Chapter 32 Marfil #4
Sebastian swept me into his arms and was carrying me to the car before I had time to react.
He deposited me in the passenger’s seat and jumped behind the wheel, starting the engine and pressing the accelerator all the way down.
“Fuck!” he shouted at the steering wheel.
His eyes darted between the rearview mirror and the side mirrors as he turned the wrong way down a one-way street and then barreled through a pedestrian area.
“I want to go back, take me back!” I shouted. “They shot Tami!”
“I know, I know,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. “There’s an ambulance on the way. You couldn’t stay there, Marfil; they were going to kill you.”
“Take me back!” I shouted hysterically, pulling at the handle to open the door but finding it locked.
“They’ll kill you!” he shouted, shutting me up.
I looked frightenedly in the rearview mirror, but the car was shaking so hard that I couldn’t really see, forcing my hands to grip the armrests.
What was going on? Did we have a flat tire?
“Hey, relax…” Sebastian said, now speaking more calmly.
Seeing the concern in his eyes, I understood that the car wasn’t shaking; I was. My entire body was trembling violently, and my teeth had begun to chatter. Someone had tried to kill me, and they shot Tami instead. She could be dead…
Sebastian sped up a ramp to a parking garage with sweeping views of the city skyline. He stopped the car, took a cell phone out of the glove box, and quickly dialed a number. Someone answered almost instantly.
“They just hit us… Three men, they couldn’t have been over thirty years old… Yes, outside the Dream Downtown… She’s fine,” he said, briefly glancing at me. “Talk to Suarez to get the security camera footage, the one from the left elevator… Okay.”
I tried to follow that conversation, but my brain kept replaying the scene I’d just witnessed, the images of my friend bleeding out on the ground. I took out my cell phone and called Liam, but it went straight to voicemail.
“Take this,” Sebastian said, removing his sweater and forcing me to put my arms in it.
Even in my current emotional state, I couldn’t help but notice it smelled like him.
“You’re in shock; try to calm down. Tami is going to be all right; I’m sure of it,” he said, cranking the heat to its maximum setting as he checked the time on his watch.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I’ve seen a lot of bullet wounds. Hers wasn’t one of the bad ones.
” I looked at him, terrified. He pushed his seat all the way back and pulled me onto his lap, wrapping his arms around me.
“You’re safe,” he said as I buried my face in his neck and my tears stained his clothes.
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.
I promise.” He rubbed my back until we heard the sound of a car coming up the ramp behind us.
“Stay here,” he ordered, placing me back in my seat before he got out of the car and closed the door behind him.
I watched through the side mirror as a man as tall as Sebastian greeted him with the same serious and intimidating demeanor as Sebastian’s.
What was happening?
Five minutes later, the man left, and Sebastian got back in the car beside me.
“Who was that?”
Sebastian started the car and drove away. “No one.”
“No one?!” I shrieked in disbelief.
Sebastian seemed much more concerned with the messages coming into his cell phone than with explaining things to me.
“Stop the car!” I said, looking down at my hands, which wouldn’t stop shaking.
He ignored me.
I pulled at the door handle, and this time it opened.
I jumped out as he slowed to a stop. I had just seen two men dead at my feet.
I had just seen my best friend bleeding out on the ground because of me.
I now knew how my mother must’ve felt right before she died, the way anyone feels when they have a gun pointed at their head.
Having gotten out alive only made me more scared because it meant that this was truly just the beginning…
Why hadn’t I listened from the start? Why did I have to be so stubborn, caring more about having a normal life than my safety… my friends’ safety?
Sebastian jumped out of the car and raced over to me.
“What the fuck is happening?” I shrieked, turning on him.
Sebastian lifted his hands, trying to calm me, as if I were a frightened animal he had to approach with caution. “Marfil, I know you’re scared, but we have to get out of the city.”
I looked at him, open-mouthed. “What?! No!”
“There are a lot of things you should know, and I promise I will explain everything, but we have to go, now.”
“Where?”
“I’ll take you to my apartment in New Jersey. I’ll explain everything there.”
I wiped my tears with my forearm, looking at him mistrustingly. “I want to talk to my father,” I said in a broken voice.
“You will, I promise, but we have to go.”
I looked around. New York suddenly seemed menacing and dangerous.
This city, which had taken me in two years ago, welcomed me with open arms, helped me discover who I was, had now betrayed me.
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to lock myself away somewhere and wait for…
what? For them to stop trying to kill me?
I got back in the car and managed to connect with Liam on the way to New Jersey. Tami was in the operating room; the bullet had perforated a blood vessel, but they were doing everything possible to save her life.
I cried for the entire forty minutes it took to reach Sebastian’s apartment as he checked the mirrors nonstop, more nervous than I’d ever seen him, continuously throwing me worried glances.
Sebastian’s building was located on the corner of a quiet street. There was a park across from it and a coffee shop on the corner.
I followed him up the stairs to apartment 4B. Sebastian unlocked the door, and I walked into a small loft that, upon first glance, consisted of a large bed on one wall, a small kitchen, a couch, and a large TV. Several boxes were also scattered around, as if he’d recently moved in.
“You live here?” I asked, moving through a space that belonged to him for the first time.
“I did,” he said simply as he went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and rummaged for something in a drawer. “Drink this,” he said, handing me a pill.
“What is it?” I asked, mistrustingly.
“A sedative,” he replied as his eyes looked to my bloodied knees.
I hadn’t even realized that I’d hurt myself when I fell to the ground beside Tami.
“I’ll clean you up. Wait here,” he said, standing and moving into what I supposed was the bathroom, only to return a few seconds later with a first aid kit and started cleaning my scrapes.
“You didn’t tell me you were from New Jersey,” I said, trying, unsuccessfully, to keep myself from trembling.
Sebastian didn’t answer. He simply went to a closet and took out a thick gray blanket, which he then draped over my shoulders.
“You know exactly what’s going on here,” I said after he’d finished cleaning my wounds. He sat down beside me and looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. “You know who’s trying to kill me, and you also know what my father’s gotten himself into.”
“You should rest, Marfil,” he said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Why do I feel like what you know is going to destroy me?”
Sebastian looked at me unblinkingly. “Because it will.”