Page 50 of No Saint

For my son.

“Find her!” Someone orders.

I can feel a cry bubbling up in my throat so I press my hand over my mouth and nose, stifling the noise.

“Enough!” Someone yells. That voice though, I recognized it. I knew it but in my panic, in my grief and my fear, it was a blurred mess inside my head. But I knew it, oh fuck, I knew but who!? Where did I know it from, “Let’s go.”

“But you wanted her!” Someone else says.

“There’ll be another time,” there was pure conviction in that tone, in that familiar voice, “she won’t escape me.”

I hear boots moving through the house, marching away on those orders. They don’t keep looking for me but I don’t move. I don’t make a peep.

I’d learned long ago that words meant nothing, lies were as easily fed as water from a tap and until I was certain this house was empty of enemies, I would stay right here, where it was safe.

There was a little girl inside of me that still lived. That still feared coming home, feared coming out of her hiding spot. There was a little girl inside of me that saw these people and immediately recognized danger and pain. I like to tell myself I’ve grown, that I’ve conquered these terrors but I was lying.

I was always lying to myself and I was sure I always would.

Put on a hard front and maybe,maybe, it would become true.

But I stay beneath that desk, cradling my son, rocking him until he falls asleep against me and then I silently sob. I cry for myself, for my past, for my nightmares and my pain, I cry for the men dead or dying beyond the door and I cry for my freedom. I cry for the freedom I don’t have and never will.

Not because of Gabriel and his forced marriage, not because I was stuck within these walls, I would never be free of the nightmare that was my life, my past and my present.

I was broken.

Consistently haunted by my past abuse, reminded everyday how I was failing, how I couldn’t provide.

It’s when I’m lost in that turmoil that I hear the door to the office click open.

My heart leaps into my throat.

Gabriel can say how brave I am, how courageous but I didn’t want to die. I would do anything to protect my son, but I didn’t want to die, there was a difference.

The thump of steps echoes inside my bones, the distinct sound of clothes brushing together, of a ring tapping against metal.

Fingers on a gun.

I close my eyes and think through what I could do.

What could I do?

If they hadn’t left, there were so many more of them than there were of me. I had no weapons. Nothing that could fight off a bullet or a knife.

Shifting a little, I try to be as quiet as I possibly can as I move Lincoln to lay on the carpet behind my own body. At least I could be a shield.

I hold myself in a way that keeps him concealed and watch the space in front of me, waiting for the show of legs.

It feels as if my breath is sawing with a loud echo inside my chest, that whoever was in the room with me could hear the wheeze of my lungs.

They come closer.

Closer still. Until their steady footsteps thump to the left of the desk and then round.

Black suit pants. Black leather shoes and a wide stance.

A hand hits the top of the desk as the other falls, a relaxed posture, a gun gripped between strong, deft fingers.

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