Page 25 of Protect Me

“I would live differently if I had a chance to do it all again,” he says after a moment or two of silence. “I would make a future for myself. Be worthy of you saving my life.”

“You are worthy of being saved,” I say and he shakes his head.

I think of the beautiful words he just recited. How amazing if you actually believe them.‘The Lord is my shepherd.’

“Can you repeat the words?” I ask and he does, more slowly this time. I repeat them after him, trying to learn them by heart.

“Such calming, lovely words,” I say. “Imagine living a life like that.”

“Yeah,” he says, “that was the plan. And then…” he waves his hand around. “The army happened.”

“Although I’m not sure I get it,” I frown. “Does having a shepherd mean that you’ll live like everyone wants you to? Like a sheep?

“A sheep can have a shepherd,” Marco says. “That’s the point. Well, if he’s a good shepherd, then that makes life worth living. Not easy, necessarily. But worthy.” I think of all the things my life has led me to. My ‘shepherds’. The palace people, my father, the king. I have been led by them in everything, and where has that gotten me? In a barn, waiting to die. Drowning in lies. “What does a wolf have?” Marco says. “Victims.”

I shudder.

It seems that I’ve been living among the wolves all my life.

“Tell me where you grew up?” I ask him quickly, as shots start falling over the door in a shower. He makes a movement as if to stand, then changes his mind. His jaw is tight.

“Florida,” he says.

“I’ve always wanted to go.”

He lets out a harsh laugh. “What are you, sixty years old?”

I shrug. “The sun,” I say. “I love the sun.”

He coughs, the sound echoing in the half-darkness.

“Fine, I’ll take you,” he says.

“Tell me.”

“I told you. I’ll take you,” I feel his lips stretch into a smile against my ear.

“What we’ll do,” I say. “Details. Tell me everything.”

I swallow tears, and he starts talking. All lies.

He is still talking about Florida’s beaches, as per my request, when they finally shoot down the door. I had held on to some remote, stupid hope that more reinforcements would arrive in the meantime. After all, we’ve been in here for hours. Marco has done so many things to buy us time, enough time for another squad to reach us. But no.

The door is down, and soldiers come flooding in, their machine guns on fire. Shots ricochet off the walls, but we’re safe inside our barricade. The shots stop, as the soldiers see our hideout. Marco jumps to his feet, mid-sentence, and leaps over me, covering every inch of me with his body. He reaches for the machine guns, his belly on the floor, his body shielding mine. I’m lying down on the ground too, but I don’t even look at the men. I don’t want to. I only look at him.

My hand tightens around the cold metal of my gun, but I’m shaking too much to ever use it. I think.

“Stay down, queen, all right? As I told you,” he says quietly, and I feel him grab his own gun.

“Marco, don’t you dare…”

“I’m so happy, Olivia,” he says, his face inches from the ground. He’s lying on top of me, but looking straight ahead at the soldiers. “I am just so happy.”

And then he starts shooting at them and they start shooting at us and for a moment, there is nothing but bullets. At some point—it all happens so quickly, I barely have time to realize what is happening—he grabs his phone with his other hand, and turns it on. The phone does this thing where, when it has almost no battery left, it just turns on for a few minutes before dying, and Marco quickly picks all twenty-something of his saved voice mails and presses ‘send’ to a contact simply named: ‘Mom’.

The minute he’s done it, our barricade bursts open, and bullets rain down on our shoulders. He doesn’t move away from my body, he doesn’t try to grab his other weapons, he does nothing but stay there, on top of me. Every inch of me is covered by his body.

He’s shot almost instantly. He dies for me.

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