Page 146 of Heart of a Villain

“Please hurry up and die,” she said, tucking herself into a corner. “The last thing I need is for you to be doing all that moaning and carrying on when I’m trying to hold on to my last few shreds of sanity.”

The rain continued to thrash.

The temperature fell.

Remembering she was in Brazil, she peered out into one of the other rooms and spotted an empty clay pot that she had to nearly shove into her face to verify was empty. Then she sprinted to grab it and returned to the bedroom. She gathered whatever she could find for kindling, dumped it inside, and retrieved a firestarter from the backpack.

“Think he knew we might get trapped in the woods?” she asked Lorenzo. “Probably. Adrían’s amazing like that.”

She returned to her corner.

Soon, the heat suffused the room, drying her clothing and hair as best as it could. To curb a surge of panic she felt on the precipice, she steered her thoughts in a different direction—she and Adrían on vacation in a nice, non-dilapidated cabin, talking into the late hours of the night while a storm raged outside.

Eventually, the imagery relaxed her.

But like hell would she fall asleep and leave herself at the mercy of gunmen, black widow spiders, and giant snakes.

Lorenzo groaned again.

She stared at him through the dancing flame, his shadow barely casting against the wall as if part of him was already dead.

“I hate you,” she said. “I fucking hate you.”

Thunder crashed.

“The thing is, you didn’t have to do what you did. You could have left me alone. You could have…” She swallowed, her nostrils flaring. “And I know I’m lucky. Don’t get me wrong—I know I’m lucky. You only had the opportunity to do what you did one time, and not many people get that same level of…reprieve. Plus, I have people in my life who’ll go to these lengths,” she gestured to him, “to get revenge for me. But I won’t ever be the same again.”

The fire crackled.

She tossed another stick on top.

“My sister’s helping me work through it, and we’ve even used techniques like eye movement therapy that I’d never heard about. I can see the way forward, and then I have a man like Adrían who speaks to my soul. But I won’t ever be the same again. See, in the past, I would think about my childhood and adulthood on one fluid timeline. Regardless of what my mother did or didn’t do, I had my aunt. I had my cousin. I had good times. But then, after you did what you did? It’s like that little girl no longer lives inside me. She’s from a different thread that I’ll never get back.”

A cry bubbled up from somewhere stronger than her will to keep everything together.

“Lorenzo, you didn’t have to do what you did.”

He made a low, wheezing noise.

“I hope you’re in pain,” she went on. “I hope that your death somehow manages to also help those who’ve experienced the same thing but had to watch their perpetrators walk free. Even worse, those who have to see the person or people who hurt them at family functions. I hope your death gives them even a little bit of redemption. I know, like me, many of them feel as if something substantial has changed, and there’s no returning to who you once were. We just have to learn to love who we are now.”

The noise sounded again.

“I don’t know where Adrían is, but I think fate made me find this cabin. Fate made me find you here, clinging to life. I needed this. I needed to tell you how much I hate you, how much I hate you for what you did, and how I hate what you did, but a coward like you will never be strong enough to break me. I will move forward. I will grab the opportunities life has granted me and hold them as close as a newborn baby. I will not see myself as tarnished or damaged goods because you were not powerful enough to irrevocably taint me. I’m going to love Adrían with every breath and every heartbeat, and never again will I let what you did, you coward ass bitch, come between me and the relationship I hope to build with my man, ever again.”

Lorenzo gurgled.

She prayed it was the death rattle.

Afterward, he quieted, and the only sounds she heard were the raindrops on the roof interspersed with the flow of the water just outside. When sleep tried to settle in, she rummaged through the backpack and found a tin cup along with a packet of instant coffee.

“This man really had us like we were about to go glamping or something.” She poured water from her hydration bladder into the tin, added the coffee, and held it over the fire. “‘Don’t go into the forest, Sayeda,’ and yet, he packed like we were about to go into the forest. Okay, Adrían. He knew my ass was about to end up in this rainforest.”

Once the tin was warm, she brought it to her lips and took a sip.

Then, she smiled.

“‘Say you love gnats, gnats forever…’”

---