circumstances.

The courtyard was entirely deserted. The last of the Mass attendees had vanished, and the adjacent buildings had gone dark. Were it not for the harsh, indifferent gleam of the distant streetlights, they might have stood in utter abandonment.

Matías turned his full attention to the one who remained. The man was of a small stature, certainly no hulking soldier or hardened athlete. Yet he stood rooted to the spot, shoulders squared, his frame braced against the biting wind and the weight of his confrontation. His Texan roots were clear in the quiet remnants of his speech, muted only by the heavy emotion that currently gripped him. Matías’s first thought was that a stiff breeze might push this man over; his second was that no gust of wind, however strong, could move him once he had decided where to stand. He was a brave one. Matías searched the man, seeking the nexus where he fit into Carpenter’s  history. A friend? A victim? A relative seeking a belated, impossible vengeance?

The truth that came from Matías was a slow, deliberate counter-stroke, spoken not in anger, but in the cold, unassailable logic of fact. “Jay murdered my father, Andre, in cold blood,” Matías said, his voice even and low, like stones scraping together. “After he had already been apprehended, mind you. He killed my cousin, Catalina, a girl who was near Marta’s age.”

The bitterness tried to rise, but Matías forced it down, allowing only the sorrow and the terrible cost to surface. “My aunt Yasmine is missing, likely dead by now. My siblings are all dead or gone in hiding.” He inhaled slowly, the air tasting of snow and ash. “My own mother consigned herself to a convent. She refuses to acknowledge my existence.”

He paused, letting the weight of the list settle in the silence between them. This was the cost of Carpenter's actions, the price the Amengual family, innocent and guilty alike had paid.

Matías finally met the Texan’s gaze, the intensity of his own eyes burning. “Yet, when I met Jay recently, and he struck me… he punched me, I turned the other cheek. I asked his forgiveness instead.” It had been a necessary step, a choice made in cold blood, a rejection of the cycles of vengeance that had consumed his family. He had done the hard, unnatural thing, because the intense desire to escape the blood on his family's hands was stronger than the urge for righteous retribution.