Witness

The chill in those stone grey eyes was enough to turn the room to ice, a fire in his fiendish smile enough to keep the fearful spark in my heart ignited. The way my pulse was spiraling out of control, I was sure I would die of cardiac arrest if he didn’t kill me first. That is, if he didn’t kill us both first.

“You don’t want to do this, Damien!” I called out to him with a broken resolve, the only motivation to keep going standing at my side – Harry, shaking just as much as I was. “They know where we are! All of Scotland fucking Yard is coming to get us, to get you! And I swear to God if you let us go, I’ll let you run as far as you can and never tell a soul where you’re going.”

You could have heard a pin drop on that warehouse floor, the three of us were so silent. Harry was holding his breath beside me, staring at me with fearful, haunted eyes. He’d never been at the barrel end of a gun before, his life flashing before his eyes. Damien Trask stood just meters away, aiming his gun boldly at the center of my forehead.

“You can have a fresh start, Damien,” I breathed, trying my hardest not to beg for my life. I couldn’t give him that satisfaction.

“You can be anyone you want. You can be a witness too – they’ll let you go if you tell them everything you know. Just please, set the gun down. Set the gun down and run.”

I just needed to stall him in time for the police to arrive. They would have had to translate my message before my phone died, wouldn’t they? They had to be on their way to save us, to take Damien and all his misery to Guantanamo Bay and lock him away for the rest of his dark, dark days. I just needed to get him to talk to me. I just needed to get him to wait, just a little bit longer. They had to be coming for us.

Instead, the earthshattering sound of him cocking the gun resounded off the empty walls. My skeleton nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound, an audible gasp escaping Harry against his will.

“It’s not that easy, Mara June,” Damien muttered in his dark, sardonic voice, the smirk apparent in his tone. “This ends here.”

In the moment before you die, there is an inevitable amount of clarity. It’s as though every second of your life is laid out in front of you in a series of postcard sized flip books, the important moments played on a slide reel in a dark projection room. Everything else fades away and it’s just you and your life – your triumphs and your mistakes, your hopes and dreams and all the things you wish you could have done but never got around to. Everything else fades away as you fight to come to terms with it all, to develop some shred of acceptance before even that fades away and the rest of the world fades to black.

I remember the days that lead me to Holmes Chapel in the first place, the days running free in the city with my friends and even the darker days before those. I remember the days feeling lost in a city of only five thousand, unable to sleep at night out of fear of the man just feet away from me aiming his gun straight at my head. I remember meeting Harry – oh god, my Harry – and falling in love with him, despite trying my hardest not to. I knew then as well as I knew at that moment in the warehouse that nothing good could have come from us being together. And now, almost certainly after Damien killed me, he would kill Harry too.

I wished more than anything I could have kept him from this moment, from all of the terrible things I managed to drag him into with me. I wished more than anything I’d never seen those beautiful green eyes in the window of the bookstore, I wished I’d never woken up beside him in the morning, I wished I’d never known the sweetness of his kiss. I wished I could take it all back before it ever started.

Because while I couldn’t speak for me, I could speak for Harry. And I would have to say that between the two of us, he certainly didn’t deserve to die.

With that thought, my resolve crumbled, terrified tears slipping from my grasp and trailing down my cheeks. I gasped to keep the sobs in, squeezing my eyes shut to brace myself for what was bound to happen next. It would be as easy as turning off the lights. One moment I would be there, and the next I wouldn’t. It would be as easy as falling asleep.

“I’m sorry Harry,” I whispered, reaching for his hand. “I’m so sorry.”

In that moment, all I wanted was to be with him, all I wanted was to squeeze his hand and tell him somehow silently to run. Only when I reached out for his hand, I realized that it was no longer there.
Frantically, I glanced around me. Harry had shifted closer to Damien, posed with clenched fists at his sides and legs planted firmly onto the ground. Damien’s eyes were wild, hair unruly, lips parted like he was hungry for blood. My crazed pulse screeched to a halt at the sight of them, knowing exactly what Harry was going to do next.

“If you want to get to her, you’ll have to get me first.”

Damien’s malevolent laugh pierced my ears as Harry glanced over his shoulder once last time, urgency deep in his eyes. He was begging me to go, begging me to take his sacrifice. Trying desperately to tell me that he loved me.

“Run Mara!”

“Harry, no!”

My legs were frozen in place and the sound that echoed from the gun was deafening and the blood that splattered from Harry’s body was enough to make me scream out into the room. He fell backwards instantly, hitting the ground with a dead-hollow thud. I screamed until my throat was raw, making moves to run to him instead of run in the other direction.

But I didn’t make it very far before Damien turned the gun on me.