Page 50 of Twin Deception

From rest to war, they fought in the living room. All I could do was watch through the limited gap of the door left open to this bedroom. Frantic and trapped, I pulled on my arm and tried to slip out of the cuff. My skin was raw and red from the force of trying to get my hand free, but I couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t.

Out there, they fought with hits and kicks. Grunts and curses followed both. No more shots were fired, but after the series of so many bullets being aimed and released, I didn’t know if that meant they were out of ammo or they’d lost their grips on the firearms. I didn’t know if someone was hurt or hit, bleeding out or dying. I didn’t know who that man was or why he was here.

I didn’t know anything worthwhile, just that I was cuffed to the fucking bed and helpless to save myself or run. Being confined in place tormented me as I experienced the urgency of fight or flight.

Again.

AgainI was subjected to this bone-deep weariness and fear of having to survive and protect myself.

Fuckingagain, I had to witness the nasty gore and gruesome morbidity of violence. Blood and other bodily matter splattered backward suddenly after another shot. A final shot.

Miguel knelt, hanging his head as he fired that one last hit on this intruder.

I flinched, cringing and closing my eyes shut tight at the visual of so much blood and mess flung all over the wall from Miguelshooting him upward through the head with his gun under his chin.

Shock swung down over me like a curtain. Behind the wall of fear and utter shock, I tucked back into myself and refused to acknowledge or witness the violence and goriness of death again.

This wasn’t my life. I wasn’t used to this. I hadn’t learned how to harden myself against the brutality of fights and murder. Of killing people.

How? How is this happening? How is this my life now?

It couldn’t be, but I didn’t know how to think otherwise. This pattern of danger and death wasn’t letting up at all.

“Isabel.”

Miguel breathed hard, showing me where he was in the suite. His footsteps came too, proving that he was approaching me, walking toward me from the living room.

“Isabel…” He said my name like a self-soothing statement and a question. As if he knew he should address me but wasn’t sure how.

I opened my eyes, hoping his body would block the sight of all the blood and grossness in the living room. It did and didn’t.

He was coated in it. Red streaks leaked from his upper arm. Between his fingers, crimson dripped.

“You’re bleeding.” I sat up, panicking as he staggered closer to me. His black T-shirt looked clean but from his arm, he was losing so much blood.

Nausea messed with my stomach. My head felt wonky as dizziness scaled higher. I wasn’t prone to passing out and Iwasn’t entirely squeamish at the sight of blood, but with all the instances of danger and violence happening consecutively lately, I was overwhelmed.

Obviously, he was bleeding. He didn’t need me to point it out. But I blurted it nonetheless, too ill-equipped and unprepared to say anything else.

“Miguel, what’s?—”

“We need to get out of here.” He reached into his pockets, wincing as he moved. Seeming to favor his right leg, he came closer.

“Oh, that’s rich,” I snapped as he got a key out from his shorts. Seeing the evidence that he was the one to cuff me to a bed in his room pushed me to react with that initial anger I’d struggled with when I woke. “It’d be a lot easier to go if I wasn’t trapped here!” I thrust my arm up as he glared at me, as if he really didn’t care for my attitude right now.

He dropped the key, but I picked it up and took over slotting it into my cuff.

“You told me to come here and wait. And I did.”

“But I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t take off when you woke,” he said, calm and neutral as if it were any other ordinary day for him to be cringing in pain after fighting someone who’d shot him.

“And I can’t be sure that sticking around with you at all is in my best interests anymore!”

He had saved me, twice. No, three times.

The metal ring fell free from my arm, and I didn’t waste a second before rubbing the raw skin around my wrist. Glowering up at him and hating how much I worried about his bleeding and suffering in pain, I tried to make it make sense.

I hadn’t faced a single second of danger until he’d shown up. Until he took it upon himself to follow me and stalk me, I had a “normal” life of minding my own business and being stuck in a rut of lonely solitude.

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