Page 63 of When Sinners Rise
“Naja, stop. It’s okay. It’s me.” My voice seems to cut through, and she stills, like all her energy just left her body.
“Miri? It’s really you?” She looks at me with squinting eyes. They soften for a moment, but then she turns back to Shaw. “No. This is a trick. You can’t do this to me again.”
I rush toward her, and Shaw backs off, heading for the driver’s seat. “Naja, it’s me. It’s not a trick. We came to get you. You’re safe.” Her eyes dance back between me and Shaw, and it gives me a chance to see the dark circles under her eyes – the shadow of bruises on her cheek. She doesn’t look the same as I remember.
“Reunion later. Get in the fucking car. We need to go,” Shaw yells.
Naja glares back, but I usher her forward, fighting off the gulf of feelings ripped open in my chest as she at last gets inside the car.
Shaw doesn’t hang about. Before we have our belts on, he’s peeling out of the parking lot and along the road.
We’re all quiet for a few beats, and I feel the weight of anticipation as to what happens next lay heavily across my shoulders. I look over to Naja, but instead of looking relieved or happy, she’s neither. Her face screams anger, and it makes me waiver in my own conviction to do all of this for her. She was the one who left me. I risked it all for her, and now she’s angry that we’ve saved her? My jaw clenches as I keep my words tucked inside. Now isn’t the time.
She turns to me and makes a quick look to Shaw before she launches into a reel of questions, the words breaking between English and Danish so fast that I can barely keep up. “Slow down, Naja,” I plead, but she doesn’t. She just keeps going, repeating the same things over and over, until I follow her lines of questioning.
“I don’t understand why you are with him. What are we doing, and where are we going?” She’s so angry, and it sparks my own.
I grab her hands and squeeze them. “Do you trust me?”
She looks me dead in the eye, and in that moment, I see all the pain, all the torture and everything we’ve had to endure starting from the moment we were taken. It feels like a lifetime – a different life – since we were together. An ocean of grief between us.
Her lips remain still, and her hesitation at my question hurts. But maybe that’s okay. It’s only taken a few seconds to realise we aren’t the same girls anymore.
A lot has changed for both of us.
She finally nods, and we settle back into a quiet that only heightens my nerves.
I thought when we rescued her, it would be different. That she’d be happy, and we’d slip back into that sisterly bond we had when she fought to protect me so viciously. But I can see that I was naïve. That was the hope of the girl who was taken, not the girl I am now. That was the girl who’d been seduced and tricked and stolen and sold and abandoned. The girl who’s been through that should know better.
Her questions start again, but I don’t want to hear them.
“I’ll explain. Not here,” I snap.
Besides, I’m not sure I’m ready to tell her everything, so I’m playing for time, too. There’s so much I can’t explain, and I hope that I can skip over those parts with little or no scrutiny,especially as I’m not sure what they mean to me. Like, why am I drawn to Shaw after everything he’s done? Why do I have feelings that linger for him? Why do I feel concern or kindness towards him and have a growing seed of fear in my stomach that he might leave us and I’ll never see him again?
I ignore those thoughts and look out the window as he continues to drive. We didn’t talk about what happens after we got Naja, so the rest of the plan is a mystery, including where we’re going.
I lean forward so I can speak to him. “Where are you headed?”
“Somewhere off the grid after this. Then, I have something in mind.”
“I can hear you both,” Naja complains.
“We weren’t trying to keep you in the dark,” I spit back.
“We’ll find somewhere to spend the night. Get some food,” Shaw cuts in.
Neither of us says anything, but the plan calms the atmosphere, and we remain quiet on the journey. He takes precautions, turning left and right, doubling back on himself and changing direction for over an hour. It’s a useful distraction to what else is coming tonight, like talking and explaining.
God, how did it get to this? It’s a fucking mess.
Finally, we pull into a tidy-looking motel. There’s a diner on-site, and it doesn’t look like we might be murdered in our sleep.
“Wait here.” Shaw heads to the office.
I wait for more questions as soon as we’re on our own, but Naja just stares out the window at the highway in the distance. I want to reach out my hand and squeeze her. I want to be the one to stand in front of her and tell her everything will be okay, just like she did to me, but I can’t because I don’t believe it myself – not yet anyway.
Shaw walks back to the car, and I jump out. “Here.” He tosses me the keys. “Two rooms, interconnecting door.”
