Page 31 of Guarded

Immediately her ass falls to the bed.

I walk up to the door and press my ear to it again. I’m restless with this itch to go out there and check if it’s safe for us to leave, but I can’t leave her alone. Not when she’s in this state, and certainly not with a loaded gun in her hand.

She lays down on the bed, bringing her knees up to her stomach, and clutches the weapon I gave her to her chest. With her eyes closed, she begins to rock herself in a soothing motion.

Guapo moves to comfort her, and I look out the peephole. I’m about to tell her it looks clear to leave, but then I hear her sobbing.

“Please, I’ll take her place. Please stop hurting her.”

I look around to see who or what she’s talking to. I walk to find her eyes blank as she continues to rock back and forth. It’s something out of a horror movie the way she fails to register me.

She keeps repeating the same thing, stuck in some living nightmare. I hate that I recognize what’s going on immediately,but I do. I am very well equipped with the monsters that torture you during psychosis.

Evangeline struggled with her own psychosis. I would see the same blank expression in her eyes. When she would release her rage onto me, she would often hallucinate things. Call me by my father’s name while she shouted his sins out loud. Her fists would fly even when I begged her to stop.

That was the most challenging part of everything I dealt with. It was hard not to be mad at my father once I knew the things he did to my mother. I carried her anger and hated him for the monster he created. Feeling of sympathy were confusing to me as a child. Why, amid my own suffering, did I still feel empathy for the very person hell-bent on seeing me hurt?

“Ari!” I call out her name, but she doesn’t respond.

I grab the gun from her immediately as a wave of panic washes over me. My trauma wants to emerge from the dark corners of my mind, but I push that bitch back.

I know the memories that will spill out. The same ones that torture me in my sleep. Flashbacks of times when I was reduced to nothing. A shell of a human, surviving only to hope the next time it would finally end in my death.

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I scream into my mind. Pushing back on my trauma, I focus on the woman in front of me.

“Ariella!” I scream again, this time shaking her until she steps back into reality.

Is this how Doctor fucking Phil would handle this? No. But I’m not that puto.

I wait until her eyes readjust to the room and then find mine. Grabbing her hand in mine, I let out a sigh of relief. She trembles next to me, and I pull her onto my lap.

“Where’d you go, Princess?” I say, lowering my voice to her ear as I cradle her into my chest.

“He’s came back for me. He’s gonna hurt me again.” she cries.

She continues to ramble, but nothing she says makes sense. Physically, she’s in my arms, but mentally, she’s stuck somewhere else. I don’t care. I’ll fucking fight her hallucinations if I have to.

“Listen, Ariella, as long as I’m with you, no one is going to hurt you. You understand?” I whisper to her.

She pulls herself out of my embrace and stands. Her face is blotched from all the sadness seeping out of her. Looking around the room, she grounds herself back into reality. She dries her eyes and regains control over herself before returning to the bed next to me. Clearing her throat, she turns to face me.

“What Cassiel did to Gen and me wasn’t the first time we had been kidnapped,” she begins. “When we were little, we were kidnapped.”

She clears her throat again, her hands fidgeting in her lap. Grabbing them in mine, I wait for her to continue. She needs to liberate herself from whatever is tormenting her.

“It happened fast. I still don’t know how, but I remember holding each other’s hands the entire time we were trapped in that basement. The cops always asked me what I could remember on the ride there, but I could only remember Gen’s hand in mine.” She stares down into her lap, where my hand is holding tightly onto hers.

“What happened?” I ask. My voice is calm even though my insides are boiling.

“The man who took us, he never hurt us. Not in the way I expected him to or in the ways they had to examine me afterward at the hospital. But he made us do things.” She says, her voice cracking on the last word.

I press my forehead into hers and close my eyes. Every murderous thought in my brain circulates around the thoughts of what a grown man could do to a young girl.

“What kind of things?” I ask.

She releases my hand and stands to her feet. Her arms wrap around her middle as she walks to the large window. Looking out for someone or something.

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