You Won't See Me Coming

by Kristen Orlando

  She looks up at Mateo, her eyes releasing from their narrowed slits. She pushes her lips together and shakes her head before tempering her voice. “I really liked you, you know. I looked forward to your phone calls and messages. This wasn’t a game for me. And what’s worse than the fact that you’re just a big liar who didn’t really care about me at all, is that I’m now tied up in the basement of a drug lord and I’ll probably be dead in a couple days.”

  “I’m trying to do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Mateo says, rubbing his hands over his face. “I care about you, Harper. I know you probably don’t believe me. But I was just doing what I was told. And now that I know you, I don’t want to see you die.”

  Conscience. This boy has a conscience.

  “Then let us out,” I try quietly. “If you care so much about her, leave us untied. Accidentally leave the door unlocked or something.”

  “I can’t,” Mateo says, shaking his head. “They’d kill me. And then they’d kill you too. You won’t make it out of this room without getting shot. There’s a guard right outside that door.”

  “Are there cameras in here?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so,” Mateo answers, shaking his head, his eyes scanning the corners of the room. “This is Fernando’s private residence. There aren’t a ton of cameras. He doesn’t normally bring … people here.”

  People. Fernando struggles to find a more acceptable word than what we really are. Prisoners. Captives. Hostages. Dead women walking.

  “Where are the other cameras in the house? Do you know?” I ask.

  Mateo shakes his head, rubbing his hands nervously along the thighs of his dark jeans. “I don’t know for sure,” he answers. “I’ve only been working for Fernando for a few months. They still don’t tell me everything.”

  “Do you think you could find out?” I ask. Mateo’s mouth twists as he looks over his shoulder toward the door, anxious that someone may be listening. I lower my voice, bringing his nervous eyes back to mine. “Look, I’m not trying to get you in trouble. I don’t want to get you killed either. But if you care about her, give us a chance to stay alive. Please.”

  Mateo stares at the door for one second, two seconds, three. He then looks back at the two of us, his eyes lingering on Harper.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” he says quietly, fearfully shaking his head, his feet slowly scraping against the ground as he backs out of the room. “I can’t. Please. Eat. And please don’t do anything stupid. If they walk in on you trying to get out, they’ll … just … behave yourselves. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  He finally turns around, opens the door, and quickly closes it behind him. The bolt slides back into place with a loud bang, locking us inside. Harper and I stare at the door and the room falls silent once again.

  “God, I’m so stupid,” Harper finally says after a few quiet moments. Her wavy hair swings between her shoulder blades as she shakes her head, still staring at the thick wood door.

  “Why do you say that?” I ask even though I know what she’s thinking.

  “I thought … I thought I was falling in love with that guy. What a fucking idiot I am.”

  “You didn’t know,” I say and reach out to touch her for the first time in hours with my stinging but free hands. “How did you meet him, anyway?”

  “He liked a photo of mine on Instagram like a month ago,” she says, pressing her lips together. Harper closes her eyes and shakes her head again. “He was really cute. Said he went to Penn. So I followed him back. Then we started direct messaging and before you knew it, we were texting and talking every day. Like, literally we would stay up until three a.m. talking on the phone about just … everything. I wonder if anything he said was true.”

  Harper twists her face back toward mine, her eyes gleaming with a different kind of emotion. Instead of terror, they read pain. Heartbreak.

  “Maybe some of it was,” I reply, trying to give Harper something to hold on to. “Maybe it wasn’t all a lie.”

  She stares at our untouched sandwiches and rubs her sore wrists with the opposite hands, her face soft and fragile in the faint light. “I just thought we clicked. It was … easy. I thought I finally might have with him what you had with Luke.”

  My lungs stop working mid-breath. Just the mention of his name flips a vital switch, turning off the survival reflex we’re all born with. I’ve been desperate not to think about him, but his presence throbs at the center of my body with every heartbeat.

  Luke. My Luke. The image of him being shot tries to rise, but I close my eyes, clench my fists, and push it down. It obeys, descending back into the black. Behind my eyelids, I see his face. Not the short dark hair and colored contacts he has now. But the way he was. The face I used to think about as I fell asleep.

  I see him dressed in his JROTC uniform, the military cap covering some of his blond hair. With that uniform on, Luke stood a little bit taller; his pale blue eyes smiled even when his mouth did not. I haven’t seen him in that uniform in well over a year. And I miss the pride, the excitement that seemed to beam off of him. Tears sting the corners of my eyes as I realize I’ll never see him happy like that again. When I open my eyes, the shelves in the storage room are a messy, scary blur as I realize I may never see Luke again. Period.

  “Oh God, Harper,” I whisper and every inch of my body instantly radiates with an almost unfathomable pain. My stomach heaves, punched by furious imaginary fists.

  “What is it? What is it?” Harper asks, grabbing my arm.

  “I think he’s dead,” I say. “I think Luke’s dead.”

  “You said you didn’t know,” Harper responds, her voice almost offended. “You said he might still be alive.”

  “I know, but I think I was just playing tricks on my brain,” I answer, biting down on my tongue.

  “But maybe he is okay,” Harper answers, her voice unconvincing and thin. “Maybe he’s just wounded and pretended to be dead.”

  “No. I saw the shot,” I say, my voice straining. “And I just let it happen, I just let him die.”

  “Stop. You did not,” Harper argues, rubbing my throbbing arm.

  “But I did,” I answer, sniffing back the snot that is now threatening to leak down my face. “I yelled out to him. I screamed for help when I should have just let them take me. I should have known what would happen if he came and tried to rescue me.”

  I try not to picture him, but the image comes anyway. An aerial shot of Luke lying motionless on the ground. His mouth unhinged. His eyes open, cold, and dead. His body white. The snow red.

  “He never knew,” I say, my mouth struggling to form the words that have been floating around my brain for hours.

  “He never knew what?” Harper asks gently.

  I try to speak, but the tears start to roll, stealing my words. I cry for what I’ve lost. For all I’ll never get to do with him. What I’ll never get to say. Harper holds on to my shoulder as I sob. She shakes me gently, trying to coax the sorrowful confession off of my tongue.

  I take a breath, trying to slow down the tears and pull together the words that sit like an anchor in my gut. “Luke never knew that I loved him,” I finally say, my hands pushing the tears off of my cheeks. “I never told him. I was scared to even think it, let alone say it. But I did. I loved him.”

  “He knew…” Harper starts, but I cut her off.

  “How could he?” I yell, my voice much louder than I meant it to be, startling Harper and even myself. “I pushed him away and pushed him away. Every time it felt like we were getting close, I found a way to put up a wall or humiliate him or drive him off.”

  “But he always came back to you,” Harper replies, her voice soft. “Always. He’s been in love with you since like the first week you met. You were his person. And he knew you loved him too.”

  Harper’s trying to comfort me, but her words only make every inch of me throb. With Luke in my life, despite how broken I’d become, there was at least tha
t small trace of hope; there was the potential for happiness. Without him, it’s like the next sixty years of my life, everything I’d secretly envisioned for us, has been wiped away. And now all I can see is black.

  Luke chose me. He ran after me, emotionally and sometimes quite literally. He chose me over and over and over again, without hesitation, without doubt. Even when I wounded him, even when loving me was horribly inconvenient, he still chose me. And I chose him back. Even as I pushed him away. I only hurt him to protect him. Because I loved him. He was mine. He was always mine.

  My stomach aches with an unrelenting emptiness, suddenly homesick for a person instead of a place.

  “It’s okay, Reagan,” Harper whispers, wrapping her hands behind my neck and pulling me toward her. “It’s okay.”

  It will never be okay, my mind screams, wanting to push her away. But I give in. I let her pull me into her body. She kisses me on my forehead, as my body heaves once again, fresh tears falling onto her shoulder.

  TWENTY-THREE

  My hands slide back and forth behind my back, testing the tightness of my newly fastened zip ties. Mateo walked in on me crying. He simply said, “Please eat. I’ll be back in five minutes.” He slipped back out the door, locking it behind him. I forced myself to calm down, and Harper and I quickly ate our sandwiches.

  I thought about breaking one of the plates and saving a shard of porcelain to use on one of the guards later. But I was afraid a broken plate might get Mateo killed. Giving two hostages glassware was probably not a smart move on his part.

  After we were finished, Mateo silently cleared our plates, tied us up, and left. After he was gone, I found three tissues on my mattress. He must have left them there for me. If someone has to die on this compound for us to get out, the last person I want it to be is Mateo.

  I look over at Harper as she sits with her back against the concrete wall, her knees pulled toward her chest. She stares straight ahead, her eyes scanning rows and rows of boxes on gray plastic shelves.

  “I wonder what he keeps in there,” she says, finally breaking her self-induced silence. Her eyes stay glued on the boxes. “I’d say severed heads, but it smells too nice in here for that.”

  “Well, I can see some fabric sticking out from some of the boxes,” I answer, my chin nodding toward an open box with a pale yellow blanket spilling out. “And it looks like one of the boxes has holiday decorations in it. I see green and red ribbons, so I’ve got to assume that’s a wreath.”

  “I find it kind of unnerving that this man has anything resembling a normal life down here,” Harper says, her eyes still studying the stacks of brown cardboard. “Like, it’d be less disturbing to me if this basement was filled with trophies from murder victims and machetes.”

  A voice outside our door immediately causes our chests to seize up mid-breath. Our heads swivel slowly toward the door, almost in unison. The bolt slides, cracking into its holder and the door swings open.

  “Good evening, ladies,” Fernando says, bounding through the door with irritating enthusiasm. He twirls a ring of keys around in his fingers, catching them in his palms with each turn as he walks toward our mattresses in the corner. Two guards, carrying M4 carbine semiautomatic guns, follow him into our makeshift dungeon, slamming the door behind them with a deafening bang that makes Harper jump.

  What do you want? I feel like snapping at Fernando but stop myself, knowing this visceral reflex to show disrespect will only get me pistol-whipped. Or much worse.

  I stare up at him, studying his body for weapons. He’s dressed in a deep maroon V-neck sweater, pressed black pants, and black polished shoes. His mustache is neatly combed and hair slicked back, making his large forehead appear even bigger. He looks like a businessman, which in a way, I guess he is.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Fernando says as he stands over me. “But I wanted to have Christmas dinner with my family before we talked business.”

  “How nice for you,” I answer, picturing Fernando sitting at the head of that long table in his dining room, surrounded by his children and wife and team of assassins as they enjoyed his spaghetti and homemade tomato sauce.

  “It was quite nice actually,” he replies, rocking back and forth on his toes, the shine from his shoes catching my eye. “Although I think the cake may have been a little overbaked … oh well. I’ll just have to try the recipe again. So, shall we have a chat?”

  Fernando opens his palm and casually waves toward the door, as if he’s inviting me up to his living room for tea and scones.

  “Fine,” I answer, gracelessly rocking my body forward and struggling to get to my feet. As I get to my knees, Fernando reaches out and gently helps me up off the ground. My muscles involuntarily flinch at his touch. He ignores my cringe, wrapping his fingers around my bicep and pulling me to my feet.

  “It’s okay. I’m not here to hurt you,” Fernando says with an unnerving calmness as he pushes me toward the two guards with loaded guns, their fingers poised near the triggers.

  Yeah, right, I feel like barking. As I take a few steps away from the mattress, Fernando tightens his grip on me and my core begins to quiver. I can feel the contents of my stomach turning over. I swallow the lingering nausea that’s stirring as he holds on to my tied-up right arm and carefully escorts me to the door. I turn around to look at Harper, curled up in the corner, looking impossibly small. She hugs her knees to her chest. Her eyes are the size of silver dollars.

  “Don’t worry,” Fernando says mildly as he pulls me away from my best friend. “She’ll be just fine. We don’t want to hurt her either.”

  “Then what do you want?” I finally say as he pushes me through the storage room door and out into the luxurious home theater with a giant screen, plush leather couches, and enormous recliners. The door behind me slams shut. I turn toward the sound and watch as one of the assassins bolts the door from the outside with a simple lock.

  Interesting, I think as I watch him, taking in every detail. It’s just a deadbolt. Like the type you’d find on a door leading in from a garage or back patio. I have to find something to jimmy that later. Not that I expect to find a lot of pocketknives lying around the storage room.

  “Let’s sit down in my office,” Fernando says, pulling my eyes away from the door and back toward him. “Then we’ll talk, okay?”

  My chin bobs up and down with a silent nod as my eyes inconspicuously scan the room. A single guard is stationed outside our room. Right now, he’s standing at attention, a Glock 22 at the end of his muscular right arm. But there’s a chair to his left. I’m surprised he’s even given the option to sit, but let’s hope he does. Fernando pulls my feet forward as I quickly search the corners of the rooms for surveillance cameras. Left corner, right corner, front corner, back corner. I don’t see any. My eyes survey the metal end tables and dark wood entertainment center. None. At least that I can see.

  Fernando shifts his hand farther down my arm and the skin below his grip begins to smolder. I desperately want to yank my arm away, but it won’t do any good to piss him off. I keep my heated face as still as possible, careful not to move my neck and alert Fernando or the guards to my quick examination of the property and its security measures. But my eyes are working overtime. I search the ceiling for cameras as we walk toward the stairs. We pass a massive wine cellar, the fifties diner, and an exquisite bar with dozens of martini and wineglasses hanging over a blue marble counter. Nothing. I can feel the two assassins behind us, eager to shoot me if I make the wrong move. Fernando pinches the skin on my arm between his fingers as we climb the stairs to the first floor. Once we reach the top, I check the corners and ceilings again. Still nothing. The cool gray walls hold only the black-and-white photographs, and I can tell from their thin frames, there’s no way a surveillance camera could be hiding beneath the glass.

  Fernando pushes me to the left, away from the dining room, living room, and kitchen and toward a section of the house I haven’t seen yet. On our right, we pass a large play
room, child-free at the moment, but filled with colorful blocks and princess costumes and enormous beanbag chairs and books. A small stage has been built along the back wall, complete with a red curtain and gold ropes tied to either side of the thick fabric. We pass a butler’s pantry with cerulean-blue cabinets and a white marble prep station. And directly across the hall to the left is a sliding glass door that leads out to a small patio with an expansive grill; beyond that is the backyard and a high chain-link fence. On the other side, the Colombian wilderness. Freedom. I take another quick glance as we pass by the door. There’s razor wire across the top of the fence, but it’s still our best chance of escape.

  “Right this way,” Fernando says as we reach the end of the hallway. He lets go of my arm and opens a set of French doors.

  I step through the doors, a guard positioned on either side of me, and into Fernando’s private office. A fire roars in a gray stone fireplace to my left, two oversized dark leather wingback chairs flank either side, a small table and chessboard set up in between. A dark wood desk sits on the opposite wall across from the fire. Behind it are shelves and shelves of books. Antique books with muted colors and gold printed titles and brand-new books with colorful jackets and perfect spines. There must be over a thousand of them. I squint my eyes, looking at the titles. Classics and memoirs and biographies and commercial fiction, some in English and some in Spanish, fill the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

  “Yes, I’m a big reader,” Fernando says, looking at my face and then back at his collection of literature. “I don’t care much for television. I prefer to read. How about you?”

  I can feel my eyebrows cinch together, the familiarity of his tone rippling at the nausea in my gut. But I will play along, act like we’re old friends, just catching up on life over the holiday weekend.

  “I like to read,” I answer, following Fernando’s lead, pretending that I don’t have my arms tied behind my back and a gunman ready to kill me on command. “Especially the classics. The Great Gatsby is probably my favorite book.”