They had left me injured and unidentifiable in the freezing dark, far from anyone who knew me, and I understood, with a clarity that has never left me, that they had not simply meant to hurt me.

They had meant for the cold, or the injuries, or both, to finish what the beating had started.

My own parents had done the arithmetic, and decided that my silence was worth my life.

And then a pair of headlights swung into the alley, and I scrambled backward against the brick in pure animal terror, certain that they had come back to make sure.

Chapter 4 — Don Ernesto