We pull into a parking lot at the end of a road lined by resort homes. I’ve been here before, once with my best friend when her older sister picked us up from school in her new car. We had gotten lost and she used this place to turn around. It was weeks before my mom forced me to Mexico with her and Javier. This familiar place reminds me that I’m very close to home. I’m so close that I could walk there. It would take several hours, but I could do it.
But where would I go?
Victor shuts the truck’s engine off. I look out through the windshield to see a section of trees and brush separating the parking lot from the interstate. A car flies by every few seconds. But the parking lot is empty save one lone car in the distance parked by a dumpster. On the other side of the lot though, over a low concrete wall there are many cars parked outside a shopping center.
I wonder why he chose a public place, although currently quiet and abandoned, to do whatever it is that we came here to do. Because Javier doesn’t care about the public or risking an innocent bystander getting caught in his crossfire.
“Stay in the truck,” Victor says just before shutting the heavy metal door.
He walks around to the back as a sleek black SUV enters the parking lot from behind the homes. My heart immediately starts pounding. I slink down in the seat, but move around to his side so that I can get a better glimpse out the window. I want to see but I don’t want to be seen.
Victor meets the SUV halfway, about fifty feet from where I am and it stops in the center of the road. I see a man. A white man it looks like and I’m confused by this. Victor nods and then I see his lips moving. I reach over and roll the window down by the old-fashioned crank. It sticks at first, but then the window breaks apart and I manage to open it several inches. But they’re too far away for me to hear anything they’re saying.
Victor starts walking back toward the truck and the SUV follows. I swallow hard and find myself practically all the way in the floorboard now, the top of my head pressing against the hard steering wheel. The driver’s side door opens, exposing me in my awkward position. That other man is standing next to Victor, both of them looking in at me.
The strange man, who I notice looks somewhat like Victor with his tall stature, brown hair, blue eyes and sculpted cheekbones, nods at me as if it’s his way of saying hello. Needless to say, I’m too afraid and unsure of him to give him the same courtesy.
The man, though still looking at me as though I’m a peculiar specimen of sorts that deserves study, says something to Victor in another language. It’s not Spanish. Victor replies to him in that same language, which I’m starting to think is likely German. The man finally looks at Victor.
“This is Niklas,” Victor says to me. “You’re going to ride with him and follow me to another location close by.”
Instantly, I feel my head shaking back and forth in refusal.
Victor reaches out his hand to me, but I reject it. Instead, I start to climb my way out of the floorboard and go toward the other side of the truck. I feel Victor’s hand wrap around part of my thigh.
“He will not harm you,” Victor says. “This truck is not safe for you if Javier or his men open fire on us.”
I glance through the back window at the SUV, assuming it has some kind of bulletproof windows, maybe. I don’t care to ask; I simply don’t want to be left alone with this man, safer vehicle or not.
“This one is not very cooperative,” the man named Niklas says in English. He definitely has an accent, unlike Victor who seems to speak fluently in whatever language he knows.
“Sarai,” Victor says my name and it stuns me immobile; he’s never called me by my name before. “I am asking you to cooperate.”
I look up into Victor’s harsh eyes and hold my gaze for a moment, letting my mind clear out the unexpected reaction that he saying my name has put there. My body relaxes and then soon after Victor’s fingers slide away from my thigh. I look back and forth between the two of them slowly, still unsure, but now more willing.
“Will you tell me what’s going to happen?” I ask, looking at both of them, but Victor knows the question was meant for him.
Niklas keeps his cold blue eyes fixed on me, but it seems more from an observant nature than a possessive one.
“We will meet Javier not far from here in a more secluded area. There, your friend will be handed over to us.”
A dark feeling of uncertainty suddenly grows within the pit of my stomach.
I narrow my gaze on Victor.
“Just like that?” I ask skeptically. “No, Javier won’t just give her over. He’ll…” I back away again against the passenger’s side door, my hand already on the handle in case I need to make a run for it. “…there’s no way he’d do that. You’re trading her for me, aren’t you?” My voice rises. “Aren’t you!”
“Yes,” Victor says.
Niklas remains quiet and calm and ever so observant. It’s starting to unnerve me.
But then I come to my senses and look away from both of them. I stare out the windshield at the landscape and the cars on the other side of the concrete wall, but I really don’t see any of it. All I see is Lydia’s face in my mind, the way I saw it last on that video: bruised and bloodied and tear-streaked and frightened. I know this is what needs to be done. A trade: me for Lydia. That is something I know Javier would agree to, now more than ever.
But he wants me dead….
My hands clench the tattered leather seat beneath me, my fingers digging into the exposed cushion insulation. My entire body trembles with dread. But then I stubbornly force that fear into the back of my mind. Maybe he won’t kill me once he has me back. I could go on pretending like being with him is where I want to be. I could even pretend that Victor kidnapped me. I know I can fool Javier. I know I can! I did it for years! I made him trust me, so much so that he believed he loved me. I can do it again.
Long enough until I get my first chance to kill him.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Because I only care about two things anymore: Lydia’s safety and killing Javier. I know that once I do it, I’ll sign my own death warrant. Izel or one of Javier’s men will hunt me down before I can get a mile from the compound and they’ll shoot me dead, just like Victor did that store owner back in Mexico.
But at least Javier will be dead.
And I don’t fear death.
I open the truck door to find Niklas standing at it waiting on me. I was so lost in my thoughts that I never even saw him leave and walk around to my side of the truck.
I shut the door and look over the hood of the truck at Victor on the other side. I’ve never really been able to read his face because his emotions, if he has any, seem impenetrable, but right now I do detect the faintest hint of something unnatural in his eyes. Could it be regret? No, maybe it’s indecision or…no, that can’t be it.
“I’ll do it,” I announce, never taking my eyes from Victor’s. “If you can get Lydia away safely, I’ll do it.”
Victor nods. Then he goes to open the truck door and I stop him.
“But Victor, please take her home. I’m begging you. Just take her home. She lives in El Paso, Texas. With her grandparents. Please.”
Victor doesn’t nod or answer verbally this time, but I know, just by that look in his eyes that he will do it. I’m not sure why I believe that, but I do.
After transferring his bags from the truck to the SUV, he gets inside the truck and the rumble of the engine turning on follows seconds later.
“Come,” Niklas says, taking me by the arm, his fingers wrapped a little more harshly around my bicep than Victor ever did it.
He guides me around to the backseat, opening the door and standing directly behind me as if he’s making sure I get in and don’t try to run away. Once I’m inside, the smell of new leather and car freshener fills my senses. A metal cage barrier separates the backseat from the front, just like a police officer might have in his patrol car. Already I feel trapped. I hear a clicking sound as Niklas locks all of the doors after he’s inside. I glance to my left and right to see that there are no inside lock switches on either of the backseat doors. I am truly trapped in here.
We end up on Interstate 19, following close behind Victor in the old beat-up truck.
“You have become quite a wrench in the gears,” Niklas says from the driver’s seat.
I glance up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror.
I don’t like him much. Not that I should like him at all considering the situation, but at least with Victor, despite being a killer, I felt a sense of safety. Even back at the compound as I watched him through the crack in the door with Lydia, I got the feeling I could trust him, that he would help me. My hunches were completely off, I admit, but he never hurt me. Regardless of what he is or what he’s done and what complications I’ve caused him, he never treated me badly.
Niklas, on the other hand, I get the sense is a little more intolerant.
I try to keep my eyes on the road out ahead, but it’s hard not to meet his gaze in the mirror every now and then. Because he’s always watching.
I swallow and say, “I didn’t mean to cause you and Victor any trouble.” His eyes narrow suddenly in the mirror and I catch it immediately. “But I don’t understand why it’s such a huge inconvenience to either one of you, to help me.” I tried to mask the bitterness in that, but I didn’t do so well.
“Victor,” Niklas says icily, which strikes me in the worst way, “since you’re now on a first-name basis with him, should have dragged you back to Javier Ruiz the second he found you.”
I hate this man.
I grit my teeth and breathe sharply through my nostrils.
“But he didn’t,” I snap. “And that tells me he’s more human than you apparently are.”
My acidic words don’t faze him like how I had hoped they would. Instead, he does something I least expected: he smiles.
“Oh, I see what you think this is,” he says with that evident German accent. “You think you’ve enchanted him somehow with your innocent girlish wiles. You’ve done nothing of the sort, just so you know. Victor, everything he does, he does it for the better of our Order. If he believes it better not to set you free or to hand you over, it has nothing to do with your well-being.”
I don’t want to believe him though a small part of me does, but I refuse to give Niklas the satisfaction of knowing he succeeded in getting under my skin.
I round my chin and look away from him, putting my eyes solely on the truck Victor is driving out ahead of us. Soon, we veer off to the right and enter an unpaved dusty road right off the interstate. The road winds through several sections of low-lining bushes and young trees, but mostly there’s nothing but dirt and an endless stretch of almost barren land three hundred and sixty-degrees around me. A few houses are perched in the distance on top of dirt hills, but I get the feeling this section of land has not been traveled in a very long time by those who own it, or anyone else for that matter.
The front of the SUV rises higher over the land as we head up a hill. Once we level out at the crest and the dust begins to settle I see four old trucks, much like the one Victor is driving, parked out in the open, waiting for us.