I feel dead inside.
Numb.
I still hear the pigeons flapping and cooing, but I am too numb to feel anything.
“Because what I found on your phone does not help your case,” she says.
My stomach plummets.
What did she find?
I'm scared, but I also don’t care.
I feel like someone took my soul.
I am exhausted.
Endless exhaustion.
Maybe I should just die here, like a pathetic idiot. Luisa always told me that being bright and shiny would get back to me at some point. Maybe that’s the punishment for infecting everyone with my toxic positivity.
I just lie on the hard ground. In this stinky hole that I might never leave.
“This is your last chance to give me the truth,” she says, squattingin front of me and showing me a laptop screen. The light burns my eyes because I am so used to the darkness by now.
“Your little friend won’t live any longer,” she says. And horror strikes me as I watch what they are doing to Luisa. I push myself off the ground. I hear her horrific screams resounding through the silence of the room I am in. I watch her being shot. In the leg. She screams. And so do I.
“Nooooo!” I scream. “Please—I don’t know anything!”
Tears flood my eyes as the man on the pulls Luisa up by the hair, gags her, rips her clothes off, fixes her and pulls out his penis.
I can’t let that happen.
“What do you want me to do?” I shout. “I’ll do whatever, but please stop it!!!”
Luisa’s muted screams rip me apart.
“You’ll do whatever, hm?” the woman asks.
“Yes, whatever, but please let Luisa go—she’s my best friend—she deserves better! She has already gone through so much, please!! I’ll do whatever you want!!! Take me instead!“
“You really don’t know anything, don’t you?” asks the woman in such a playful tone that I am genuinely scared of her. And I call myself crazy for it, but my background makes me ask myself what must have happened to her to be able to be so cold and abusive.
She probably went through hell. And I, the idiot, have somehow compassion with the woman who kidnapped and tortured me.
“I don’t,” I say desperately. “But if that man you’re looking for really was my father, I’ll help you find whatever I can on him, I'll give you whatever I can find in my mother’s stuff, but please, please let Luisa go.”
I can barely see the woman’s face in the low light from the laptop. She has her eyes narrowed in an unreadable expression.
“Come with me,” she says, grabs me and pulls me up. I feel as wobbly as it can get, and hold myself to the cold stone I have been leaning on.
“Walk before I change my mind,” she says harshly.
“Let Luisa go,” I say, not walking.
The woman stops.
“Walk now, or she won’t,” she says, annoyed.
