ONE EIGHTY

Gael moved to him slowly, his entire body moving like it hurt to even exist. He motioned for Dominic to sit on the chair by the window, and surprisingly, Dominic obeyed without a word, sinking into the seat with a grunt.

As Gael approached, I caught sight of Dominic's wound again—a raw, angry gash on his side that hadn’t been redressed since the previous day. Now, under the harsh yellow light of the room, it looked even worse. Red, swollen, and oozing slightly.

I winced without meaning to.

Gael knelt beside him, slowly unwinding the makeshift bandage. The air in the room grew even heavier, the silence thick enough to choke on.

And all the while, Tina lay still in the bed, her frail body trembling, her fever burning away at her strength second by second.

I stood there, watching it all, feeling the weight of everything pressing down on me—the fear, the helplessness, the unbearable ache of not knowing if we were too late to save her.

And as Gael worked, as Dominic gritted his teeth against the sting of antiseptic against raw, angry flesh, I knew one thing for certain:

The real battle hadn't even begun yet.

It would start the moment the clock struck nine.

And we had to be ready.

No matter what it cost.

Once Dominic was bandaged and Tina was cleaned up as best as Gael could manage, the room settled into a heavy, expectant kind of quiet. Dominic wasted no time shrugging into the shirt again, the fabric stretching tight over the bulk of his shoulders, his movements stiff with pain. He hadn't said a word about it, of course. He never did.

Tina, fragile as a paper doll, barely stirred when we shifted her to sit upright, her skin clammy and too pale under the light. I gently brushed damp strands of hair from her forehead, trying to soothe the feverish crease between her brows, swallowing past the lump forming thickly in my throat.

She needed something more comfortable, something easier to move her in for the hospital run Gael had promised us. She couldn’t be carried out there bundled in thin, bloodied linens.
I pressed a hand lightly to her shoulder—she was trembling again—and forced myself to pull away.

"I’ll get Isabella," I murmured, my voice barely a thread of sound.

I hesitated only for a second before slipping from the room.

The hallway stretched long and silent ahead of me, only the faint creak of the old wood floors under my bare feet breaking the stillness. Isabella had been locked away all day. Ever since the little talk we had in the morning, and after she had prepared breakfast, she and Adam had remained in her room, behind closed doors. I had felt terrible for the things I had said to her and she had just made it easier for me not to have to look into her face and see her hurt by the words I had said, but if I liked it or not, I had to now. 

I had wandered up to her door at least four, maybe five times throughout the day.  Each time, I found myself pausing with my hand raised, my knuckles barely brushing the wood, caught between knocking and eavesdropping like some guilty intruder.

Behind the door, I’d hear them—Adam’s tiny, piping voice, rising and falling in breathless little bursts of curiosity.
He was relentless, that sweet little boy. Asking question after question after question, the way only a child could:
"Why do you not have a child?"
"Why does your hair look like that?"
"Can you make me some pancakes?"
"Why do you have an accent like that?"
"Do you like dinosaurs?"

On and on, without a single pause for breath.

Sometimes Isabella answered—soft, clipped, weary responses that sounded thinner and more exhausted every time I passed by.  Other times, there would be a heavy, loaded silence, broken only by Adam's delighted, endless chirping as he tried to fill the quiet all by himself.  It was almost funny. Almost sweet.  If the rest of the world hadn’t been collapsing around us.

Once, around noon, when Dominic was pacing the living room like a caged animal, wearing a path into the floorboards with his heavy footsteps, I slipped upstairs and pressed my ear gently to Isabella's door.  Adam was rambling about different types of sharks—his high-pitched voice lilting up as he explained, in excruciating detail, how bull sharks could live in freshwater and saltwater.  I heard Isabella's soft, resigned sigh.
"Adam," she murmured in that lilting accent of hers, "I have not slept since yesterday. Please. Ten minutes, sí?"

But Adam, sweet and stubborn and utterly relentless, simply launched into a story about the time he'd seen a shark documentary on TV.  I pressed my forehead lightly against the wood and smiled, sad and small.  Even locked away, even trapped in the middle of this nightmare, Adam was still just a little boy trying to find a friend in the darkness.

The last time I checked—maybe an hour ago—Isabella had been trying to teach him some basic Spanish. 

"Repeat after me—hola."

"Hola!"

"Muy bien. Now—gracias."

"Grashus?"

"No. Gracias."

"Gracious?"

There had been a long, world-weary groan from Isabella after that, so full of despair that I had to press my hand against my mouth to stop from laughing aloud.

Now, as I stood outside her door once more, gathering the courage to interrupt whatever fragile peace they had built in there, I felt that same bittersweet pang deep in my chest. We needed her. We needed her calm, her steadiness, her willingness to move past things that should have broken trust. And the ugly truth was, I had been the one to fracture it. I had been rude to her, tossed cutting words at her feet like she was nothing more than an inconvenience, a burden dragging us down when she had only been doing what any decent human being would have done—defending family. I had acted as if loyalty meant obedience to me alone, as if her natural instinct to worry about her cousin somehow made her the enemy. I hated the memory of it, hated the sound of my own voice, sharp and commanding, stripping her of her dignity just because I needed someone to blame. Fear had wormed its way into my gut and twisted me into someone I didn’t even recognize anymore.

All day, I had wandered up here, passing her door like a ghost unable to find peace. Each time, I had told myself I would knock, would say something — anything — to make it right. But cowardice always clamped down on my throat at the last second, leaving me paralyzed. Instead, I had listened. Unintentionally at first. Then shamefully, deliberately, later. The sounds of Adam's voice filtering through the wood had been a balm and a blade — proof that some small scrap of normalcy could still exist, even after everything we had done. Even after the day we had stolen from him.

Adam was no fool. He was ten, not five — old enough to know when something was deeply wrong. He had no illusions about Dominic and me. In his eyes, we were kidnappers, plain and simple. Strangers who had snatched him away from whatever life he had known and thrust him into the middle of a nightmare. He hadn’t screamed or thrown tantrums like a younger child might have. Well, he had, not just as much as I expected. Instead, he had watched us with those wary, shuttered eyes, his mind clearly racing behind them, calculating and cautious. It made my heart ache in ways I didn’t know how to explain — how quickly he had been forced to grow up, how little choice he’d had.

Now, standing outside Isabella’s door, I pressed my ear slightly closer to the wood, guilt twisting deeper. Inside, their voices murmured in low, tired tones. Not the wild, excitable chatter of a younger boy, but the halting, careful questions of a child who didn’t yet know if he could trust the adult he was speaking to.

"...Why are you helping them?" Adam asked, his voice rough around the edges, as if he had been holding this question in for hours, maybe since yesterday. "They’re criminals, aren’t they?"

The silence that followed was heavy, almost suffocating. I could imagine Isabella sitting on the floor or maybe the bed, her head tilted slightly in thought, trying to find the right words. The truth was dangerous. Lies even more so.

"I do not know everything," Isabella said finally, her accent softening the hard edges of her words. "But... sometimes, people do bad things for good reasons. Or maybe not good reasons... but reasons they believe are right."

Adam didn’t answer right away. I could hear the creak of the mattress as he shifted, maybe drawing his knees up to his chest the way he always did when he was thinking hard.

"You think they had a good reason to take me?" he asked, voice low, filled with a rawness that made my throat close up.

"I do not know, cariño," Isabella said again, her voice steady but so terribly sad. "Maybe they believe they are protecting you. Maybe they are scared, too."

Another silence. He wasn’t satisfied. Of course he wasn’t. Adam was smart — too smart. He wouldn’t be soothed by vague reassurances the way a younger child might be.

"Do you know them?" he said after a long moment, a sharpness creeping into his tone that I had never heard before. "You’re just stuck here too. You’re just pretending to be nice so they don’t hurt you."

I pressed my forehead against the doorframe, squeezing my eyes shut, willing myself not to make a sound. The truth of his words — the rightness of them — carved me open from the inside. He wasn’t wrong. We had kidnapped him. We had forced Isabella into this, forced her to sit here and babysit a terrified boy while we played God with people’s lives.

"I am here because I choose to be," Isabella said softly, her words barely a whisper. "Not because they force me. And I am kind to you because you deserve kindness, Adam. No matter who brought you here. No matter what happens next. And yes, I know Eleanor, she has been very kind to me.”

There was such heartbreaking sincerity in her voice that it made something rupture inside me. She wasn’t just saying it to soothe him. She meant it. Even after the way I had spoken to her this morning — cruelly, unfairly — she was still offering Adam something precious: dignity. Love. Safety.

"Would you help me if I tried to run away?" Adam asked after another long pause, and his voice was trembling now, teetering on the edge of something too big for a child to carry alone.

My whole body locked up. My chest squeezed so tight I could barely breathe.

Inside, Isabella answered after a long, aching beat. "I would listen to you," she said finally. "I would not let you be hurt. I would do everything I could to keep you safe."

"You wouldn’t tell them?" Adam pressed.

"I would not betray your trust," she said quietly. "But I would also want you to be safe. Running away... it can be very dangerous. And right now, everything outside these walls is dangerous."

Adam was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was smaller, more fragile. "I don’t even know where home is anymore," he admitted. "I don’t know if anyone’s looking for me."

Tears burned hot and fast behind my eyes. My hand was still clenched around the doorknob, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t open the door. Couldn’t bear to face him — or her — after hearing that.

Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know that his mother was standing outside this door, desperate to protect him, desperate to fix the broken pieces of his life. He didn’t know that the people he thought were monsters were the people who had loved him before he even knew what love was.And he was right not to trust us. Because love wasn’t supposed to hurt like this.