Chapter 9
Niamh (Jessie), 11
That first night, stuck inside an alien basement with a boy who is not only older than me but also a complete stranger, I try to look at my surroundings with some sort of rational mind. There is but one bed, a double, but one we’re expected to share all the same. We both approach it nervously, with my fingers fidgeting with one another. He tries to smile reassuringly, like Mom did on my first day of school. He then throws over a shirt, one of his, before telling me I can wear it to bed. I nod but make no move to do anything other than just stand here.
“Do you want me to sleep on the floor, Niamh?” he asks, but when I look around, the floor is hard, cold, and with no sign of any comfort.
“No, it’s ok,” I murmur, not being fully convinced but falling into my natural instincts to be polite…even now. “I’m afraid to be alone anyway.”
“You know you’re safe with me, Niamh, you know that right?” he practically begs me, and I smile shyly before nodding. I’m not at all certain but he’s all I have, and I suppose I told the truth just now. I don’t want to sleep in this bed alone, knowing that the unhinged man from upstairs might come down to find me again.
We both get on the bed and crawl into our own little spaces, feeling awkward and very much aware of each other’s presence. However, with the silence that falls over us, I begin to forget about Jake and think of my mom instead. Is she looking for me? Is she crying and missing me as much as I’m missing her? Why hasn’t she come for me? Why haven’t they rescued me? Why didn’t she think to come and pick me up in the rain? Why wasn’t she there?
“Hey, Niamh, are you crying?” Jake asks, snapping me out of my thoughts, only to realize he’s right, I am crying and what’s worse is I can’t stop. “Come here, Niamh, let me hold you.”
His words fill me with fear, for what does that mean to him? Does he want to do the things the overly hormonal boys talk about at school? The stuff we saw in one of Tammy’s brothers’ naughty magazines. I don’t want that, I can’t!
I lie rigidly in my small, fetal position, unable to move for the abject fear crawling around my body, infecting my every cell. I hold my breath when he wraps his arms around my trembling arms and pulls me against his warmth, and then…that’s it. He does nothing more than hold me in his soothing embrace until eventually, my trembling subsides and my breathing calms.
“Do you trust me yet, Niamh?” he whispers.
“I don’t know…I want to,” I whisper back.
“I promise I won’t hurt you,” he says with a crack in his voice, “I just want someone who isn’t nuts to be my friend, Niamh.”
All I can manage to do is nod against his chest while quietly sobbing. I so desperately want his words to be true but I’m still so unsure. How can I ever be sure of anything ever again?
When I wake, it’s still dark. Even though we are in a basement, I can tell the difference between night and day, and it’s definitely still nighttime. Jake’s hand is still resting on top of my arm, but I cannot tell if he’s awake or not. But that’s not what’s concerning me. What’s making my breath hitch with fear is the sound of heavy breathing coming from the corner of the room where there’s a wooden chair. It suddenly scrapes against the floor with a squeak, making me gasp.
“Shh,” Jake whispers inside my ear without so much as a flinch, “don’t move!”
I hold my breath and squeeze my eyes shut while Jake holds me that much tighter. I don’t know how long we lie like this for, listening to him in the silence, just sitting there watching us with some weird kind of obsession. Eventually, he gets up and walks toward the bed, stands at the end for a moment, and finally walks up the stairs. It’s only when he shuts the door that I let myself breathe out again.
“What was he doing, Jake?” I whimper.
“Nothing,” he whispers, “he sometimes just comes to watch me sleep. That’s all, I promise.”
“I wanna go home, Jake,” I cry, “I don’t want to be here anymore!”
“I know, Niamh, and you will, one day,” he says, “I promise.”
“You make a lot of promises, Jake,” I say, to which he laughs.
“I guess I’ve never had someone to make promises to,” he says as I turn to face him. “I always wanted a sibling. Believe me, I have no interest in doing anything with an eleven-year-old, Niamh. I’m not a pervert.”
“Thanks, I guess,” I reply, smiling a little because his words have actually settled my nerves. “I always wanted a sibling too,” I begin before lowering my voice, suddenly feeling shy over asking him my next question. “Will you be mine until the day you take me home?”
“I’d like that, Niamh,” he says to me with a smile, one that I trust.
_____
Phoenix
When the last few customers walk out of the bar, leaving me, Javier, and Jake, all alone, I brace myself for the ensuing confrontation between me and my cousin. As soon I lock the door, I turn on Jake, more than ready to interrogate and do God knows what else to him. He’s cleaning up some glasses and doing a general turn-down ready for the next day; the idiot hasn’t even noticed that Javier and I are both staring at him. Not even when I walk up to the other side of where he’s standing. Javier, much like before, remains inside the booth we were sitting at, obviously choosing to remain impartial. I have a feeling he knows more than he’s letting on, which only tells me that whatever the reason for Jake’s weird behavior, it isn’t going to make me feel good.
“Woah!” he gasps when he finally looks up to see me glaring at him with a clenched jaw and a murderous set of eyes. “Can I help you, Cuz?”
“Yeah, you could say that, Jake,” I snap, “you can tell me why the hell you hired me to kill your ‘sister’ back there? Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the personal request and all, but I’m not sure Jess is going to feel the same way!”
“Argh, Christ!” He huffs out a long breath while putting his hands on his hips and staring point-blank at Javier. My nonchalant friend merely smirks and waves his hands in the air, very much enjoying the show. “Thanks, Javier, I thought you were on my side here.”
“Hey, ese, I am, but I couldn’t resist seeing this bastard’s reaction when you told him,” he says with a chuckle, “being cagey about this girl as he was.”
“Will someone start talking before I lose my shit?!” I shout before remembering Jess is out back and could well be listening in right now.
“Look, it isn’t what you think!” Jake rushes out as he marches around the bar to get to me, which could be an epically bad idea considering I’m seconds away from ripping his head off.
“What’s that, Jake? That you hired me to kill an innocent girl whom you claim to be your sister?” I frown at him, genuinely curious as to what this crazy reason is for this messed up situation. “Cos I know you haven’t had a real sibling before, but I gotta tell you, that’s not what you do as their big brother!”
“Lou and I got together one night, and I started telling her about Jess, minus a few details of course-”
“Lou?! As in my sister, Lou?” I spit as I step toward him, now feeling even angrier. “You better not be planning to hire someone to bump her off too, Jake. Christ, what is wrong with you?!”
“Shit, will you just listen, Phoenix?! Come on, you know me; I would never want someone like Jess to get hurt. God, if you knew what we went through together, you wouldn’t-”
“I’m trying real hard to understand, Jake, but all I see is your mouth moving without a lick of sense coming out of it,” I snap through my teeth just as Javier begins laughing in the background. “And you! I would shut your hole up too!”
The asshole laughs even harder and in such a way I want to march over and shut it for him, but right now, I’m slightly more interested in Jake and what his excuse is.
“Look, Jess and I didn’t see each other again after we managed to escape. We talked frequently on the phone, but she couldn’t face seeing me, and for a few years, I respected that decision. But every time I spoke to her, she sounded more and more lost, just stuck inside her parents’ house, because she’s too frightened to go outside, but also too angry to build any kind of relationship with them. She was a complete recluse!”
“So, you thought you’d end her life for her?! Fuck, Jake, that’s not your call to make-”
“No! I wanted you to save her!” he yells, and I’m so confused, I turn to Javier with a furrowed brow, hoping he might shed some light on what the hell he’s talking about. But all the bastard does is throw his hands in the air while turning his head to the side, thus conceding over how nuts this sounds.
“Me? You wanted me to save her? ME?!” I laugh because I’m the last person someone would think of to be all warm and fuzzy and heroic.
“Believe me, Phoenix, you weren’t my first thought, but then Lou began telling me how worried she was about you and how she thought you needed saving too. I guess we kind of came to the same conclusion and put two and two together to make-”
“A billion?!” I scoff. “Even if I can make some sort of peace with your insane matchmaking scheme, why the hell would you hire me to kill her?”
“Christ, Phoenix, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t harm a hair on her head; you’re like a brother to me!”
“You think you know me? Jesus, Jake, you don’t even know half of what I’m capable of.”
“I know one hundred percent you research your targets and Jessie’s story would have hit you hard. Put that together with how she is, her anxiety when you would have met her, there’s no way you would have done anything to harm her. I also knew that you would have brought her back here if you thought for one minute someone was after her. It was the only way I could think of to make you go to her!”
“So, let me get this straight, you and Lou thought Jess and I needed ‘saving’ and decided to set us up under the guise of being her hired killer?”
I glare at him like he’s gone absolutely insane; he at least has the decency to look a little sheepish about it.
“Si!” Javier laughs while clapping his hands behind me. “Well done, mi amigo.”
“What the hell were you two thinking, Jake?!” I yell. “Do you know how stupidly dangerous that was? Not to mention you had no right to lie to me like that…to set the both of us up like that?!”
“It was a little out there, granted, but-”
“But nothing, Jake!” I snap right in front of his face, now feeling beyond angry and frustrated. “Don’t you ever get up in my business again! Tell me, Jake, do you think Jess will understand when you tell her what you did? Do you think she’ll still rely on you? Still trust you?”
“Probably not,” he admits, looking down at his hands as he clasps them in front of him.
“And just so you know, you are not my brother, but even if you were, I’d still want to kick your ass right now!”
I watch him close his eyes, sigh, and then nod his head as though I just stuck a knife through his heart. I feel for him, a fraction, but the guy messed up and he needs to know that if he’s going to stick around with me, he can’t act like a brainless puppy.
“What are you going to tell her?” he asks in barely more than a whisper.
“Shit, I don’t know,” I huff, as I throw myself inside of the booth opposite Javier. “Where is Robert, Jake?”
“I-I don’t know,” he admits. “I didn’t go to Europe this month just gone, I went back to the town near to where he kept us all those years ago. I went to go and see if he was still there.”
“And…?”
“I couldn’t face going back to the site itself, but apparently, the houses are no longer there, it’s just overgrown woodland now,” he says with a defeated shrug. “I tried to ask around, do some research, but there was nothing to say if he got out or died down there. All I know is I beat him up pretty bad and left him on the floor while Jess and I ran.”
“Were there any windows down there?” I ask.
“There were a couple of tiny ones at the top of the room, much too small for him to climb through.”
“The door?”
“Solid wood, double-locked,” he answers.
“Neighbors?”
“No one for miles. No visitors either. Robert had the mail kept at a post office in the town.”
“Then,” I sigh, not completely sure of my decision, “we tell her nothing, for the moment. We can’t risk her running back to her parents and being under threat. Agreed?”
“Yeah, agreed,” Jake says, still looking like the little chastised puppy he is.
When I turn to face Javier, he simply shows me his hands, telling me he has my back on this one.
“Can you do some digging, Javier?” He nods, so I then turn back to my cousin. “Great. Jake, you need to give every detail you remember about Robert to Javier. And Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t try and have any more ‘good’ ideas!” I point at him until he nods in agreement, looking beyond pathetic, just as he should after what he pulled.
“Where are you going?” Jake asks when I get up and begin to walk out back.
“To double check your sister hasn’t overheard any of your plans to hire a hitman to take her out, just so she can hook up with him, you giant idiot!” I huff moodily before closing the door on the both of them, trying to shake it off.