Witness

I awoke with my hands tied behind my back, lying on my side, my head resting in a pool of warm liquid.

Off to a great start.

Still only half conscious, I managed to roll myself upright only to find that my head was screaming with a searing pain. A gasp escaped me, my vision blurring with painful tears and the skin at my wrists sore from the zip tie that held them. When my sight returned, the first thing I saw was the puddle of blood on the ground, realizing that it must be pouring from where I was hit on the head.

And ended up… where, exactly?

My heart raced as I looked around the space around me – I was in an abandoned warehouse, it seemed. The floor was dusty with the remnants of what once was there, trails of boxes pushed out of the way inching across the cement to their new positions against the wall. The space was entirely clear, and also entirely sealed – the heavy metal door across from me was seemingly bolted shut.

Finally, realization sunk in. Damien had me. It finally happened. Damien had me. And suddenly, when I was right where he wanted me, he was nowhere to be found.

But then, another realization came to me. There was someone else in the room, several meters away. I could only see a pair of boots peeking out from behind a stack of boxes, but that was all I needed. I would know those ridiculous boots anywhere.

“Harry!” I called in a whisper, the sound of my own voice startling me in the silence. “Harry!”

Immediately, the feet shifted and I could hear the rustling of his body against the dust, his head finally appearing in my line of sight. I heaved a sigh of hesitant relief – he was badly bruised on his left eye, a gash graced his collarbone, his hair was matted with blood around the crown of his head, but he was nonetheless alive. I could hear the same sigh exude him as well before he opened his lips to speak.

“I was worried you were never going to wake up,” he breathed. “When I saw him bring you in, you were bleeding so badly…”

“Where is he, Harry?” I pressed. I had no concept of how big the layout of the warehouse was, where he could be hidden, if he was listening to our conversations. All of these things would play an integral part of how things played out. I writhed uncomfortably in my bindings as Harry glanced up at the second level balcony that surrounded us like an arena, seemingly finding nothing.

“Not here,” he muttered. “I heard a door close up there a while ago. I can’t be for sure, though. I’ve been pretending to be passed out for a while now.”

“God damn it, I’m so sorry,” I muttered, tears coming to my eyes. Harry had been beaten, tortured, by this monster of a man because of me, so badly so he felt he could no longer fight back. I fought back a sob, trying my hardest to be strong, but his eye was blossoming in navy and crimson and it was all my fault. I may as well have given it to him myself.

“Mara, now is not the time,” Harry asserted. “You can apologize later. Right now, we need to figure out how to get out of here before he comes back.”

“Right,” I murmured, sniffling one last time before setting my mind to work. I didn’t know if I could get up without my hands for balance, I was so light headed. Even if so, we would need our hands to get out of there – that door looked insanely heavy and my hands were tied in the most awkward position. I hissed as the plastic dug into my skin when I tried to tug them apart, attempting to break the seal. That wasn’t going to work.

I rolled forward onto my knees, struggling to get better leverage as I tugged apart. Harder and harder until I was fighting not to scream – but it was no use. I simply wasn’t strong enough. I needed a force going on the tie to break the tie itself. Leaning forward just slightly, I bent my arms to the best angle, where the tie felt the most taught. And then, with one forceful blow, I forced my arms apart while hitting them against my back at the same time.

And though I could feel the burn scorching my wrists, my hands came free.

“Brilliant!” Harry exclaimed, nodding excitedly. “How did you – “

But before he could even finish, I was on my feet, racing across the dust to his back. If I could spare him the pain, I would. My eyes smarted with the pain as I messed with the locking mechanism around his wrists until finally it broke free. It was almost as though a clock was ticking inside my heart, warning me to hurry the hell up. Glancing around the room, I found that Damien was still nowhere to be seen. And then Harry’s lips were on mine.

With his kiss, it felt as though he’d been gone for years, not just hours. It felt like I’d managed to resurrect him from the grave. I’d brought him back just in time. Though his lips tasted of sweat and blood, it was the sweetest kiss he’d ever given me. It was like falling in love all over again.

And as soon as it started, it was over – Harry was pulling away from me, glancing at the catwalk above. “We’ve gotta get out of here,” he insisted, scrambling to his feet and pulling me up with him. Without another word, we ran to the door, searching for any sort of handle or lock.

Only to be interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing from the level above us. My blood turned to ice as I frantically glanced at Harry, struggling more than ever to find a way to open the door before Damien saw us.

“Stop right there.”

Too late. My knees went weak at the sound of his voice, like fog on a lake in the evening, the colliding of two worlds. That room housed everything that was good in my life and everything that ruined it, encased in two beings now face to face in my presence. Damien had seen us.

“Oh Mara June, I wish you still played by the rules,” his voice came again, and I slowly turned to find him descending the spiral staircase in the corner. He looked even more bedraggled than he did in August on Canal, his gun still steaming against my skin. Harry inched closer to me protectively while I scanned the image of my killer as he approached me. His hair had grown, scraggly and limp around his sharp bones – he looked emaciated, like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His grey eyes were sunken, gaze hollow, lips cracked and bleeding. His hands were bloody. I could have cried.

“How?” I breathed, all of my questions embodied in one word. Damien grinned as he reached the floor, each footfall echoing off the pavement. He couldn’t resist an opportunity to reveal his brilliant criminal mind.

“Same way I got the encryption code to the Pentagon security system, the very case that Eric Spengler came after me for,” he responded coolly. “Algorithms. Code cracking. Patience. I had a lot of time on my hands, being dead and all. It didn’t take very long to figure it all out. Your pals at the O.E.O. need to complicate their protection methods a little bit. It was fun, seeing how hard they tried.”

“They’ll find us,” I responded shakily as he advanced. “It’s only a matter of time until they get here. They’re coming for you and you’ll get what’s coming to you. For Eric. For Amelia. For everything.”

“But Mara, don’t you realize that everything I do, I do for you?” he questioned, finally stopping just yards from us. “I’m simply trying to give you some sort of sense of identity before I take everything away from you, the same way you took everything from me.”

“But I didn’t take anything from you!” I protested weakly, tears springing around my lash line. “You’ve only taken from me!”

Damien shook his head, taking another step closer to us. Harry stiffened beside me – I swear I could hear the rage pulsing through his veins as he shouted, “You stay away from her!”

Damien’s cold gaze turned to him then as I struggled to keep back a gasp, fearful for Harry’s life. “I would suggest you keep your mouth shut, seeing as I’m only keeping you around until you’re no longer useful. That time is running out.”

The tears I was working so hard to fight escaped then, silently down my cheeks. “Please, just let him go,” I begged. “It’s me you want. Please, just take me.”

Damien shook his head, clicking his tongue in disapproval. “Mara, I’m not going to kill you until every part of your life has been taken apart. The same way you took apart my life. The very day you were born.”

I realized then he was talking about the fact that our father’s affair with my mother ruined his family. “I can’t control what our father did, Damien. It’s not my fault.”

“If I could kill the dirty whore I would do it myself,” he snapped, the coolness of his voice leaving for the first time. “Unfortunately, she let her guilt get to her first.”

“What?” I gasped, not understanding.

“Oh, didn’t Arthur tell you? She didn’t die in childbirth,” he spat. “She killed herself. She dropped you off at an agency right before blowing her fucking brains out.”

I stared at him in disbelief. There was nothing more I could do.

“I know more about your past than you could ever imagine,” he continued, a curl of bitterness apparent in his voice. “That’s right, I knew your mama. Lea Hitchcock, a darling southern belle. Don’t you know that’s why I went to Louisiana? I was looking for you.” He scoffed. “I thought they might stash you with some of her relatives or something. Well, I guess that was a waste of time. Good thing I was able to pull off that body as my own and the agency was too stupid to think otherwise, otherwise it would have all been for naught.”

I didn’t know my mother was from Louisiana – I didn’t know any of it. It felt like he was tugging me apart from the inside out, like he’d reached into the very frame of my being and took a hold of my ligaments and tendons and was pulling them out through my skin. I could hardly stand anymore, my legs were shaking so badly.

“How?” I asked again, this time even weaker than before.

“She was my nanny,” he hawked, his eyes glinting then. “She cared for me, too, Mara. I loved her too. And then I caught her standing with a full belly in the doorway to my father’s study, crying as she told my mother everything. I wasn’t supposed to see, but I saw it all. She had disappeared months before that, around nine to be exact, and then I saw her again out of the blue. I was thrilled. And then she ruined everything. You ruined everything.”

“Damien…” I breathed, catching his gaze and holding it for the first time. “You have to understand that it was hard for me too, that I never had a family…”

He grunted, stuffing his hand into his coat pocket. I could sense Harry then begin to frantically glance around, Damien’s attention entirely diverted from Harry and focused on me and whatever was in his pocket. He was looking for an escape route.

“After that, I never had a family either,” he countered. “Arthur worked all the time. My mother was in and out of sanitariums. The only thing I ever had after that was my ability to hack, and you ruined that too, the night you got away.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Don’t you understand, Mara?” he questioned, his voice straining. “I could have had it all. I was this close to running the ring of accomplished hackers I looked up to so much. They were all rich and successful and feared and I could have ran New York god damn City with fear if it wasn’t for you. You ruined everything.”

He pulled his hand from his pocket to reveal the same gun he held to my head on the night of August 21st, the barrel that still haunted me in my sleep. I could still feel it burning my skin, scarring it just faintly, in a way that would never go away. He pointed directly where he would have shot me that night, right between my eyes – soon, that scar would become a bullet wound, it seemed.

“So now I’m going to ruin you.”

Rewind, rewind, rewind, to the moments of when I was first telling you this story, and then press play on the scene. Stalling Damien, bargaining with him for not only his life but ours as well. Praying that someone, anyone would find us. The sound of the gun cocking shattering against the walls. My life flashing before my eyes. Harry running out to distract him.

The ringing of the gunshot. The spray of blood that erupted from Harry’s body just before it hit the floor.

The shrillness of my screams as I began to run to him.

The loss of hope that anyone would ever find us.

“Only one thing left, Mara,” he breathed as I froze between him and Harry’s body, the gun cocking once more. “Finishing what I should have finished all those months ago.”