“Junktown?” Sarah’s whisper is a scream in my mind. She’s at the top of the front steps, feet bare, arms crossed against the chill.
“Get inside,” I tell her.
“That’s the alley where your mother died.”
“You don’t even have shoes on!”
“Dario.” Oria gets my attention. “It wasn’t a mistake, was it? He was telling me something.”
“You’re meeting him at the airport in two days. I told you.”
“How do you know they didn’t find him instead?”
“Because they want me.” I thrust my arm in Sarah’s direction. “They want her. Their eyes aren’t on him.”
Oria and I are locked in a staring match, trying to read each other’s determination, when a rhythmic buzzing comes from behind me.
A phone.
Oria breaks the gaze to look over my shoulder. I turn to find Sarah pulling her phone from her pocket. It lays in her palm, flashing and vibrating.
I step toward her. She’s shaking, phone out like evidence of a crime. I’m aware that I’m intimidating her, but I can’t stop doing it.
Someone’s texting her, and it’s not me.
“What did you do, Sarah?”
“It was an accident, and I don’t know how it happened. I was seeing if I remembered his number. I hung up, then the texts started coming. I never replied.”
“Who?” I ask in a low growl.
“Ma-Ma-Mass—” She doesn’t have to finish. The puzzle comes together.
“Fuck!” I bark.
“Shit,” Oria says under her breath.
“Why, Sarah? Why. Did. You. Do. That?”
“I don’t understand how.” She glances from me to Oria, looking for sympathy. “I didn’t tell him my number.”
The buzzing stops.
“You don’t have to.” I grab the phone and flip it open.
“I didn’t say where we are. I didn’t say anything.”
“Cell tower pings,” Oria says it to me as if I don’t already know. “They can find us.”
I scroll through the texts. Bullshit, bullshit, and more brainwashing bullshit. She never answered him. I have no idea if that matters.
Sarah continues, “He says he misses me. He wouldn’t hurt me.”
She makes me want to laugh and embrace her and kill her at the same time. I can’t do any of those things. None could express the depth of my fear. Only anger finds a voice.
“And who is this?” I point at another number on the list.
“Denise. Her house phone. She didn’t pick up either.”
“God. Fucking God, how can I love an incompetent this much? You don’t even know how a fucking phone works!”
“I don’t get it.”
“You gave up your location,” Oria says with more compassion than I’m able to work up right now.
Sarah’s face twists as if she’s been punched. Confusion in the squint of her eyes. Hurt in the tightness of her chin.
She should be all of those things. Just for putting herself in danger, she should be too hurt and terrified to repeat it.
I hate myself for thinking this is justice.
I don’t want her to get hurt, but I especially don’t want to be the one who does the hurting.
Not anymore. Not ever again.
Lying to myself is still lying. I’m going to have to hurt her over and over for reasons I can’t predict.
“Fuck this.” In a few taps, I connect the line. “Fuck the fuck out of this.”
“Who are you calling?” Oria asks suspiciously.
I don’t answer. She’ll know soon enough.
“Goody?” Massimo Colonia’s voice comes over the phone.
“You alone?” I bark.
“Who is this?”
“Your brother-in-law. Are you alone or are you in earshot of a bunch of savages?”
“Very funny, coming from you.”
“Answer.”
“I’m home. Alone. Where’s Sarah?” he asks.
“On her knees, sucking my dick, as far as you’re concerned.”
“What do you want from me? You think you’re gonna provoke me?”
“Don’t call again. Don’t try to contact her. Don’t even let my wife cross your mind or I’m going to send you pieces of your sister, starting with her sweet cunt. In a box—”
“You’re sick.”
“—and we’ll keep sending pieces.”
“Until when? What do you want?”
I hang up.
“Fuck!” I shout my shame to a sky that doesn’t hear me.
Oria starts, “Do you want me to—”
I toss her Sarah’s phone. “Tamara’s going to need the SIM card. Ask her what she can do.” I turn my attention to Sarah. I know my look can wither every leaf in the forest, but I can’t soften it. “You weren’t ready for a phone.”
Sarah spins on her bare heel and storms into the house.
CHAPTER 29
SARAH
Doing what you’re told is an art form, and I was trained to love a life of utter obedience—first to my father, then to my husband.
But my father has rejected me, and I’m not married to my husband. So it’s only me giving the orders here, and the man I love needs me. My bare feet storm through the dimly lit house with my mind narrowing on a single decision.
I’m staying with him, and he’s staying with me.
He’s going to fight it, and I’m going to fight back.
He’s going to win. He’s going to put me on a plane and send me away because I’m dangerous. I don’t have the strength or knowledge to beat him. I don’t have the skills. I have nothing but the force of my will and it’s not enough.
At the back of the house, the sliding glass opens onto the dark forest. I hear him come in the front.
“Sarah?”
I’m not ready to talk yet. I need a minute to take stock of my value to him.
His walking shoes sit by the back door. Mine are in the front. So I stick my feet in his and step onto the deck, closing the glass behind me. Clopping in unlaced shoes five sizes too big, I walk into the darkness, arms crossed, sifting everything I know through the sieve of everything I think I know.
I don’t know how the world works, but I know how the Colonia does.
No. It’s been proven I don’t know how the Colonia functions.
“I didn’t mean those things,” Dario’s voice comes from behind me. When I turn, he’s backlit by the glowing windows of the house. “They were just to upset him.”
“I know you’re not going to cut me in pieces.”
“Good.”
“But I’m not a prop for you. You can’t move me around like I’m an object. Here. There. Now she’s fine. Now she’s cut up like a pizza.”
“I told you I didn’t mean that.”
“But you thought it. You had it in your mind, because you think of me as something you can just send away.”
“I should have sent you weeks ago.”
I’ve never heard him sound so desperate, and it’s then I realize that though he can force me to go, he won’t. He wants my consent, even if he has to demand it.