Chapter 7
Sophie/Cara
“Sonya tells me this is your first time here.”
A fist strikes the hanging bag beside me, a jarring sound that reverberates through the gym. The owner’s grin hints he noticed my flinch. Around me, young and old alike are drenched in sweat, lost in their own worlds. I stand among them, swallowed by oversized clothes, starkly out of place.
Time’s stretched on slowly. Often, I forget what days I'm living. That’s what happens when you close yourself off to the world. My arms are frail. Any mass I built when Xavier taught me to defend myself disappeared a long time ago.
I don’t even want to be here.
Even now that I’ve made it through the doors, the noises around me trigger a fight-or-flight response I used to be able to suppress. A grunt. Heavy breathing. The sound of bodies colliding in training. A heavyweight slammed into a mat. I wouldn’t be here at all… if it weren’t for the nightmares.
Horrors that bring me out of sleep to distort my reality.
At night, my mind deceives me. Shadows dance around the room. Strange sounds shuffle in from the patio. It’s always the same, and that kind of dread is paralyzing .
Months ago, I was on the steps leading to my apartment when I heard two men talking over café con leches.
Their conversation led me three blocks down to a dry cleaner’s shop.
My mouth opened, revealing that I wasn’t there to turn in any clothes, and within moments, I was shown an array of illegal weapons at my disposal.
Just like that, I felt like myself.
I felt the heavy weight of a gun in my hand, remembering the moment my husband armed me for the first time.
In the short time we shared as one, he made sure to teach me everything I needed to know to make that moment happen.
I selected a pistol I could hold and fire with weak arms. I handled the weapons effortlessly enough that the man didn’t think twice about selling them to me, even instructing me on how to acquire a government permit under the table.
But my nightmares have worsened. The gun doesn’t help.
Every night, I'm running from a hell I’ve already lived.
It’s why I’m here now, my eyes fixed on the gym owner, surrounded by unsuspecting souls who’ve swapped their desks for a chance to sweat.
This is something different for me.
The man is perceptive enough to catch onto how unamused I am by his approach and leans into the bag, crossing his arms. Curiosity touches his gaze.
“Tell me why you’re here, Cara.”
Why am I here? That’s the question.
What led me through the crowded streets into this dingy corner gym?
Was it that I needed a change?
Or was it that I’d run out of options… That if I didn’t do something, these demons would spool and unravel what remains of me until there’s nothing left.
Maybe I just want to hurt myself. Maybe it’s as sick as that.
“I want to fight,” I say. Either way, that’ s the truth.
“What are you interested in?”
My eyes dart to the two men wailing upon each other in the corner of the room. Following my gaze, Enrique blows out a long whistle. “It’ll take a long time to get there, girl.”
“I have time. Plenty of it.”
The body remembers.
My instincts are still there.
When my arms rise to intercept Enrique, predicting his next moves, I feel pride. My feet shuffle on the mat, and when I kick him, regaining the form I’d been taught years ago, he grins with intrigue. “You’ve been taught before.”
It isn’t a question, although it’s shaped like one.
Others near us are becoming interested in the naive, vulnerable woman with the hollow eyes, and because of that, Enrique isn’t as cautious as he was when we started.
He approaches me again, now with an audience gathered around the mat.
For a moment, I hear Xavier.
He is faster than you. You have to be smarter.
When Enrique lunges, I aim for the spots that can weaken a man while my husband’s voice guides me.
The throat. The eyes. The back of the knees. The groin.
To continue hearing him, I push my decreasing momentum despite how weak I’ve become, but I’m not as capable as I once was. My body never fully recovered from those months I wasted away. I haven’t tried to heal it, haven’t cared enough.
My back slams into the mat, my withered calves seizing from the unusual exercise. Once, I could have scrambled up, continued, but I can’t move. Enrique gazes down at me as our audience disperses. Pressing my hand over my pounding heart, I close my eyes .
I’ve waited so long to feel something, anything other than defeat.
This is what I’d been waiting for.
In the summer, the heat in Madrid is suffocating.
Even with the patio door open, the apartment is airless, filled with the stench of sweat as I pound a hanging bag with both fists. Jazz music seeps through the thin walls while chatter from the café below drifts through the windows.
Another summer.
Another year.
A life of putting one foot in front of the other, living minute to minute. I can't think back. I can't think forward, stuck in a never-ending relapse.
Mere movement from the window, and my hand is already gripping a gun, prepared to do my worst. The shuffling is just a couple on a small balcony of the four-bedroom hotel next door.
Leaving my place at the bag, I watch them sway together to the music drifting from the café.
The man brings a strand of her hair to his face, inhaling deeply.
Her arms instinctively surround him tighter.
I'm frozen, admiring their intimacy, an envious intruder to their life.
And just as quickly as the warm remembrance of love finds me, an ominous veil consumes that respite. Shooting across the bedroom on unsteady legs, I slam the shutters shut, securing them with finality.
Collapsing onto the mattress, glancing at the side that has never been unturned, reserved for a ghost of my past, I close my eyes, struck by something painful.
Loneliness. Isolation. Deprivation.
My hands hesitate as I make the decision to lay them on my body, sliding them underneath my damp clothes.
Trying to awaken my senses, evoke want through my fingertips, I imagine him.
His calloused hands wandering so softly.
His wet mouth settling between my legs. His labored breath warming the tender skin between my thighs.
The beating force in my chest begins to tick… tick… tick … a hesitant spur of life on its last embers. It could be the beginning. It could be the end. That’s normally how this goes.
Him. Think of him .
His lips sweeping roughly across the crooks of my thighs. His tongue dipping into the curve of my back, tracing a delicate line along my spine. His fingers grinding my hips into a soft mattress.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Boom. Boom. Boom .
More .
Trembling fingers lacing against a groaning headboard, his powerful chest settling onto my back, merging to my skin like night succumbs to day.
My mouth hangs, imagining his fingers guiding mine, spurring me towards a release he knows I need. A release he knows might save me. Yes… Yes .
A hundred pricks of his mouth against my skin, anywhere he can reach…
A pocket knife…
Pinned to my throat…
Teeth…
Shredding my skin, tearing my mouth open…
My hand freezes underneath my clothes.
A year ago—two, three years ago—I would’ve screamed. Sobbed. Curled into a ball for days at a time.
But I’m used to this horror now, unable to do a damn thing as my heart booms…
then ticks… like the last few grains of sand beaching to the bottom of an hourglass until the organ is barely beating and every memory I hoped would brin g me release interweaves so deeply with my nightmares that I cannot tell them apart anymore.
It makes me wish I never thought of him in the first place. It makes me never want to touch myself again.
Something is wrong with me. Deeply. And rather than understand it, I pull myself up, grabbing my things.
To exist, I must push Xavier Marcello back.
One foot in front of the other.
Minute to minute.
That’s how I make it through each day.
Police have closed off the streets around the apartment. This area is famous for its vibrant summer markets, drawing vendors from various places who crowd the sidewalks on both sides of the road. As I immerse myself in the throng, my eyes roam, my chest still tight, battling my inner demons.
Red carnations are in full bloom, their fragrance filling the air.
The scorching sun warms my back as I scale the length of the festival, appreciating the colorful rows of flowers.
Men hand bouquets to their partners while children braid, weaving the stems into playful bracelets on the sidewalk. Absolutely everyone is smiling.
Everyone but me.
“Paella?”
I nod, approaching the vendor, my hollow stomach crying out for substance.
I dig into my wallet, avoiding the picture of my marital bliss, grabbing some euros.
Someone plows into my back, sending my things onto the ground.
Dropping down, I scoop them up, glaring at the culprit.
His brown eyes gleam mischievously as he apologizes in Spanish, handing over my passport and keys. “Damn, you are hot .”
His friends behind him burst into laughter as he attempts to grab my hand. He blinks in surprise at how quickly I’m turning, completely forgetting about the meal I was about to pay for .
“Lady!”
He’s not Spanish. I could sense it, but when he spoke, I knew. He’s not from here.
“Listen! I want to talk to you!”
“Just talk to him! He’s nice, I swear! Just a little drunk!”
Keep moving. Lose him. Them.
Strangers gasp as I plow through them, passing cops that would be of no help to me—a woman here with a false name, a false identity. My hands shake the longer they follow me, my mind spinning to dark thoughts.
“She keeps looking back! Look, she wants us!”
This is happening.
This is what you’ve been preparing for.
Reaching into a compartment in my bag, I turn onto a side street, throwing the pack onto the ground as I conform to the brick wall.
With one jab of my arm, I open a baton. All breath escapes me as I hear footsteps, many of them.
My eyes squeeze closed, forcing back the triggers that could paralyze me.
My grip tightens on the baton as one of them rounds the corner, and I swing, the stick colliding with his shoulder.
It’s a searing pain, like a crack of a whip, and I’ve mastered how to deliver the assault acutely.
When the others reach him, I’ve already landed another crack to his throat, which sends him sprawling on the ground, wailing without the ability to make a sound.
Heaving heavily, the men ignore their friend to gaze at me in disbelief. Anger . Anger that I would dare. I’ve seen that look in a man’s eyes too many times. It doesn’t frighten me as it once did.
A couple of them bend to pull up their friend.
“What’s going on here?”
We all turn, finding one of those officer’s from the festival surveying the scene, rightfully suspicious.
Noticing my wallet on the ground beside the man I just wrecked, I snatch it up, passing the officer who asked the question, and rush back into the street.
My teeth are still chattering when I return to the courtyard, unable to hear Enzo the first time he calls out to me.
“I need to go inside,” I mumble, beginning up the steps.
“Someone came to see you today.”
My feet still. “ What ?”
No one knows where I live. I’ve made sure of it.
“A man?” I ask, unable to help how my heart swells in my chest.
Please, be him. I need it to be him.
Enzo shakes his head, wiping flour from his hands with a cloth. “A woman. She might still be there.”
My eyes dart to the entrance of my apartment, widening as someone shifts into view. Someone I thought was dead.
“Victoria.”