9. Sofia
9
SOFIA
I can’t believe it.
It was only a half hour after the official end of my shift and I was already home. Things never just happened like this. The stars and moons and planets and whatever else in the orbit never aligned just so for me to actually leave work close to my expected quitting time.
Smiling as I parked my car, I got out and noticed the neighbors further up the street setting out their candles. Families came out to arrange the lights and I sighed in anticipation that Ramon and I would join in doing that too.
Did Diego ever set out candles?
Does he know what this night means?
Will he ? —
I opened the door and was pulled back against a man’s chest. Caught off-guard upon my entry to my home, I panicked. A scream built and stayed trapped in my throat. Flinging out my arms as my heart hammered fast, I reacted with a potent spike of adrenaline.
Fight or flight.
I tried to do both, in danger with this nasty, stinking man holding me roughly against his chest, one arm locked over both of mine as I bucked and kicked and let out muffled screams. His free hand clamped over my mouth, forcing me close to gagging at the odor of his body too close to mine. In a flash, I was forced back to the trauma I didn’t want to relive anymore. With his harsh hold on me, I was taken to the memories of the last time a man had captured me.
The Cartel.
The night they?—
No! No! Please, no!
Another man stood on the other side of the living room, or what remained of it. Red and green décor had been pulled down. Twinkling lights and Christmas trinkets I’d saved over the years lay strewn all over with the pillows, books, and other things in my home. The coffee table lay on its side. Pictures had dropped off the walls, the frames splintered and the glass cracked. A bureau was shoved over, the drawers hanging out and emptied.
I didn’t slow to take in all the details, too consumed by fear, but the general scene of disaster bled into my numbing mind in a blur.
Focusing on the man in the living room, I fought and kicked to get free from the one holding me captive.
I never let men into my home. I never trusted a man to get close.
Only Diego. He was the only exception, and I’d only taken the risk on him because my bleeding heart was too big for me to walk away from someone helpless and vulnerable in need.
Diego wasn’t here, though. Nor was Ramon, and that gave me the brave resolve to fight back.
Ramon was safe at Se?ora Vasquez’s until I’d walk over to get him.
These men couldn’t get him.
They couldn’t take him.
Shadows hung too dark for me to make out who this man was. It wasn’t Diego. He was taller and more muscular, and at seeing him gone, I worried about what had happened. Everything was going too fast for me to catch up.
“Where are they?” the man demanded as he stalked closer. With the light from the windows, I saw that he was younger, too.
“Where are they?” he shouted.
Where are what? Who? Ramon and Diego? I feared someone had been watching to know they were here. I was alone right now, but I refused to be defenseless.
Biting down on the first man’s hand was all it took for him to release me with a shove. Before I could step to the side, the other man lurched forward, grabbing my arm then slapping my face.
“Bitch, where are they?” He held up a knife. “Tell me!”
I opened my mouth to scream, to alert anyone on the street, but he hit me again.
“Tell me where the drugs are,” he ordered as I reeled back from his hit.
Oh, no. No, no, no. He wanted drugs, not people. He wasn’t here for Ramon—or Diego—but drugs. As I glared at him, standing fuller, I recognized him as a druggie who’d come into the clinic before. He knew I was a nurse and assumed I’d have drugs. And he was wrong.
“I don’t have anything! Get out!”
“You’re lying,” the first man argued, grimacing at his hand where I hadn’t bitten hard enough to break his skin. “You have to have something here. Tell us where they are!”
“I don’t have anything!” I retreated, not letting them get into my personal space again and trying to find something that could be used as a weapon.
“I don’t believe you. You’re a fucking nurse. I know you have to have something here.”
“I don’t?—”
The skinny one slashed out his knife at me, startling me. As I reared back, the first man shoved me down to the couch, slapping me again. “You do, you lying bitch.” Leaning down, trying to catch my arms as I fought back, he snarled and panted. “I’ll rape you until you tell us. I’ll fuck your pussy until it’s ripped, bitch. You want that? You wanna tell me you don’t have anything here and see what happens when you lie to me?”
No! His words elicited stark terror. Rape me? No. I couldn’t survive it. Not again. I just couldn’t.
“You pay up one way or another, you fucking bitch!” the other man said as he kicked over drawers he’d yanked out from the side table. “With your cunt or with drugs. Now which is it?”
The stinky man forcing me down to the couch reared his arm back to punch me. I tensed, trying to block him and hit back, readying for the impact of his knuckles on my face.
“Don’t hurt her!”
My heart seized. My lungs locked in all the air I’d shallowly pulled in.
No! Ramon? No!
But I’d heard his voice. It was my sweet son, shouting at these men from the back of the house. He was here, not next door. He wasn’t safe. He was here and in danger to stand up for me.
The man hovering over me blocked my view, but I heard the stampede of his little feet running over the floor. He’d rushed out into the living room from my bedroom. In a flash, the motion blurring by too quickly for me to track it, my sweet son, the reason I lived, darted out.
“Don’t hurt her?” The druggie who kicked our things about snatched my son as he ran out to stop this other brute from hitting me.
“No! Don’t!” I wrestled and squirmed, lifting my knee to ward off this asshole so I could get free.
The rabid need to kill these men lit a fire within me. Rage. Fury. White-hot anger burned so hot through me with this urgency to defend my son. Ramon relied on me. He counted on me, the only person he had in this world, to save him and protect him. Motherly instincts flamed so that I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t think. I was no longer able to even rationalize anything. All my energy, sparking with a desire to make these men suffer, was funneled down to protecting my baby from a single second of harm.
Like the Devil, laughing and sneering, the man caught Ramon in his arms. Holding him close as he flung out his arms and tried to kick out of his grip, the man narrowed his eyes on me. “I thought you had a kid. This will work even better.”
“Let him go!”
“Give us the drugs.”
Spittle flew from my mouth as I clenched my teeth and sucked in air to scream. “I don’t have any!”
“And I think you’re lying.” He held Ramon tighter. “And you can watch me take your son away and sell him, bitch, if you don’t listen to me now. I want the drugs.”
“Give them to us,” the other man said as he lifted his arm to strike at me again.
No. They couldn’t do this. It was asinine to think that just because I was a nurse, I would have drugs. It was ludicrous, a stupid, idiotic assumption that these bastards would believe, but they were too far gone, high or in the throes of withdrawal and rooted in malice, to stop and realize how wrong they were to insist that I had drugs here.
He tugged at my pants, ripping the seams of the scrubs. “I’ll prove it. You don’t believe me? I’ll show you. I’ll fucking take this cunt right now. Right in front of your son before we sell him on the streets if you don’t?—”
“Let her go.”
The man’s grimy fingers stopped clawing at me. Heaving hard breaths, I watched as he narrowed his eyes and tilted his head.
Ramon continued to kick out in my peripheral vision, but the man who captured him turned toward the back of the room.
In the frenzied seconds that passed since Ramon darted out to save me and stop the druggie from hurting me, someone else intervened.
Stepping out from the shadows was none other than Diego. He stalked forward, his fisted hands ready to fight back.
I wasn’t alone.
I wasn’t defenseless.
He was here, ready to help.