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It was dark, and I had to feel my way around. When I finally hit the landing, I could see light from the window above, which guided me the rest of the way to the door at the top of the stairs.
He tapped in another code, and the door pushed into a tidy but comfortable-looking studio. A small kitchenette, wide-openliving area, and what looked to be a small bathroom to the right. "Are we safe here?" I asked.
"Yeah. I'll call for Ryan in the morning. Come have a seat on the couch. I'll grab the first aid kit."
I shook my head. "I don't need first aid. I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You've got bruises and cuts. At least let me get you cleaned off."
"A shower is going to do the majority of that. Leave it."
But he ignored me. Instead, he came back with the first aid kit and a white washcloth, gently cleaning my face. His voice shook, and his hands trembled. "I'm so fucking sorry."
"Saint, you saved my life. If we'd gotten in the car, they would have shot us. If we stayed on the street, they would have shot us. You did what you could, and I'm still here."
"I just… I don't fucking know what's going on. I swore to myself I wasn't going to put another woman in danger."
His hands continued to shake, and I clasped them in mine, bringing them down into my lap. "Hey, look at me. This, this is not your fault. You didn't do this. Lay the responsibility at the feet of the real perpetrator. Don't go taking on any shit that's not yours. I'm not Elise. She made her own decisions, and there were consequences to her decisions. Those don't fall on you."
"But I-I promised I would keep her safe too. I believed everything she told me about her life, and I promised I'd keep her safe."
"It's not on you. Her decisions made her culpable. You can't take that on, and you can't keep looking at me like I'm her. I'm just a girl who's not quite sure what she did wrong."
His arms wrapped around me then, and he tugged me up from the couch onto his lap. He held me close and quietly murmured, "I promise, I will keep you safe. I promise."
But even with his whispered words, I knew the truth. He couldn't keep me safe. This was going to get so much worsebefore Antonio Igno caught up with me and mum’s past mistakes that haunted me.
Kaya
Saint had been holding me for a long time. I had no idea if it was several minutes or hours, but I stayed tucked on his lap, letting him hold me and holding on to him as well. We were going to make it out of here, one way or another. We were supposed to survive. We were.
She taught you to be a survivor.
"I remember this one time when I was six,” I said. “I wanted to know what I would do if I was ever separated from her."
Saint wrapped his finger around one of my curls. They were still damp, and there was hardly enough conditioner. But there wasn't much I could do. My hair would be a little dry, but I would deep condition it when we got home. In the big scheme of things, un-moisturized hair was not my biggest problem.
"We got on the Tube during the crowded rush hour, and she left me. I was distracted, playing with my doll or something, and she just vanished in the crowd and I couldn't find her. I was so scared.”
"She did what?"
"Oh yeah, my mother was always testing me. It was no wonder that as a teenager I just thought she was simply crazy. Which isn't something you're supposed to say, but I just assumed she was mentally ill. She had to be, because who would do that to a child, right?"
He resumed stroking and playing with my hair, and I kept talking. "I was frozen for a moment. Utterly frozen. And then I remembered all the drills, all the things she'd said to do if I evergot lost. At the next station stop. Get off. So I did. It was so packed. A sea of people and none of them looking down. And if anyone did look down, I'm sure they assumed that I was with a parent. But there was a map to the subway posted, and I checked where I was. I had to navigate my way back, and I did. I got right back on the train going in the other direction."
"Not a single person stopped you?"
"No. You know what it's like during rush hour. No one's paying attention to a kid."
"That's fucked up."
"I saw a woman with a stroller. She was white, but I figured nobody would notice if I just tagged along with her and her kids, and then I just walked out of the same station where we'd gotten on. I turned left. I was on my way home. "
"Fucking hell. Even outside the station, no one stopped you?"
I shook my head. "No. I didn't realize I’d gotten turned around until I was a quarter ofa mile down the way at this park we used to play at, and I realized I'd gone the wrong way. That really scared me. But I just kept hearing her voice in my head. ‘Be brave, be strong, make it happen. You can do anything to survive.’ So after a turn on the swingandone on the slide, I headed home.”
Saint chuckled, and I could feel it through his chest. "Of course. You just needed a little fortification, a little dopamine hit before you had to do something hard."
