AllFreeNovel
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He’s swearing. A lot. I wait for him, and finally, he stops. Hector is no Angel. If he’s swearing, I will wait him out. He has been nothing but kind to me. I’ve put him through so much, and he doesn’t deserve this mess I’ve landed him in.
When he finally starts speaking with words other than curses, his voice sounds thick as if he’s been scared out of his mind.
He’s not angry; he’s petrified.
“Liv,” he keeps saying, “Liv, you’re alive.”
“Chill out, ok? Just breathe,” I tell him, rolling my eyes, but his voice is clogged with tears, and that shakes me up. I imagine what he must have been through, and my heart stops. The palace must be freaking out, and he’ll bear the brunt of it. “I’m fine, don’t worry. I-I’m sorry,” I tell him, although I’m not sorry at all. But I am sorry for what I’m putting him through. “I didn’t mean to do that to you. Is he… are they very horrible to you?”
Hector sniffles a little. “Do you think I even care about that? I’ve been getting crap all my life, Liv, that’s nothing. It’s you. I thought… I thought I’d lost you.”
His voice breaks.
“No,” I say. “I lost myself.”
“Don’t—don’t say that.” He clears his throat. “Look, let me come get you, ok? I’m so scared right now. I can’t even t-talk. Please, Livy.”
“Hector, look, I—”
“I can’t lose you,” he says again, and it kind of sounds personal. Not in a I-can’t-lose-you-because-my-superiors-will-have-my-head kind of way. In a I-can’t-lose-you-because-I-can’t kind of way.
Which is weird. I don’t know what to think of it, or if I’m imagining it. And then I realize what’s happening: they are tracing my phone, aren’t they? He’s stalling, buying time, to allow his team to track my location down. How dumb am I? He is keeping me on the line, so they can trace the phone call. I quickly disconnect the call and turn the phone off. I hand it over to Marco, before they activate it remotely again.
I know it takes a few hours for the secret service to be able to do that.
“Could you take that somewhere in the woods and bury it for me, please?” I ask Marco. “I don’t want to see where you put it, because I might go and dig it back up.”
He takes it reluctantly.
“Are you sure?” he asks me.
“Yes.”
“Right.”
He disappears with the phone into the trees, and comes back a minute later. A chill runs down my spine. I’ve done it. I’ve officially done it. I’m free.
I am so dead. Literally.
“Come on,” he says, taking his seat in front of me again.
***
We ride for a while down to Vermont, the road drowning in a carpet of red leaves and golden light. The water gleams in the sunlight as we approach the waterfront, and I lean my cheek on the leather jacket on Marco’s back. It’s freezing cold.
“Wanna go on the water?” Marco screams over his shoulder at me, and the wind snatches the words out of his mouth.
“Yeah!” I scream back.
So we go canoeing.
***
Canoeing is my new obsession.
I can’t get enough of it: the quiet, the calmness of the glassy water, the crisp wind on my cheeks. The absolute solitude of it. The beauty. As we glide across the lake, our canoes parallel, I just close my eyes and breathe in the feeling of being absolutely alone.
Absolutely free.
