by Laura Rossi
Chapter 12
You can run but you can’t hide
We had agreed to these security measures, the first day I had started protecting Andrea and Eddy.
In case something happened, two soldiers would drive to the Riverside bridge, about a mile from the Market and join us there.
The men were already waiting for us when we got to the meeting point. We switched cars rapidly, Eddy still sleeping peacefully.
I held him in my arms and placed him in the back seat of the other car, taking in how strained his face looked. Maybe It was just my imagination or maybe Andrea had noticed his suffering too, she eyed me quickly and secured her son to the seat.
I was driving again, the soldiers in the car with us and I looked back briefly to my car.
We had set it on fire, leaving no evidence, no plate, nothing.
Just another car burned down by vandals or the mob.
My apartment wasn’t too far away, we were there in ten minutes. I had no idea how Joe had left the place. I was surprised to see it looked tidy and clean, for it being abandoned for a week.
“We need food and water for Mrs. De la Crux and her son,” I told one of the guards.
Andrea flinched and looked away. I knew she hated to be called that, but that was what she was, to the soldiers anyway.
And what she should be to me- the thought crossed my mind and I slammed it away, disagreeing with it. With myself.
She is nobody’s wife. She’s nobody’s woman. She’s Sad Eyes. My Sad Eyes.
I kept my stare on her the whole time, as the soldiers walked out of the apartment and Andrea slipped Eddy in my bed. I watched her sit beside him and stroke his hair, while he mumbled something in his sleep.
Andrea closed her eyes shut in that moment and hugged Eddy tighter.
I told the soldiers not to come back if they had even the slightest feeling they were being followed. They nodded and left.
Two seconds later my phone rang. I picked up immediately.
“What the fuck happened?” Alejandro De la Crux roared in my ear.
“They are safe. House has been breached. We had to leave,” I kept my voice as calm as possible, even though I could have killed that fucking coward with my bare hands If I had him in front of me.
“Where are you now?” he asked and I told him we were in the location we had planned ahead, without going into details. The line might have been hacked.
“Good. Keep them there, alive. Until I get all those sons of a bitches killed. I will call you back” and he hung up, without letting me say anything else.
Andrea
Eddy was sleeping soundly and it was only eight pm. I had never gotten him to bed that early, nothing had ever worked. He had always been the energetic child, never ready to say goodbye to his day, always ‘one more game mommy, one more minute, one more cartoon’. Eddy loved his life so much, he was never fed up of living and enjoying the things that surrounded him.
He cried so much – I cringed at the thought.
I stared at him a little longer, how he breathed in and out. I focused on that, on his breathing. Every time he inhaled and exhaled I felt blessed. He was alive. We were safe, for now at least.
I left the bedroom but didn’t close the door. I couldn’t. I needed to see Eddy, make sure he was okay.
Sebastian’s apartment was small and the size made me feel better, safer. I could see Eddy from the living room, even if we were in two different rooms, the distance was really insignificant.
As I stood in the doorway, I felt shivers down my back.
Next to the window stood Sebastian, staring outside from behind the curtain, never touching it and in the darkness. He had kept the lights off. He wanted no one to know we were there.
He was so tense, so concentrated on who was coming and going under his building that he hardly heard me coming into the room. I stared down at his body, how his arms seemed dirty, like he had rolled onto the ground. His face was scratched, his jaw bruised, but he had cleaned the blood off his forehead. The long slit on his temple was still there though. I could see it, red and fresh, pulsing with life.
My feet moved forward and he turned immediately, his body relaxing under my gaze as he breathed out relieved It was me.
It lasted only one moment our distance.
I dashed towards him and he pulled me into his arms.
“I was so scared,” I whimpered against his chest and then he went for my chin, tilting my head up to look at him.
His lips went searching for mine, hard and needy. And I knew from how he was kissing me and holding me tight, that he too had been scared, scared of rushing down the stairs a second too late and see me and Eddy hurt or worse being taken away by those men.
But instead of speaking, he kissed me again and again, leaving me no time to breathe or think. Giving himself no time to think of what the fuck had happened.
How had the house been breached so easily?
“What happened upstairs?” I asked and he grinded his teeth a little.
“Someone had walked through your bedroom window,” he said and watched me nod, as I examined his wound a little closer. “I made sure he wouldn’t go down to the kitchen and then I ran down the stairs, to take you and Eddy.”
“You…killed him,” I said the words softly, knowing it was true already.
I knew what had happened up there. I knew exactly what Sebastian had done. He was the one that had made it down the stairs. He was there, alive. I could see it in his eyes.
“I wasn’t going to let him touch you,” he told me and I covered my mouth, swallowing hard.
He killed the intruder- I gasped for air and kept my hands on his forehead, around his wound.
“He was going to kidnap you and Eddy. Or kill you. He was holding a gun,” he went on but I stopped him, placing a finger on his chapped lips.
They were such a dark colour, so full, I stood on my toes and kissed them gently.
“I am sorry,” I said looking down, rubbing my finger on his lips again. “Thank you for saving me and Eddy”
We just looked at each other then and I enjoyed every single instant of that private moment. There were no soldiers around to look at us and I ached for his touch.
His strong hands ran through my hair, slipping off the headband I used to pull my hair up earlier in the car.
I loved how his fingers traced around my cheek, down my neck to my collar bone. I wanted him to kiss me there, in that same spot, but my eyes kept glancing at his wound.
“Where is your first aid kit?” I asked and Sebastian pointed to a door to our right.
I walked through it, ending up in the bathroom, ramming through his cabinet. There were so many medications, so many plasters, disinfectants and bruise ointments.
I took them all and went back to the living room, eyeing Eddy for a moment.
He was still sleeping, he was still in bed. He was still breathing.
Calm down – I silently prayed, but my hands were still shaky no matter how hard I tried.
As I took out a gauze and poured some red liquid on it, Sebastian wrapped his hand around my wrist and I closed my eyes for a moment, thankful he was holding me still.
My hand had finally stopped shaking.
“I am not sorry,” he said as I looked into his dark eyes, his deep voice making my stomach clench. “I am not sorry I had to protect you and Eddy. I did what needed to be done. I am not here for Alejandro, Andrea. I am here for you. You. When I saw your picture, when he was showing me what I needed to do, I didn’t even think twice. I was going to do it, not for the money. He could have thrown me a million or nothing, I would have still done it. For you. Nobody is going to touch you. Nobody, if it’s the last thing I do,” and he let go of my wrist, guiding my arm gently to his temple.
I let his words sink in, my chest so heavy and so light at the same time I just couldn’t explain the feeling. I felt overwhelmed and content at the same time. My lips were sealed, not finding the right thing to
say.
So I just kissed him again and then gently placed the gauze on his wound, wincing as he grimaced.
“Does it hurt?” my eyes wide, alarmed.
“Not the wound,” he said looking down to my lips.
I knew he wanted to kiss me again.
“There is no happy ending for people like us,” I don’t know why I said the words in that precise moment. I don’t know why my mind had even thought about it.
Maybe I just needed to hear the truth from my own mouth. I needed to hear it as it was. I needed to put it out there, the truth just before he kissed me once again, just before we hung on to that beautiful feeling of our mouths claiming one another.
There was no hope, no way out of the situation, no matter what. You can’t win against someone like Alejandro, how can you even think to defy the devil?
Sebastian and I weren’t meant to be. We had no future and we both knew. And that was the truth.
I said it to myself more than to him and for a moment, seeing he wasn’t saying anything, I wished I hadn’t spoken my mind.
His hands gently slid down to my back, all the way inside my black jeans and he pulled me closer, so close I could hear his heartbeat – steady, slow, hard.
“Maybe not,” he eyed me cautiously. “All I want is to keep you safe. Keep you and Eddy safe. Everything else doesn’t matter,” and he kissed me again, this time my hands were around his neck, ramming through his hair.
It was the strongest declaration of love I had ever heard.
I had received the flowers, the chocolates. I had gone through the dating, the flirting and all that falling in love sentimentalism. And it had turned out to be fake, empty, worthless.
Sebastian’s words were the most heartfelt ‘I love you’ I had ever heard and the word love had never been spoken. It didn’t need to be. Our bodies did the rest.
Sebastian
We had been in the house for two whole days, when Andrea walked up to me while I was making something to eat in the kitchen and told me she wanted to go to the police.
“You can’t,” I was very straightforward about it. “The police are probably looking for you, someone could have reported what happened to your house. They won’t help you.”
“I could tell them everything, ask them for an escort,” she went on, playing with her fingers a little, like she was planning the whole thing in that moment.
“They won’t protect you. They won’t keep those people away,” I broke it down hard to her, without sugar coating it.
Being closed inside the apartment was making her nervous. I could see it, how Andrea paced the room, ran hands through her hair all the time, biting her nails.
It wasn’t just about her, it was also Eddy.
We were having a hard time keeping him quiet, keeping him inside.
The morning after we fled the house, Eddy woke up like only a kid can wake up after running away, fast in a car- he woke up like he had been reset. Like nothing had happened.
He wanted to go to school, to run around in the playground and it had been really hard to keep him inside, to keep him low key.
“Why can’t we go for a walk?” Eddy had asked me after lunch.
I couldn’t avoid his stare, those light blue eyes were too honest, too pure to look away from. It was hard to lie to him, because he knew, I could see he knew I was lying to him.
“We can, just not today” I did my best, that was all I could say.
“I don’t want to live like this. There must be something we can do,” Andrea ran both hands through her blonde hair and bit her lip, eyeing Eddy at the table.
He was drawing, his face glum, his big eyes bored.
“We can’t do much until those men are still hunting down Alejandro, looking for you. They need to be taken down, before we head outside,” I lowered my voice, not wanting Eddy to hear me talk about his father.
Andrea had told me how she kept information about him down to a minimum.
“I don’t want to be involved in this. I am tired of being in this shit. Maybe the police can help…”
“The police can’t do shit, Andrea,” I said and I heard my phone ring then.
I tossed the kitchen cloth and didn’t make out the last thing Andrea was saying. I picked up the call immediately.
“What the fuck, man. Where are you?” Joe shouted.
In the background, loud house music was playing and I didn’t need to ask him where he was. The club, he was at the club. There was a fight going on.
“I am still in Naples,” I lied and placed a finger on my lips, to let Andrea know it was best not to talk.
“Get the hell out of there and come back, quick. I have a fight for you scheduled next week,” Joe said and I held back a few ‘fucks’, just for Eddy’s sake.
“Joe what the…I am not sure I can make it.”
“You fucking better. They want to give you three times the money they used to. They want you back, they need you back.”
His voice was beyond excited. I could just imagine him counting the money in his head.
“Fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” and I hung up, pacing the room, looking for my shirt.
I had just come out of the shower and I was wearing my jeans, my hair still damp.
As I slipped on a fresh, clean blue shirt, Andrea started talking to me again, but I asked her to be quiet once more.
There was a weird sound coming from downstairs. I rushed to the window, never moving the curtain.
“Fuck,” I cursed under my breath, recognizing the sound the moment I saw them.
Scooters, there were scooters everywhere. Two cars parked to the side and four men got out of it, while the kids on the scooters were holding back the two soldiers Alejandro had sent for us.
“Shit, come here,” I took Andrea’s hand and ran to take Eddy in my arms.
All his colours dropped to the floor, rolling under the couch and I made him wrap his legs around me.
“Hold on, don’t let go. Okay, Eddy?” I said. “Look at me,” and he did, eyes wide. “Do not open your eyes, keep them closed until I tell you to.”
Then I turned to Andrea, as we opened the door slowly and heard the roar coming from the stairs.
The men were coming up fast. We had been busted, the soldiers had been held down. We were alone and we needed to move fast.
I pointed upstairs without saying a word and slowly closed the door behind me. That would make them lose some time, trying to open it.
As silently as we could, we climbed the stairs and ended up on the terrace.
The cold, damp air filled my lungs, while I looked around, searching for the right direction.
Was it left or right I needed to go to jump to the other side?
I scanned the place quickly in the darkness of the night.
Left -I grabbed Andrea’s hand and we ran fast, my arm tight around Eddy’s body.
We didn’t speak a single word. We just kept moving, as quickly as possible along the terrace, on the small bridge that connected the two buildings.
I let Andrea stand behind me, as we went down the stairwell of the other building and ended in a courtyard at the opposite side of mine.
“Fuck! There they are!” someone shouted from the terrace, as we ran through a line of parked cars. “I am going to fucking kill you, you fucking whore,” the man shouted again but we were out of his sight in an instant.
We disappeared into the night.
Chapter 12
The escape
Andrea
Prisons have walls. Mine seemed to follow me around wherever I went.
First it was Alejandro’s mansion – a huge villa where the Market ended and the Hillside began. I had thought about escaping that prison so many times, I had lost count of the ways I had come up with to make a run.
But my prison wasn’t bound to a certain place. It was bound to Alejandro.
Even if I had walked out on him, for Eddy’s sake, I was still bound to him. Even now that I was
running away to save my son, I felt Alejandro’s breath on my shoulders.
I sometimes thought of him as a presence, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to strike back at me and make me pay for what I did. Leaving him. He wasn’t the sort of man you could leave.
“You will pay for this,” he had told me once, just once but it was enough for it to haunt me.
Once you see how cruel and soulless his eyes can be, you’ll never sleep soundly again.
Never.
I couldn’t stop my hands, my legs from shaking.
Two things I knew I could never escape from: Alejandro and the questions.
Questions from Eddy, that I feared just as much as being caught by my ex-husband.
“Where are we going, mommy?” he asked, looking back at me, while safely wrapped in Sebastian’s arms.
We were running through small, narrow streets. I was holding on to Sebastian’s hand, not knowing the direction and not knowing our destination.
I shook my head, I didn’t dare speak, the only sound were the thuds our feet were making on the cobble roads.
Where were we going? What would become of us?
Will I live to see you age? I pursed my lips and held back from speaking.
Eddy snuggled up in Sebastian’s shoulder and closed his eyes a little. He didn’t press on, he let it go.
This time, I thought. But the time will come, when Eddy’s questions would demand an answer. No prison, no hiding would save me then.
Silently, I prayed to see the light of day.
We ran for half an hour, never stopping once. I never felt so much energy, the fear of getting caught was above all the strongest.
I ran, fast, my hand in Sebastian’s the whole time, as he guided us into a large parking lot, somewhere in the outskirts of Rome.
We were so far out by then, I could see the shining lights of the eternal city in the distance.
Not all that shines is gold- I remembered an old saying.
Those lights had blinded me and I had landed face first in a never-ending nightmare. The nightmare was still on. I was still running, I was still trapped.