Delgano: A Dark Contemporary Interracial Romance

“I could teach you.”

“That’s your response?”

This woman was the perfect target, which made him further wonder why she was there. This wasn’t someone used to sitting across from someone like him, having breakfast, as if they were old friends.

“Just how pretty are you under there?” he teased.

She leaned forward as if to respond with words that would keep her out of any religion’s upper room. Then he saw the moment she remembered she was supposed to be lying about who she was and backed down.

Something wasn’t right about who she claimed to be. This woman was too much of a forest fire, someone who was probably once shy but had grown tired of it after being “bitten” far too many times.

“So, here’s something I’m not supposed to tell you,” she prefaced, flicking away his question with a wiggle of her slender fingers. “A great deal of things that happen in the world go unreported to the public. Many of these things don’t require the help of a military. In fact, involving a military would only start a war.”

“Unreported things like what?” he asked.

“Women forced to watch their babies die because they can’t go to work with them on their backs—by order of their masters. Children waiting to be sold to rich families. The babies aren’t usually conceived through consent, and the children are often sold as servants if they make it past infancy. Sometimes, they’re sold to these families so the children of wealthy families can own them. Like a doll.”

He frowned. “Masters? Sold?”

“It’s still prevalent in places like Mauritania.”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“I…have a connection to the country.”

“If someone ‘owns’ another person,” he began, searching her unreadable eyes, “I don’t think ‘doll’ is the right word to use.”

Words like “own” and “sold” didn’t sit well with him unless it was in reference to vehicles and houses. While he never received any solid proof, he’d always believed his mother was “owned” by someone and had “sold” her body for profit.

“The word doesn’t matter if you understand,” Sayeda said, searching his face the same way, though he probably wasn’t as challenging to decipher. “The organization that brought you here thinks that someone like you would care about something like that. They believe there’s a silver lining to your lethality.”

“Expand on that, please. The ‘someone like me’ part.”

It didn’t matter who or what he’d become; he hadn’t fallen far enough to enjoy watching the innocent suffer. Had it not been for a select group of people during his years as a low-level Chamas péderua, a “street foot,” he would have been taken advantage of when he was still too young-minded to realize it.

“Personally,” Sayeda tapped her chest, “I don’t see why you’d care about any of this. It doesn’t concern you. You’re a monster.”

“And how familiar exactly are you with monsters?” he asked.

“I’m familiar with the bogeyman.”

“I’m not the bogeyman.” He leaned forward. “I’m of a completely different breed altogether.”

She lowered her voice. “Show it to me.”

For most of their meal, she’d looked away, yet that, she was able to say while holding eye contact.

He didn’t need to see her entire face to know that she was probably as pretty as pretty came. But if boyfriend and husband material was made from cotton, he was all jute fabric. Still, it didn’t change the fact that he’d been a sucker for a pretty face since the moment he first began to notice them.

“I’ll gladly show you,” he said. “Just tell me when.”

Without breaking their eye contact, she took his glass of orange juice and drank every last drop, which had him hard enough to break one of the legs off the table.

Afterward, she stood, piled everything onto the tray, and returned to the kitchen. She didn’t meet his eyes again as she packed the dishwasher, and he watched her go, staring at the empty kitchen minutes after she’d left, waiting for his blood to settle.

Sayeda intrigued him, but it still irked him that someone, possibly an entire government entity, knew so much about him, and he didn’t know shit about them. This was also an entity strong enough to follow him without him knowing, abduct him, and then force him to choose between remaining trapped in a palatial prison or leaving in a body bag.

The more he learned about this “project,” as little as that information came at a time, the more he realized that its scale was too expansive to be tied to Brazil alone. In the case of something this significant, the Americans had to be involved, which he wouldn’t mind if it came with American money.