KILLING SARAI(25)

“I’m not going to kill you,” he says calmly. “If it was my intention, you’d be dead already.”

He waits for my tense body to ease some before I feel his hand loosen ever so slightly.

“Are you going to be quiet?”

I nod because I still can’t speak with his hand over my mouth.

Finally, after a long moment, Victor moves his hand away slowly.

“Why wouldn’t you kill me?” I ask, my voice still trembling and choked by tears. “Still using me as leverage?”

“In a way, yes,” he answers.

I want to scream again while I have a chance, but his words keep me from it:

“And I don’t kill innocent people.”

Silence fills the small space between us.

“No one is innocent,” I snap, surprising myself. “Least of all me. For years I let that disgusting murderer violate me and I never said no. I sat back and watched in silence as he and his men and that bitch sister of his beat and raped and sold the girls I became close to. I did nothing. I never screamed or fought back or stood up for any of them. Not a single one.” I hear my voice beginning to rise with anger, but I don’t care. I clench my fists together on my chest, looking up into his eyes as he remains seated on top of me. “I pretended like nothing bothered me, that Carmen’s hands being smashed to bits by that hammer didn’t faze me! I didn’t flinch when Marisol was forced to have an abortion by a butcher doctor who left her to bleed to death on the table! I didn’t shed a single tear when the girl with the red hair and freckles was killed right in front of me because the man who came to purchase her didn’t like what he saw!” I bring up my fists and go to slam them down on the tops of his legs out of anger, but he catches my wrists and holds them solidly. “I am not innocent!” I roar.

I feel his hands wrench my wrists, but my head is too clouded by emotion to care.

The things I’ve admitted are things that have haunted me for the longest time. They’ve been buried in my soul, burning through to the very core of me, rendering me emotionless and turning me into someone entirely different than I was supposed to be.

I let my head fall to the side, feeling the pang of defeat. I can’t look at him anymore. Not out of anger or hatred or revenge, but out of shame. I can’t look a murder in the eye because not only am I no better than he is, it’s possible that I’m worse.

“You are very strong,” he says and raises his body from mine. “With a strong survival instinct. It is the only thing that separates you from those other girls. Like them, you were still held there against your will. You were still made to do things against your will. You were physically and emotionally abused. You should not blame yourself for their weakness.”

He walks back over to the table.

I pick myself up from the floor and just look across at him, trying to make sense of his words. Or, maybe the guilt I’ve harbored for so long is only trying to force me not to believe them.

He glances over at me and adds, “You did the right thing.”

I shake my head. “No. I didn’t. I should’ve done something to help them.”

Victor shoulders his duffle bags and takes up the suitcase in the other.

“You did,” he says, standing in front of me now. “You kept your cool. You waited for your opportunity. You pretended to the point of acceptance and trust. You’re risking your life right now to go back for that girl.”

He walks past me and goes toward the door, turning to look back once he gets there.

“You are innocent,” he says. “And it’s why you’re still alive.”

Then he opens the door and hesitantly, I follow him out.





CHAPTER TWELVE





We arrive in Green Valley nearly three hours later. Both of us sat in silence for most of the drive. I had too much thinking to do, too many unresolved issues to work out, which I didn’t come close to doing in such a short time. And it will take me a very long time to lay my guilt to rest, if I ever can. I don’t care that the things Victor said made sense, I still feel like the most selfish person in the world for what I did. I’ll probably feel this way forever.

And I did ask Victor why we were heading to Green Valley. He had said before that he would tell me what was going on, but when it came down to it, he was vague. He told me that he has an exchange to make near Green Valley, but he wouldn’t go into detail. I guess all that talking he did back at the hotel in Douglas went over his conversational word limit. Because he was back to himself again so quickly, the quiet, reserved, intimidating assassin who, for reasons unknown to me, I almost feel completely safe with.

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.