by Stella Noir
I would take his wrath and his threats happily for the rest of my life if I knew it would keep Brooklyn safe. My mistake had been thinking I could keep her with me. That I could keep her safe. That she would be better off with me than she would be alone someplace where she could start a new life on her own.
I don’t even know what I was thinking. If I had found a safe place for her to live and had headed out on my own, my father would be following me around now and none of this would be happening to her. And she wouldn’t be married to her brother.
I looked down at my phone and noticed an email from an address I hadn’t seen in a long time. I didn’t open it right away. It felt like too much of a coincidence that he would be contacting me after the shootout, and after almost a year of no contact whatsoever. But finally I decided to see what he had to say.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the email was short and to the point. It wasn’t Dad was all it said, but what the point was, I wasn’t completely sure. I didn’t even know how to interpret what I had read. If he was referring to the shootout in Manado, I couldn’t fathom how he knew about that, unless Grady told him. So now I had to worry about whether I was being played by Grady.
Now, instead of just being mad at myself for how things were turning out, I was angry that there wasn’t a person on this planet, other than Brooklyn, that I felt like I could trust. I felt like my whole world was collapsing around me, and I had no way to stop it. I had nowhere to go and no one to turn to in order to make sure Brooklyn didn’t disappear off the face of the earth.
But then a name popped into my head. Gina LaDonna, the designer who Brooklyn had been working with since we left the villa in Italy. She was an old friend and I knew that she adored Brooklyn. If she could take Brooklyn for a couple of months while I figured things out, then maybe I could get everyone off my tail. Maybe we could find a place to settle down so that we weren’t on the run on the open water with people shooting at us at every port. I had to do something, because I couldn’t be selfish and risk Brooklyn’s safety any longer.
I was still wide awake when I crawled into bed next to Brooklyn. I could hear her even breathing in the dark and was glad she was able to get some rest. After the email from my brother and everything that had happened in the last few days, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to sleep a wink. I kept rolling everything over and over in my head. The attack in Manado was a huge concern, but it paled in comparison to losing my one contact with the world.
If Grady had turned against us we were both as good as dead. But if Lucas and Grady were talking, why would Lucas have sent me an email telling me it wasn’t my father that had sent the men to Manado? What did he have to gain? What kind of game was he playing?
Suddenly I heard a noise out in the hall outside the bedroom door. The door was open, but the room and hallway were both pitch black so I couldn’t see a thing. My entire body surged with adrenaline as I heard another very faint squeak, like weight being put on one of the floor boards.
I was terrified any sound either of us made would cause whoever was out there to come rushing in and start firing at us, but I had to get Brooklyn off of the bed. I put my hand over her mouth and felt her jerk awake, then whispered that there was someone in the room and to not make a sound.
I pulled her across the bed and onto the floor on my side of the bed, which was across the room and on the side farthest away from the door. I pushed her under the bed and just as I did the gunfire started. I had two guns in the bedroom, one in my nightstand drawer and one that I kept under my pillow ever since the recent shootout. I stayed behind the bed while I pulled the gun out from under my pillow and started firing into the blackness.
All I could see were the blasts of light coming from the direction of the gunfire across the room and I hoped they couldn’t see any more of the room than I could. I shot blindly from behind the bed until I was out of ammo and I heard a couple of bodies drop, but I had no idea how many of them there were.
I heard some names being called out barely above a whisper, I assumed by what sounded like the one remaining shooter, because there were no responses.
I pulled my second gun out of the nightstand drawer and braced myself with my gun aimed at the door when I turned the light on. I knew it meant that I would be visible, but since Brooklyn was hidden I figured it gave me a better chance of getting rid of whoever had boarded our yacht.
Light flooded the room and my brain quickly took in the surroundings. Blood splattered on the wall next to the door, two bodies in wetsuits on the floor, and a man in a black wetsuit standing three feet away from me. Luckily he was momentarily stunned by the sudden blast of light that filled the room, and I got a shot in before he landed on top of me.
But that didn’t seem to slow him down much. His fists came raining down on my face, but I was able to get a knee under him and kick him backward. I had lost my gun after his first punch and when I turned to find it he grabbed me by the shoulders and flipped me onto my back again.
He wrapped his hands around my throat as I pushed up at his face, trying to dig my thumbs into his eyes, but he twisted his head away and somehow simultaneously tightened his grip around my neck. I tried desperately to pull his hands loose, but no matter what I did nothing helped.
I tried to fight the feeling of losing consciousness. In the haze I kept seeing Brooklyn’s face and I couldn’t accept that my father would win. There was no way I could let this happen. There was no way I was going to lie here and die and let Brooklyn get squirreled away somewhere and used as some goddamned sex toy.
The man on top of me dipped his head down closer to my face for a moment and I took the only opportunity I was going to have to stun him. I balled both of my fists together and brought them down on top of his head as hard as I could, which dazed him long enough that I was able to twist my body a bit and throw him off of me.
I knew exactly where my gun was now, so I reached behind my head and grabbed it without even looking, then in one swift move brought it in front of my face and blew the guy across the room.
I lay there for what felt like an eternity, gasping for breath and taking in the carnage. There was blood everywhere, as well as bits of skin and bone fragments dangling from the delicate, off-white curtains and blasted into shapes across the walls. The part of the white comforter I could see from my position on the floor was sprayed with uneven patterns of red dots, and the carpet was a mess of huge splotches of blood and guts.
I heard Brooklyn’s tiny voice from under the bed. She had stayed hidden under there and watched the whole thing from a couple feet away.
“Adrian? Are they all gone?”
I turned my head and my heart sank as I looked into her horrified eyes. I couldn’t keep letting this happen to her.
“Yes,” was all I could muster up the energy to say.
“You’re covered in blood,” she said as she scooted across the floor and crawled out from under the bed. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. The guy got a few good punches in, but I didn’t get shot.”
“Are they your father’s men?”
I looked at the guy lying on the ground across the room with what was left of his head propped up against the wall.
“Yeah, I recognize him. He was one of my father’s security guards.”
Brooklyn straddled my body and helped me into a sitting position. We sat there on the floor with our arms wrapped tightly around each other for a long time. Every time Brooklyn took a breath I could feel her body shake. I was still too stunned to do anything but bury my head in her hair and hold onto her.
“What are we going to do, Adrian?”
“I don’t know. I can’t even think straight right now. As soon as it starts to get light outside I’m going to see if I can spot the boat they came in on. See if there is anyone aboard.”
“You’re not going out there, are you? You can’t, Adrian! Please! Let’s just get out of here!”
“And keep running
until they catch up with us again? I’ll never be able to sleep after what happened tonight.”
“What if we find some place on land to hide?”
“I don’t think it will make any difference where we hide. They’re tracking us somehow. I got an email from Lucas last night, but now I know he was lying. Everything is a big joke to him. Even my life.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it wasn’t Dad. I’m assuming he was referring to the shooting in Manado. But that’s all he said so I don’t know for sure.”
“But how did he know?”
“The only person that could have told him is Grady.”
“Oh no! He wouldn’t have done that, would he?”
“There’s no other explanation. I don’t talk to another living soul on the planet,” I said as we got up off the floor and looked around the room.
“I’m gonna carry these bodies out and throw them overboard to begin with.”
“Okay, I’ll start cleaning everything up in here,” Brooklyn said with a horrified look on her face as her eyes moved over the bits of skin and bone that would need to be cleaned up somehow.
“No, don’t. Let’s use the guest room for now. I think we should ditch this yacht in a small port somewhere and figure something else out. I just need some time to think.”
I hoisted one of the bodies up onto my shoulder and carried it up and out onto the deck, then threw it overboard. I debated about whether to keep anything the men had on them, their guns or their walkie talkies, but in the end decided to get rid of everything. I didn’t want to risk any kind of tracking device staying onboard.
And finding their communication devices led me to believe there probably was someone on the boat they came in on, so I decided to get as far away from that spot as I could before the sun came up. I had no way of knowing how they were tracking us, and could only hope we would be able to slip away unnoticed and get a bit of a head start.
As I sat in the cockpit at the helm, drinking a very large glass of whiskey and trying to figure out the best course to take, I stared at the email from my brother. I still couldn’t believe he was doing this to me. That he had turned against me along with my father. I didn’t understand what I had done to him to deserve this.
I knew he was jealous of me on some level, and had been since we were kids. But I had always figured it was harmless competitiveness on his part. I had no idea he would take it to this level and try to kill me. But then again I never in a million years had imagined my father would pull a gun on me himself. The memory of that moment was almost unreal.
After a couple drinks too many I decided to email him back. I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, but I had to ask. I wanted to understand how we went from best friends to complete enemies.
I asked him if this was all a joke and if I was just a joke to him, then sent it and lay down on one of the vinyl-covered booths in the galley.
BROOKLYN
A fter I finished moving all of our clothes and anything else we might need from the master bedroom to the guest bedroom, I went out into the main cabin to find Adrian. It was light out now and it looked like the auto pilot was set because Adrian wasn’t at the helm. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere in the main cabin.
I walked out onto the deck and felt a twinge of sadness when I saw him. He was laying on one of the deck chairs with a blanket over him. His face was still covered in blood, and as I approached his eyes slowly opened.
“You look like hell,” I said, brushing his hair off his forehead. “Why don’t you go take a shower and get in bed? I got the guest bedroom all fixed up.”
“I need to talk to you, Brooklyn.”
“About what?”
“About you going away somewhere for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you need to go and live somewhere away from me. Where you’ll be safe. I can’t keep you safe, Brooklyn. I’ve tried but I don’t have the recourses they do. I can’t fight them and I won’t let them have you.”
The sea was still relatively calm, but the boat rocked a little, which caused an empty glass to roll out from under Adrian’s deck chair. I picked it up and held it in my hand, watching the legs of the remaining residue of whiskey run down the side of the glass.
“Adrian, you’ve been drinking and you’re upset. You’re not thinking straight—”
“I am thinking straight. I’ve been thinking the same goddamned thing for weeks now and it’s just this morning I’ve come to the realization that there is no other option. If they come back … if they kill me, Brooklyn, do you know what is going to happen to you?”
“Yes,” I said as I looked out across the gray water.
The sky was overcast and at the horizon it was almost impossible to see the separation between the dark cloud cover in the sky and the charcoal gray of the water. It seemed so long ago now when I was taken from in front of the NYU library and woke up in the pitch black, barred dungeon where Adrian’s family kept the girls. I knew if the man that bought me got his hands on me I would be back in the same situation, only that time in the caverns under the villa might be the fairytale version. It’s entirely possible I could wind up much worse off than that.
“Someone is going to take you and hide you away, and no one will know you are there. If I’m dead no one will come looking for you, Brooklyn. And you will never get away. Ever.”
I looked back at Adrian as tears filled my eyes. I knew he was right, but I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving him.
“I don’t want to go anywhere without you, Adrian. Why can’t we go together?”
“I’m going to try and hide you. And then I’ll switch boats and take off on my own. Hopefully they’ll follow me and I can throw them off. Then maybe after six months or so things will have calmed down a little.”
“Six months! No, Adrian! I don’t want to be away from you for six months. Where would I go?”
“You can stay with Gina. I already talked to her and she said she’d be happy to have you. There’s no connection between you and her, not that they can trace. Grady knows you have a friend you work with, but he doesn’t know her name or where she lives. He knew you met her in Manado, but for all he knows she lives in Indonesia, not Italy. It’s the perfect solution, Brooklyn. It’s not only the perfect solution, it’s the only solution.”
“But why? Why can’t you come too?”
“I don’t want to risk it. And I don’t want Gina any more involved than she already is. If I can get you to her, she’ll take you on her private jet and you’ll be safe, Brooklyn. All I want is for you to be safe.”
“But I want you to be safe too, Adrian. I don’t want you to be out here all alone.”
“What I’m hoping is that, if they are watching, they’ll see you leave but they won’t be prepared to follow you. Gina is going to use rentals, a hired plane and car, so that they can’t be traced back to her. Even if they can track the plane to Italy they won’t be able to track her once she’s landed. If I can pull this off you’ll disappear and they won’t have any idea where to look.”
“So you think your father’s men are going to know where we are no matter where we go? Even if we did this together?”
Adrian didn’t say anything for a moment. He elevated the chair so he was sitting up, and he straddled it with his legs, resting his elbows on his knees with his head in his hands.
“It’s not just my father who’s been following us.”
“But you said you recognized the man in the bedroom.”
“Yes, he worked for my father, but … I got another email from Lucas. Last night after I dumped the bodies I couldn’t stop thinking about his email and why he sent it. I couldn’t figure out if he was taunting me or what the hell kind of game he was playing. So I emailed him back and asked him that exact question.
“He replied pretty quickly and told me there was no joke. That he knew something had happened because one of his men let him know he had seen some communication on t
heir servers that made him suspicious. Lucas figured it was me trying to get information and he was curious about what was going on with us, so he asked our father what was happening with the search.
He told Lucas someone else had found us in Manado. That his men were there and they watched the whole shootout go down, but they weren’t part of it. Someone else has been following us all along. I suspected it but I wasn’t sure, although I am now. It might have even been this other person who left the note in our hotel room in Manila.”
“Do you have any idea who it is?”
“No, but Lucas said he’s going to find out for me. He said he doesn’t even know who my father made the arrangement with, who he sold you to, but he said that’s who it is. Whoever bought you is trying to find you, and I can’t let that happen.”
“Then come hide at Gina’s with me! Please, Adrian!”
“I need to do it this way. I need to make them think you aren’t with me anymore. They don’t want me. It’s you they’re after. But they know how to find me.”
“What do you think you’re going to do, kill them all?!” I yelled. I suddenly realized what it was Adrian wanted. It wasn’t to lead them away from me, it was to kill them without having to worry about me being in the line of fire. “Do you really think you can fight off two armies of men? Adrian this is insane!”
“I’m not going to fight them, Brooklyn. I want to throw them off so that they don’t know where to look for you.”
I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t. I knew above all he wanted to protect me and ultimately the only way to do that, to make sure we were safe, would be to kill the people who were after us.
I didn’t know what to think. It all sounded insane to me, but at the same time I knew neither of us was safe any longer. I didn’t have any other ideas, other than Adrian coming with me, which is what I wanted more than anything.
“I don’t want to be without you,” I said in a quiet voice with tears tickling the corners of my mouth. “When is all of this supposed to happen?”
