18. Isabel
18
ISABEL
I tossed and turned all night. I’d never suffered through such a terrible attempt at sleep like this.
Nightmares of running through a storm assailed me in my sleep. Dreams of rising waters and guns popping up out of the waves hindered me from resting at all.
Switching from my right to my left side, I twisted to get comfortable, but nothing worked. Nothing helped.
Jolted awake from an intense tingling sensation running down my arm, I grimaced and tried to nestle into the pillows again. I felt like I hadn’t slept in forever, so thrown off with too many disruptions in my life.
Thinking about Miguel nonstop.
The danger of that man in the alley.
The intensity of running from my stalker and having sex on the beach.
Only to be shot at.
Worry about Miguel forced me out of any hope of rest, and I sat up.
Or I tried to.
“What the hell…” I whispered it, waking fully with a spike of adrenaline coasting through me and making my heart race.
I couldn’t move my arm.
I tugged, forcing my muscles to react to my desire to lower my hand that felt so weak and numb. It felt as though my hand had lost all sensations, heavy and dull from my circulation being cut off.
Freaking out, I shoved my butt back on the bed to look over and see what the hell was happening to me.
A shiny metal ring adorned my wrist. It was no bracelet, but a handcuff.
Gawking at it, I moved my arm so the pressure of my wrist wouldn’t push down so hard on it.
Blood rushed through, stinging with the return of circulation again.
A handcuff?
I stared at it, wondering if this was another dream, a bad trip of my subconscious mind that was tricking me to debate what was real or fake.
It was an actual handcuff, solid and locked securely around my wrist. A matching ring was stuck around the vertical wood post of the bed frame. Thin but sturdy, the narrow wooden slat was likely for decoration only, but someone had thought to use it to keep me in place on this bed.
I whipped my head forward, seeking out who could have done this.
Miguel was the only one I expected here, but with the danger and shots taken at my life lately, that might have been a foolish and risky thought to entertain.
He was the only one who was supposed to come here, where he’d told me to wait.
And there he was. Not in the bed with me, but on the couch. Through the few inches that remained from the bedroom door being left cracked upon, I spotted him sleeping on the couch.
He did this?
He worried that I would run, that I would escape him and whatever the hell he was trying to do with me so he had to cuff me to the fucking bed?
Fury burned through me. Angry and livid, I clamped my lips shut and stared at him. I couldn’t finish a full thought past the ire lighting me up. I couldn’t speak around the emotions of this deep rage that choked me.
How dare he?
How could he?
Why?
I knew he was a bad man. He killed people. He had a gun. He stalked me. Beneath all that, he also fought hard to save me, to not only keep me company but to keep me alive from dangers I couldn’t fully see or recognize.
“What the fuck is going on?” I whispered it to myself as I tested the cuff, seeing if that wooden slat would snap.
Of course, it didn’t.
And of course, the asshole slept through the clinking and clanking sounds of my struggles to get free.
What is he doing, kidnapping me now?
I shook my head, struggling to process any of this rationally. Staring at him and damning him for sleeping so deeply on the couch, I tried to rein in my frustration and be strategic about this. Independent to the core, I resisted the mere idea of someone else having this much control over me, over my life. That was why I’d cut ties with my father so long ago. I tired of having him dictate what could happen in my life, which he did on the regular by making me go into hiding or uprooting me so often.
As I locked my gaze on Miguel deep asleep, I tried to compare the two, to connect a similarity of how he, too, could want to control me.
Behind him, I noticed movement, though. It wasn’t fast, but inchingly slow.
Someone opened the hotel door and slid into the suite. Dressed all in black, his gruff face hidden in the shadows near the entrance, he stepped inside with a gun up.
Just seeing the end of the barrel leading this intruder’s way into the suite made my heart seize.
Again. I gasped a breath and screamed.
“Miguel!”
I screamed again and again, watching hopelessly as the man reacted to my shouts. He darted forward, firing the gun at the same time Miguel jerked up on the couch and rolled to the floor. His arm was raised too, firing off a bullet from his handgun.
From rest to war, they fought in the living room. All I could do was watch through the limited gap of the door left open to this bedroom. Frantic and trapped, I pulled on my arm and tried to slip out of the cuff. My skin was raw and red from the force of trying to get my hand free, but I couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t.
Out there, they fought with hits and kicks. Grunts and curses followed both. No more shots were fired, but after the series of so many bullets being aimed and released, I didn’t know if that meant they were out of ammo or they’d lost their grips on the firearms. I didn’t know if someone was hurt or hit, bleeding out or dying. I didn’t know who that man was or why he was here.
I didn’t know anything worthwhile, just that I was cuffed to the fucking bed and helpless to save myself or run. Being confined in place tormented me as I experienced the urgency of fight or flight.
Again.
Again I was subjected to this bone-deep weariness and fear of having to survive and protect myself.
Fucking again , I had to witness the nasty gore and gruesome morbidity of violence. Blood and other bodily matter splattered backward suddenly after another shot. A final shot.
Miguel knelt, hanging his head as he fired that one last hit on this intruder.
I flinched, cringing and closing my eyes shut tight at the visual of so much blood and mess flung all over the wall from Miguel shooting him upward through the head with his gun under his chin.
Shock swung down over me like a curtain. Behind the wall of fear and utter shock, I tucked back into myself and refused to acknowledge or witness the violence and goriness of death again.
This wasn’t my life. I wasn’t used to this. I hadn’t learned how to harden myself against the brutality of fights and murder. Of killing people.
How? How is this happening? How is this my life now?
It couldn’t be, but I didn’t know how to think otherwise. This pattern of danger and death wasn’t letting up at all.
“Isabel.”
Miguel breathed hard, showing me where he was in the suite. His footsteps came too, proving that he was approaching me, walking toward me from the living room.
“Isabel…” He said my name like a self-soothing statement and a question. As if he knew he should address me but wasn’t sure how.
I opened my eyes, hoping his body would block the sight of all the blood and grossness in the living room. It did and didn’t.
He was coated in it. Red streaks leaked from his upper arm. Between his fingers, crimson dripped.
“You’re bleeding.” I sat up, panicking as he staggered closer to me. His black T-shirt looked clean but from his arm, he was losing so much blood.
Nausea messed with my stomach. My head felt wonky as dizziness scaled higher. I wasn’t prone to passing out and I wasn’t entirely squeamish at the sight of blood, but with all the instances of danger and violence happening consecutively lately, I was overwhelmed.
Obviously , he was bleeding. He didn’t need me to point it out. But I blurted it nonetheless, too ill-equipped and unprepared to say anything else.
“Miguel, what’s?—”
“We need to get out of here.” He reached into his pockets, wincing as he moved. Seeming to favor his right leg, he came closer.
“Oh, that’s rich,” I snapped as he got a key out from his shorts. Seeing the evidence that he was the one to cuff me to a bed in his room pushed me to react with that initial anger I’d struggled with when I woke. “It’d be a lot easier to go if I wasn’t trapped here!” I thrust my arm up as he glared at me, as if he really didn’t care for my attitude right now.
He dropped the key, but I picked it up and took over slotting it into my cuff.
“You told me to come here and wait. And I did.”
“But I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t take off when you woke,” he said, calm and neutral as if it were any other ordinary day for him to be cringing in pain after fighting someone who’d shot him.
“And I can’t be sure that sticking around with you at all is in my best interests anymore!”
He had saved me, twice. No, three times.
The metal ring fell free from my arm, and I didn’t waste a second before rubbing the raw skin around my wrist. Glowering up at him and hating how much I worried about his bleeding and suffering in pain, I tried to make it make sense.
I hadn’t faced a single second of danger until he’d shown up. Until he took it upon himself to follow me and stalk me, I had a “normal” life of minding my own business and being stuck in a rut of lonely solitude.
Even though he was my hero, I wasn’t sure whether that was a delusion I had to break out of.
Was he my savior or the attraction of all this trouble?
The smart thing to do would be to run as fast and far as possible, but locked in this intense stare down with him as I searched his rugged face for an answer, I internally cringed at how the thought of leaving him would feel like the worst decision of my life.