Blessed are the Peacemakers

by Kristi Belcamino

  THAT NIGHT, NICO DIDN’T come to her room. It was the first time since they had been kidnapped. Gabriella waited, checking the clock every few minutes. Finally, when it was nearly midnight, she threw a sweater on over her tank top and slipped on some ballet flats. The garage was out. But the office with the phone still beckoned. She would keep trying it, hoping one time it would be open.

  But when she tried to open her door, it was locked.

  She was stunned. Someone must have known about her foray to the garage today. Nico seemed like the most likely suspect. She thought back to his odd behavior earlier in the dining room. That would explain it. He knew she had tried to get into the garage.

  At dinner that night, she noticed that when she wasn’t looking directly at him, he was studying her. As if he was a little bit suspicious of her. Once she caught him in the mirror watching her with narrowed eyes. When she met his gaze, he quickly winked or smiled.

  Gabriella went to the three long windows in her room that opened up to a spot on the veranda. Locked. What the fuck? She was a prisoner in her room. She could break the glass. For a second, she eyed a huge black onyx Buddha statue on the floor by the window. She leaned over. It would be tough, but she could lift it high enough to toss it at the window. She set it back down. That wouldn’t do. She didn’t want everyone to know she was trying to escape. It needed to be sneaky. They couldn’t know she was gone until she’d had a chance to reach the main road.

  Crawling into bed, she made a plan. Somehow, she would get to that phone and she would call someone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  It was later, some indeterminate time deep in the night when Donovan was awakened by heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. He sat up in the dark. He couldn’t make out any faces, only caught glimpses of heavy combat boots and pants torn at the ankle revealed in the beam of the flashlight.

  A lamp was lit and Donovan saw it was three men, all without masks. He wondered if this time they would kill him. But instead of speaking, the three men holding guns stood back along the walls, as if assigned posts to watch him. He sat up, running his hand through his hair to get it out of his face. When he heard the door to the basement open again, he moved closer to his overturned bucket with the spider underneath and stood, waiting.

  First shiny black shoes appeared on the stairs. Then, pressed black slacks and a blazer and ruby-encrusted gold cufflinks came into view. Then, a crisp white shirt and blood red tie. Above that was a face that made his blood boil.

  It was the man who was making love to his wife in that picture. The man with the scar. Donovan’s fists clenched and it took all his willpower not to attack the man. In an instant, he forgot about his plan not to reveal he recognized Gabriella. He only remembered when he saw the man note his clenched jaw and steely gaze.

  “Aha,” the man said in a thick accent. “You do remember now, don’t you?”

  Donovan glared.

  “She’s quite something, isn’t she?” the man said.

  If he could, if there hadn’t been three men with guns, Donovan would’ve killed the man on the spot. With his bare hands.

  “I would like to tell you if you cooperated, she’d be yours again, but I can’t say that,” the man continued, his eyes never leaving Donovan. “Because at this point, whether she is yours or not is up to her. Not me. She might have changed her mind in the past few weeks. Women can be fickle.”

  Without seeming to, Donovan took in the posture of the three gunmen. They were lazy, slouched, not really anticipating any action. After all, what kind of idiot would try to escape three gunmen in a small room? But Donovan was making a plan. If he could make it to one of the gunmen without being shot, he could grab the gun and without even taking it away from the man, use it to shoot the other two. It could be done. The wild card was the dude with the Italian accent. He might be armed or able to intervene.

  He needed a distraction. A noise from above provided that for a second. All four men looked up at the stairs. It sounded like a scream. While they looked away, Donovan took his foot and lifted up the bucket a few inches, praying that the spider would head the opposite way instead of attacking his bare foot. To his relief, the spider seemed disoriented and stumbled in the opposite direction toward one of the gunmen. Donovan tried not to look at the spider, but watched out of the corner of his eye as it made a steady path toward the gunman’s leg. Donovan watched in disappointment as the spider scaled the wall behind the man.

  The gunman closest to Donovan wasn’t really paying attention. He had spotted the picture of Gabriella on the floor where Donovan had tossed it in a move he hoped had seemed nonchalant. It was the picture of his wife making love to the fucker standing on the stairs right now. The gunman kept glancing down at it and then back at the man on the stairs, putting the pieces together. The gunman was apparently as surprised as Donovan that his boss was fucking Donovan’s wife.

  Then, Donovan got a lucky break. The gunman closest to the stairs leaned back against the wall. A second later, he howled, clutching the back of his neck.

  The spider.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The first aid kit in Gabriella’s room was somewhat old-fashioned. It contained syrup of Ipecac. When Grace was a baby, all the books had said to keep this around in case a child ingested poison. It would make you vomit. Doctors didn’t recommend this anymore since overdosing on it was so easy. But Gabriella wasn’t worried about that.

  Now, with the bathroom door locked, Gabriella got ready.

  It took a while for her to straighten the bobby pin. The plastic coating was a problem for lock picking. After about twenty minutes she’d stripped the plastic off the bobby pin with her teeth, leaving little shards of pink everywhere that she wiped up and flushed down the toilet.

  When she was done, she messed up her hair, tangling it in knots and applied black makeup to create faint shadows under her eyes.

  Then she crawled back in bed and pulled the covers up over her head.

  Normally, she appeared between eight and nine for breakfast. It was a buffet style spread with yogurt, fresh fruit, rolls and coffee. Sometimes Nico was there. Sometimes he wasn’t. Today at ten, she heard a faint knock on her door. She groaned in reply.

  The sound of keys clattering was her signal. She quickly gulped a glass she had tucked under the bedclothes, out of sight of the cameras. She had worked carefully to keep it upright under the covers. Keeping her head under the covers, she drank the syrupy sweet liquid, tucked the small juice glass under her pillow and pulled back the covers, squinting at the bright light as Esmeralda came to the side of the bed, peering down at her concerned.

  Gabriella groaned. “I don’t feel good.”

  “Enferma?”

  “Si, sick.”

  The woman wrung her hands and looked around worriedly.

  Gabriella leaned over and vomited on the floor beside the bed aiming for the small trashcan but missing and then feeling guilty that this woman would have to clean up her mess as part of her ruse.

  The woman remained calm, gently holding back Gabriella’s hair and wiping her face with a corner of her apron.

  Gabriella gave her a weak smile of gratefulness. Ruse or not, she felt like shit.

  And now this poor woman was nursing her.

  But this guilt was a small price to pay. She had to stay focused on getting home and back to Grace.

  Lying back weakly, Gabriella closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the woman cleaning up the mess. When she was finally done mopping up the mess, she brought Gabriella a glass of water and set it on the nightstand, clucking sympathetically.

  Again, Gabriella shot her a small smile, closed her eyes again and pretended to sleep until she heard Esmeralda leave, closing the door softly behind her. Listening carefully, Gabriella was relieved that she didn’t hear the clatter of keys or the lock turning.

  Now might be the hardest part. She would have to continue pretending to be sick, even taking more Ipecac later so she would co
ntinue her sporadic vomiting throughout the day. That way anyone watching her through the cameras wouldn’t worry about her escaping tonight.

  It would be easy to sleep all day. She didn’t have to pretend. She was exhausted. She hadn’t slept the night before.

  And under the cover of darkness, she would take her new lock picking tools and open up the door to that office.

  It was strange that Nico hadn’t come to check on her. He must really be on to her now, which explained the locked doors and his sudden disappearance from her life.

  But it might also help.

  She wanted to avoid him so he didn’t see the change in her, so that he didn’t see suspicion in her eyes.

  Sitting in front of the fireplace with him, she wouldn’t be able to hide her sudden revulsion. She could fake small interactions, but she wouldn’t be able to do enough of an acting job to convince him during their hours-long nightly rendezvous.

  Getting sick, well, vomiting at least, was also designed to keep him far away.

  One night, she’d quickly figured out he was a germaphobe, although he’d probably be mortified to know she thought of him that way. He had told a story about skipping a mission because he hadn’t received the correct malaria shot in time and wasn’t going to risk the trip. He said his superiors were extremely angry, but he drew the line on purposefully exposing himself to some foreign illness. He was so indignant about it, like it was normal to act that way.

  It reminded Gabriella of the mammonis—Italian men who stayed unnaturally attached to their mothers and never really left that stage even as they grew into men in their thirties.

  That’s why she had also made dark circles under her eyes and left streaks of blood under her nose as if she had nosebleeds. It took cutting a small piece of her foot and bandaging it under a sock but she got enough blood to make it look real. She wanted him worried that she had something much worse than just the stomach flu. The further away he stayed, the better.

  Tonight, after midnight, she would make her move.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  After having slept most of the day, the first thing Gabriella did when she got up was turn off the lamp on her nightstand. Sometime after it grew dark, Esmeralda had drawn her blinds and turned on the small bedside light.

  Now, in the dark, Gabriella kicked back her covers and did a series of stretches to work out her stiffness from lying in bed all day.

  She quickly dressed in the dark, pulling on her trusty black cargo pants, a tank top, her jacket, and boots. She loaded her lock pick tools in her jacket pocket along with some items from the first aid kit- tiny scissors, bandages, antibacterial ointment and some antibiotic pills. Once again, she sent a silent prayer of thanks to her good friend photojournalist Chris Lopez for teaching her how to pick locks a few years ago.

  The first step in her plan was to make a call on the office phone warning her mother and The Saint that her captors were coming for Grace once they found out she had escaped. Now that she had the right tools, the second step was to break into the garage and get the hell out of this place. She needed to get word to her mother that she was still alive. She needed to get home to see her mother before it was too late. If she had time, she would also try to get upstairs. If there were girls being held prisoner upstairs, she had to take them with her. She couldn’t leave them behind. But then she realized that if there were other prisoners, the best way she could help them was to leave and get help.

  She tugged her hair into a neat ponytail and plopped her baseball cap on before she crept toward her door. The squeaking wood of the floor seemed screamingly loud to her in the quiet of the dark. She tried her door handle.

  It turned.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Gabriella pushed her door open as quietly as she could. She stuck her head out slowly, quickly glancing down the hall. It was empty. She listened but didn’t hear anything so she stepped back into her room to pull her door closed. It would buy her some time if anyone passing by thought she was still asleep inside.

  When she turned back, she froze.

  A woman stood at the end of the long hall near where it led to the kitchen. Was this one of the women whose voices she had heard? But this woman was obviously not a prisoner.

  Even from fourteen feet away in the dim light from sconces on the wall, Gabriella could tell the woman was stunning. She had a long sleek curtain of black hair that fell to her curvy waist and full pouty lips that were clearly bright red naturally. She wore a black flowing skirt and black embroidered peasant blouse that revealed a glimpse of a red satin bra and abundant cleavage. Her small bare feet with red painted toenails poked out the bottom of the skirt.

  As soon as the woman saw Gabriella she half turned toward the kitchen, her mouth open as if she were going to scream or call for someone. But then she closed her mouth and turned back toward Gabriella, taking her in from her boot-clad feet to the baseball hat on her head. Gabriella calculated how long it would take to reach the woman and realized if the woman screamed or shouted, all bets were off. She held her breath waiting and watching to see what the woman was going to do. The faint scent of fresh bread came down the hall as if someone had opened a door somewhere letting in a breeze.

  Clenching and unclenching her fists, Gabriella waited. For what must have only been seconds, but felt like an eternity, the two women stared at one another. Then, the woman nodded and looked down, turning away and slowly walked back into the kitchen.

  Gabriella didn’t wait around to see why the woman hadn’t screamed or alerted anyone. Instead, she raced toward the door that led to the garage. Now that she’d been spotted, it was too risky to spend time picking the lock on the office door. She’d put her effort into breaking into the garage and trying to commandeer a vehicle. It was her best shot.

  Racing by the office, she did pause long enough to turn the handle. It was locked as she suspected, so she continued running, bursting through the door to the outside and racing down the hill to the garages on the lower level.

  Crouching down in front of the garage door, she took out her homemade lock pick tools.

  Her hands trembled and she kept looking behind her and up the driveway, waiting for a gunman to appear and mow her down.

  She slowed her breathing and tried to calm down so her hands would stop shaking and remain steady enough for her to do her job.

  Within five minutes she had the lock undone. She ducked inside, closing and locking the door behind her. From the outside, nobody would know she had been able to break into the garage. In the dark, she could make out the shape of at least three vehicles.

  Racing to each one—a Jeep, a sedan, and a truck—she checked the ignition and glove box for the keys. Nothing. Then she began searching the walls for a hook that might hold some keys. Nico had heard Esmeralda say the keys were kept in the garage, but she had no idea where they were.

  In the dark, she relied on feeling her way along the walls. The keys had to be somewhere.

  Outside she heard shouting and it made her heart race. They knew she’d left her room. The voices were just outside the garage now. She hid behind a vehicle in case someone could look through the tall widows at the top of the garage doors. After a moment, the voices seemed further away and she resumed looking for the vehicle keys.

  She searched a small workbench with drawers, dumping each drawer out and feeling the contents. Her eyes had adjusted a little and she could make out more of the details of the garage by the light filtering in from the garage’s three high windows.

  She’d searched everywhere and was nearly sobbing with despair that she’d come so close to escaping. If Nico wasn’t on her side, if he was the enemy, maybe he had lied when he told her they kept the keys in the garage with the vehicles.

  Maybe it was all a lie, a trick to get her to think she could escape when she couldn’t.

  She willed herself to breathe in and out and gave herself a pep talk. Get your shit together. The keys have to be here somewhere. He wouldn’t
just make that up out of thin air.

  She crawled into the Jeep and pulled down the visor. Nothing. Then she remembered how one of her uncles used to store a spare key under the floor mat on the driver’s side. Racing to the Jeep, she dug her fingers under the mat and almost yelped when she felt a small piece of metal.

  She hopped into the driver’s seat, stuck the key in the ignition and with her other hand, got ready to press the small garage door opener button clipped to the driver’s side visor.

  Luckily the Jeep had been backed into the garage because as soon as that garage door opened, she planned to book out of there with the engine roaring. She’d wait until the door was barely open before she started the engine. Hitting the garage door opener, she cringed as it made a tiny squeak that seemed deafening to her ears in the quiet of the night. When there was only about five more feet until the garage door was all the way up, Gabriella turned the key in the ignition and made the sign of the cross.

  The engine turned over.

  She peeled out of the garage, burning rubber as she rounded the corner that led to the driveway. As she flew down the road, she could hear shouting behind her and then heard bullets hit the back of the Jeep at the same time the sound of gunshots reached her.

  In the rearview mirror, she watched the figures of two men standing in the middle of the road firing at her.

  Ducking down, she gripped the steering wheel tightly and took the corners as fast as she dared. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about the gates, ramming them probably wasn’t an option. As soon as she was far enough away from the gunmen, she’d search the vehicle for any remote controls to operate the gate.

  When they’d been brought in, the driver had been able to open the gate remotely.