KILLING SARAI(48)

He curls his finger at me. “Let me see you.”

I walk closer, my bare feet moving over the Good Housekeeping magazines scattered about the floor. The grandfather clock standing tall in the corner ticks ominously behind me.

“Javier, she’s going to die if we don’t call for an ambulance,” I urge as I get closer. “Let me call nine-one-one. Then we can leave.”

I see her knees now, but it’s all that I can see as the rest of her is obscured by the chair and the darkness.

Javier reaches out his hand.

“Did he f*ck you?” he asks and pulls me closer to him by my fingers. “Did you let him f*ck you, or are you still mine?” He leans inward and inhales the scent of me, a loose strand of hair fallen from my ponytail he plays with in the tips of his fingers.

“No,” I say breathily. “I’ll always be yours.”

He’s wearing cologne, the same kind he always wore when he’d come to me in the night. And his hair, somewhat long on top, is clean and groomed, the way he always wore it when he’d dress me up and take me with him to the wealthy houses.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says quietly and I feel his breath on my neck. “You don’t know what you’ve done to me. You shouldn’t have left.”

I reach up with my left hand and curl my fingers softly around the back of his neck. I lean into him, the side of my face navigating the opened buttons at the top of his shirt until I feel his chest on my cheek. “I know and I’m sorry.” I kiss his skin lightly. “I am so sorry for leaving you like that,” I add in Spanish.

I shudder, both from pleasure and from disgust, when he slides his hand down the front of my pants and puts two fingers inside of me. It doesn’t matter that he’s insane or that he’s a murderer or that he might kill me any second, the touch still makes me wet. It’s my body betraying me, human nature betraying me, not my mind or my heart. I had conformed years ago to react to him in this way. A twisted survival instinct that they don’t teach in self-defense classes. Javier had to believe he was turning me on or he’d know everything else about me was a lie, too, and so my body learned to react in the way that it knew would keep me alive.

He pulls his fingers out and brings them to his lips, inhaling deeply, his eyes closed as if to savor it. Then he puts them in his mouth.

I take a step backward while he’s distracted, to put as much distance between us as I can manage although small.

“I’m not sure I want you anymore,” he says.

My heart hardens. If he doesn’t want me then I know he’ll kill me, especially after everything that I’ve done, all of the trouble that I’ve caused.

“Javier,” I say, trying to hide the nervousness in my voice, “let’s go. I’m ready to go back.”

His top lip furrows and he shakes his head.

“Izel is dead,” he says probingly, probably wondering if I did it. “I know you hated her. I don’t blame you. But she was my sister.”

I shake my head and start to back up some more.

“I-I didn’t kill her,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

Javier laughs.

I take another step back and two to my right, stepping on a sharp piece of plastic from some random object, but it doesn’t break the skin. I press my hands against the wall behind me.

And then I see her, Samantha, much clearer from this angle. I abandon my dire need to watch Javier’s every move as he approaches me slowly, tauntingly, and all I can see now is Samantha. She’s not moving. She sits slumped over with her back against the wall. Her bloody legs are splayed out into the floor. Her arms lie limply on either side of her, her fingers uncurled.

Her eyes. They’re open. And they’re dead.

Bile churns in my stomach, my hands begin to solidify, hard like metal, down at my sides. I’m shaking all over from anger and hatred and guilt, and godammit, fear.

“You killed her,” I say, my lips trembling.

“I did,” Javier admits proudly. “On the fifth shot.”

“But you said…,” I look to and from him and Samantha’s body, my heart feels like its closing in on itself. “You said if I didn’t—”

Javier raises his gun at me, that last bullet I know now why he didn’t use it on her.

I stand frozen, one hand still on the wall behind me, the other somehow made its way to my stomach as if it could keep the vomit down by being there. I stumble on more debris and then press my back against the wall to let it hold me up. Because my body is still betraying me, my legs weak and unstable, threatening to give way beneath me any second.

I stare across the small space separating Javier and I. I stare into his cold, bottomless dark eyes, not the barrel of his gun pointed directly at me, but his eyes. I hear a click, just a click, and we look blankly into each other’s faces, both of us confused by what just happened. Then a shot rings out and my head falls against the wall with my back. I feel my body sliding down until I’m sitting on the floor just like Samantha. Limp and spent, just like Samantha. The room spins around in my vision like a thick haze of gray.

And I close my eyes and let the darkness take me.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO





Victor





I’m forty thousand feet above the Texas landscape when I get the call.