This was it. I was going to die.

Blood thrummed in my temples, my heart thumped in my chest, and my legs all but gave up on carrying my weight. If Pablo didn’t kill me soon enough, I would drop dead any time now.

If there was one person, one human alive, a single individual who could never know about Sarah Kennedy, that person was Juan Sandoval. At best, he was working for Pablo and would report that I had stepped out of line, at worst, he had already explained everything to Hernan.

Whatever happened, we were all fucked. Emilia Kovacs and Sarah Kennedy, Pablo, Oscar, Juan, everybody. We were all going to die.

The boyish grin on Juan’s lips faded as he watched my face decompose in horror. His voice, the name he called out, still echoed in the corridor like a never-ending gunshot. A guard walked across the distant end of the hallway, and I could have easily missed him, had Juan’s words not sent all my senses into overdrive.

I grabbed Juan by the collar of his shirt and pulled him into the bathroom. With an adrenaline-fuelled strength, I threw him against the wall, where he slipped and fell to the floor. For a second, he was stunned and speechless. I turned around to lock the bathroom door.

“Who told you?” I spat.

His lips flapped open and shut, but he couldn’t let out a word. He tried to stand up, but skidded on the tile floor like a newborn foal. Rather than help him up, I fell to my knees and wrapped my hands around his neck, shaking his head between my trembling fingers.

“Who told me what?” he stammered.

“That name,” I hissed.

Even I was surprised by the hate that dripped from my voice, frothing through my clenched teeth. I could feel the veins pop in my bloodshot eyes, and how they almost bulged out of my face. I could feel my lips quiver, and hear the joints of my jaw screech as it threatened to pop out of place.

“Em,” he murmured, his fingers wrapping around mine in a desperate attempt to untangle them from his shirt’s collar. “You told me.”

“I told you?” I echoed in a breath.

“Yesterday night, when you were half passed out,” he answered. “I asked you what your name was, and you said, Sarah Kennedy.”

Spit sliced down my throat like the blade of a knife.

“What else did I say?” I whispered.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything else, I found out myself.”

I had to let my mouth drop open to take a proper breath. I felt like a fish out of water, like I’d been stripped naked in front of a crowd of thousands. The truth was out in the open, and that meant this could be the end of the road for me. For the cartel, too. For everybody.

Juan rubbed a finger around his neck to readjust the collar of his shirt and take a long, deep breath.

“How many people did you tell?” I asked.

“No one,” he shook his head, a serious look on his face. “I wanted to make sure I found out everything on my own if it turned out you were really a spy.”

Either Juan was an idiot, or he was only joking – in which case, that would still mean he was stupid, since this wasn’t the right time to try and be funny.

“I’m not a spy, Juan,” I frowned.

“I know,” he groaned, “but you’re also not Hungarian, so at least I was right about that.”

“Yeah, well, that was pretty obvious,” I mumbled.

“Still, I’m the only one who figured it out, so who’s the dumb one now, huh?” he retorted.

His tone was low and dry, almost like a growl. Juan defended his discovery like a feral dog with a bone. He was proud, and I was sure that the next thing he would do would be to run to his father, Hernan, and show him what he’d found.

Juan would be proud to tell his Dad that he was smart enough to find out the truth, and show him that he was in fact worthy of leading his stupid little cartel. He’d say that he was right all along, that I wasn’t who I said I was. He’d tell him about Pablo’s scheme, all the girls he’d kidnapped, all the dirty businesses from which the Sandovals had been left out.

And then, everybody would die. We’d all pay the price for our treason, and I could only hope that I’d be killed fast enough. Perhaps that was why they had invited us. Maybe this was a trap, and we were all going to die tonight.

“Also, finding the articles wasn’t that easy,” Juan continued, with a haughty smirk. “There’s gotta be about a million Sarah Kennedys.”

We were all going to die in a lawless bloodbath, and Juan was going to cause it all; with a silly smile on his face. It was such a sad sight it was almost funny, like watching a Golden Retriever wag his tail as he brings his owner a live grenade.

“Articles?” I breathed. “Were they looking for me?”

“Yeah, look at this one,” Juan answered as he scrolled through his phone. “I took a screenshot, because there was a picture of you. I wasn’t sure at first, because you look super different.”

He turned the screen towards me, and my hand instinctively moved to hold the necklace hanging at the base of my throat. It was a picture of me and Ana.

I hadn’t seen her in a while, not even in a photograph. She looked a little different than she did whenever I closed my eyes and tried to remember what her face looked like. The way she was in my dreams, her skin was smoother, her jawline sharper, and her eyes much bigger, almost cartoonish. Yet, her smile never seemed so bright as it did in this picture.

Ana was laughing out loud, and even through the silent screen, I could hear the echo of her turkey-gobble laughter. I sat beside her, and both of us had one arm wrapped around the other’s shoulder. I could tell from the background that we were sitting on the front porch of her parent’s house, but couldn’t remember why or when, or who had taken that picture.

I looked quite different. I was smirking, probably snickering at the joke I’d just made. I looked younger, more carefree, and lacked that permanent frown that life with Pablo had etched in the center of my forehead. I looked fat, with fuller cheeks and perhaps an extra chin. My hair was light blonde, ironed flat, save for a few dark frizzy hairs sticking out from the roots, growing off the top of my head like bad weeds in a flowerbed.

“See?” said Juan. “It barely looks like you.”

My heart ached a little, but Juan was right. The girl on the screen and the other in the bathroom mirror were nothing like each other. If Juan, who had seen me every day for the past few weeks, could hardly tell this was me, then there wasn’t anyone out there who could recognize me from a single picture in an article.

“It’s an old pic,” I muttered. “I used to bleach my hair.”

Juan held the phone by the side of my face, and arched one eyebrow.

“You know, I usually prefer blondes, but you actually look better as a brunette,” he chirped. “Maybe we should send them a new picture, or you know, give them something to work with, since you haven’t updated your Facebook profile pic since 2015.”

I had so many questions – why would he look up my Facebook; how on Earth did he find mine in an ocean of a thousand Sarah Kennedys; who the fuck still uses Facebook anyway; but also, are there any messages on my wall from someone who might miss me? But Juan kept on rambling before I could ask anything.

“And your Instagram is worse,” he sighed. “Look at this shit: three sunset pictures, two inspirational quotes and a fruit basket, and that same pic from your Facebook profile. Worst of all, six followers. Who the hell only has six followers?”

“You stalked me?” I frowned.

“Yeah, I wanted to know more about the mysterious Sarah Kennedy,” he shrugged. “Turns out you’re not mysterious, you’re just boring.”

Boring? I thought. Perhaps my personality isn’t really the most outgoing, happy-go-lucky, captivating one out there, but for god’s sake, Juan, I was kidnapped by the leader of one of the world’s biggest cartels. That alone could make me the main character for a Wattpad novel or one of those stupid movies he liked to watch, and I was pretty sure that spared me from being qualified as boring.

“Show me the article,” I mumbled.

“It’s really short,” he said as he nonchalantly handed me his phone. “It just says you both went missing.”

“Missing?” I fretted. “Ana’s still missing?”

I ripped the phone out of his hand, and frantically scrolled as I tried to read the article a few times, over and over, until I could figure out what happened to Ana. The article was from our local gazette, titled ′Tragedy in paradise? Two Goose Creek girls go missing’.

“Is Ana your friend?” asked Juan. “The hot chick in the picture?”

I nodded, and raised a trembling finger in the air to shush him, and then brought it to my mouth so that I could chew off its nail. I read the text on the screen about fifteen times. It only said we hadn’t shown up at our retreat, that a message was going around social media asking tourists to keep an eye out for us, and then it misspelled the name of the restaurant I used to work at.

I refreshed the page, perhaps hoping that the text would change, and instead, it would say that Ana was home, that she was fine, and that I was dead. On the fiftieth time that the top of the article bumped against the edge of the screen, I finally noticed the date.

November 15th, 2021. That was already about a week after when we were kidnapped, and yet still a few days before Ana finally left. She was home now. I let out a deep, loud and shaky breath.

“What happened?” worried Juan.

“It’s fine, the article came out when she was still here,” I heaved. “Sorry, I panicked.”

He took his phone, gently prying it from my tightly shut fingers, and side-eyed me as he took one step back.

“Where did your friend go?” he asked.

“Back home.”

“She left you alone?” he frowned.

“Kind of, well, not really,” I sighed. “Her parents paid the ransom, and–”

“Ransom?” he cut me off. “What ransom?”

He stared at me, I stared at him, my jaw dropped, so did his. His lips spelled out the words, but he couldn’t speak them out. His voice sounded like a mute hiccup, stuck at the back of his mouth. His deep, dark eyes blinked with every rusty squeak of the cogs turning in his brain.

“Is that why you went missing?” he let out. “You were kidnapped?”

I nodded silently, backing up against the ice-cold tiles of the bathroom wall.

“Holy shit, Em! What the fuck?” he screamed. “Why wouldn’t you tell us?”

“I couldn’t, Juan, they would have killed me,” I whispered, hoping a hushed tone would bring his voice down before anyone heard us.

“They’re still after you? Emilia, are you okay?” he cried, and held his head between his hands as if it could have blown up. “You should have told us ages ago, Em, you could be in danger like, literally right now.”

I glared in shock and he stared in horror. He grabbed my hands to hold them tight, trying to reassure me, although I couldn’t tell whose fingers were shaking the most.

“Do you know who they are?” he questioned me, a deep frown on his brow. “Does Pablo know about this?”

I shook my head in disbelief, pain weighing down like a ton of bricks in the center of my chest.

“Em, you need to tell him,” Juan stammered. “He– he’ll keep you safe, okay?”

I thought my jaw couldn’t drop any lower, but at this point, my bottom lip could have almost swept the bathroom floor.

“Juan, we can’t tell Pablo,” I murmured.

“Why not?” he said, and his mouth drooped down in a pitiful pout.

Somewhere, deep down in his heart, Juan probably knew what I meant. He just seemed to be begging me to tell him the opposite. I bit my lip, and swallowed my spit.

“We have to, Em,” he insisted. “I know him, he would do anything to make sure you’re okay.”

“No,” I breathed.

The thought crossed his mind for a split second, but he shook it off with a jolt of the head. He walked right past me, rolling up his sleeves, as he headed for the door.

“I know you probably don’t trust him,” he said, words spilling out of his mouth so fast he was panting,” you know, because of what happened with Gustavo, but–”

“Juan–” I interrupted him, putting my arm out before he could open the door.

“–he really is a good guy,” he finished his sentence, almost absentmindedly.

I stared at him and stayed quiet, as my eyes filled up with scorching tears. Juan’s lips pinched together, and his nose scrunched up as if he sensed a bad smell. A lump grew in his throat, and he winced in pain as he swallowed it down.

“What?” he croaked.

He stood still, staring down at me with his piercing, reddened eyes. His arms hung limply down the sides of his body, and his bottom lip curled outwards. He looked like a kid who had just realized that Santa might not be real. I answered with a gulp.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” he hissed.

His pain morphed into anger, and he turned bright red at the cheeks.

“This is another dumb prank, isn’t it?” he spat. “You’re fucking with me again.”

“No, Juan,” I whispered. “I’m not lying.”

“If this is a joke, you better tell me now, because this isn’t fucking funny, Emilia,” he exploded.

A single tear rolled down my cheek. I caught it before it fell with the side of my wrist, afraid that if it hit the floor, its inaudible sound would capture the attention of the guards roaming in the hallways.

Juan banged his forehead against the wall, seething a thousand ‘fucks’ from between his clenched teeth, punctuating his cursing tirades with guttural screams.

“This can’t be real, this can’t be real,” Juan muttered, his voice endlessly echoing inside the marble bathroom sink.

He splashed water on his face, rubbed his hands across the back of his neck. A while ago, I had felt nauseous, but not anymore. On the one hand, letting out the truth had taken a massive weight off my chest. On the other hand, I felt so empty that I thought I might be dead. The blood running in my veins felt like an icy wind chill, my skin was cold and clammy, my limbs stopped trembling and my body turned numb.

“This can’t be real, fuck!” repeated Juan, banging his fists down on the black marble counter.

The sink clattered, the hand soap fell over, and Juan’s phone rang. He wiped his wet hand down the side of his face, sank his teeth in his lips as he let out a sigh and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Manée? What now?” he groaned as he picked up the call.

He glared at me as her angry voice blared through the speaker. He fiddled with his shirt, tugged on his collar, and ran a finger around his neck as if he needed more air.

“Yeah, well, Emilia is sick and she puked on my shirt,” he lied to his fiancée. “I’ll get changed and I’ll be right there.”

He hung up the call and threw his phone in the sink, and let out another loud fuck for good measure. Just in case any of his guards hadn’t heard us yet.

“We should go back,” I mumbled, inching towards the door.

“Just– just give me a minute,” he stuttered, his fingers desperately grasping the edge of the sink. “I need to fucking process this shit.”

“Juan, I thought you’d seen the articles,” I whispered, scowling at him. “What did you think happened?”

“I thought you’d run away,” he answered.

He rolled his sleeves down, and then back up again. He ran his fingers back and forth through his hair. The thin golden chain around his neck swayed with each of his rapid breaths.

“Why wouldn’t I tell you guys if I was just a runaway?” I hissed

“I don’t know, maybe because you were scared we would call the cops?” he muttered.

“You guys lead cartels, you’re like the number one group of people who would be least likely to call the cops on a fucking runaway. Especially a fucking adult,” I spat.

Plus, no one would care if I ran away. I did it once, when I was fourteen, and after three days my Mom called Ana to ask if I was gone, and she almost sounded disappointed when Ana answered I had been at her home all along.

“The articles didn’t even say anything about being kidnapped,” he mumbled. “They just said you were missing, but they didn’t say why.”

He sniffled and picked up his phone again. I hesitated for a second, and took one step toward him.

“You’re right, it’s weird,” I faltered, as my pulse skyrocketed again. “Ana was still here, but the other girls were back, so they should know we were kidnapped.”

“Girls?” he scowled.

“There were four of us,” I said. “Me, Ana, and two of Ana’s friends.”

“Why wouldn’t they speak out?” asked Juan. “Like, about being kidnapped.”

“Maybe they were afraid,” I muttered, and paused for a while.

I gulped, looked up at Juan, and we answered together, almost in unison:

“Or maybe they never went home.”

“What were their names?” asked Juan.

“June Corfield, and Kathr– Kaitlyn Johansson,” I answered.

He quickly found each of their Instagram accounts, and I held tight onto his arm, staring in disbelief at his phone’s screen. Kait and June were fine. They’d been posting every now and then in the past few months. They seemed to be doing great, even, if you believed their pictures.

I recognized the pretty spots of the retreat we were supposed to go to together, where they posed in skimpy swimsuits, backs arched and tongues sticking out through their beaming smiles.

“What kind of self-centered, narcissistic, attention-whoring psychopathic bitch posts pictures of themselves in a bikini when their friend is being held hostage?” I seethed.

Juan shook his head, and nervously glanced at the door.

“What about your other friend?” he asked. “I don’t see anything about you or, what’s her name, Ana?”

“Literally, not a single thing,” I hissed in outrage. “Not a missing person’s post, not a memory, nothing. I just hope that Ana’s not friends with them anymore after this.”

“That’s fucked up,” Juan mumbled. “Weren’t you guys friends?”

“They were Ana’s friends, but it doesn’t matter,” I spat. “I’m not even talking about me, I don’t care about them either, but Ana was still here. She was their friend.”

“Maybe they were intimidated into not saying anything?” he suggested.

“Is that not just in movies?” I muttered.

“I don’t know, I’ve never kidnapped anyone,” he shrugged. “Or perhaps they feel guilty.”

“Guilty? Why would they feel guilty?” I frowned. “They’re victims”

“Survivor’s guilt,” he gulped. “They got out, you didn’t, and maybe they feel like they could have done more to prevent it. Perhaps they even think it was their fault. It’s actually really common. Victims who suffer from it even refuse to talk about the incidents afterward. That could explain it.”

Memories flowed back, hitting me in the face like a gust of wind when you stand too close to the edge of the platform in a train station.

So I told him everything. Starting from the police stop, the arguments, June calling the police officer a moron, and how defeated I felt once the zip ties tightened around my wrist. The basement, the scent of my blood-soaked blindfold, everything Gustavo said, the videos he made us film for our parents. How the girls tried to escape, how pathetically they failed, and how I first met Pablo.

I told him all the things that happened, everything that led to Pablo asking who killed me, and why I answered that it was all June and Kait’s fault.

Every step of the story, every word I said, seemed to rip Juan apart and crush his heart all over again.

“Those were my last words before Pablo shot me,” I said. “In the girls’ eyes at least.”

“He shot you?” Juan frowned.

“Not really, but the girls think I’m dead. He shot the wall behind me, but the girls were blindfolded, and he asked this kid to splash them with some water so they would think they had been splattered with blood,” I explained. “But I was fine. Although I think I’ve lost part of my hearing in this ear.”

I giggled awkwardly as I pointed to the side of my head, but Juan didn’t laugh.

“Do you think he did it on purpose?” he muttered. “Making you tell the girls it was their fault?”

“So they would feel guilty?” I asked. “And then they wouldn’t talk about it?”

“To make sure help wouldn’t come,” he whispered.

It made too much sense for it to be true. Surely, Pablo hadn’t thought things out that well, that quickly, on the spot in a situation he’d never been in before. Or perhaps he was the twisted genius he said he was, and he’d reviewed his plans a thousand times over in the maladaptive daydreams he said he had too.

I shook my head at Juan’s suggestion, but the truth prevailed, and it ended up looking like a nod.

“How could he do that?” Juan breathed.

“You tell me, you know him better than I do,” I mumbled.

“Not anymore,” he retorted.

A tear dropped from the corner of Juan’s eye, as he slowly slid against the wall and fell to the floor.

“Holy shit, Em. He’s the guy I looked up to the most,” he murmured. “You don’t know what this means. He basically raised me.”

“I’m sorry,” I answered curtly, glaring at the way his phone’s screen lit up as he received another call.

“I’m so fucking dumb,” he spat.

“Juan, we need to get out of here,” I whispered.

“I wish I knew how, Em,” he lamented, holding his head in his hands. “I really do.”

“I mean back to the dinner table,” I added, biting my lip. “We’ve been together in the bathroom for ages. Do you know how that looks to him?”

“Bad. It looks bad,” he muttered. “This is all bad. What are we going to do?”

I knelt by his side, and framed his face with the palms of my hands.

“Listen, we are not going to do anything,” I ordered. “You’re not going to tell anyone, and I’m going to pretend nothing happened. In fact, both of us are going to pretend nothing happened, and we will never talk about this again. Forget about Sarah Kennedy. She doesn’t exist anymore, okay?”

“But how are you going to get out of here?” he asked.

“You leave now, change your shirt so you stay consistent with what you told Manée, and I’ll come back in about five minutes,” I told him. “If they ask about me, just tell them I’m really sick.”

“I mean, how do you plan on getting away from Pablo,” he mumbled.

“I don’t plan on it,” I spat back. “It won’t work. No matter what I do, I’ll get caught, and then it’s back to square one.”

“So you’re just going to stay here?” He arched an eyebrow, and almost scoffed at my answer.

“Exactly,” I replied, and glared back at him.

“You need to do something about it, Emilia,” he murmured.

“If I do anything about it, things are going to get worse,” I hissed, as burning anger began to prickle my cheeks. “Trust me, Juan, I have tried.”

“Things aren’t going to get better, you know,” he answered, shaking his head.

“They’ll have to, someday,” I shrugged, scrunching my nose at him. “Once I hit rock bottom, the only way I can go is up.”

“No Emilia, you need to act before it’s too late,” he said. “Rock bottom isn’t a place a lot of people come back from.”

“It’s fine. I don’t care if I die, because I have nothing to lose,” I spat. “But if you tell him, your father, or anyone else what you know, then Pablo will kill you too.”

“I wish I could do something to help,” he whispered.

“You can keep your mouth shut,” I answered. “And get back to the dining room.”

Juan stood up, his skin pale and body frail like a sheet of toilet paper. He took a few deep breaths to wipe the sorrow off his face, and walked out of the bathroom.

As soon as he shut the door, I puked. Once, twice, three times, until I couldn’t do it anymore. Still panting from the strain, I sat on the floor, with my back against the wall.

This was it. I was going to die.

Although his reaction seemed pure, I still couldn’t fully trust his intentions were good. Even if they were, and God did I hope that was true, Juan wasn’t clever, and before long, the truth would slip out of his lips, whether we wanted it or not.

I made my way back to the dining room after a few minutes, shuffling slowly, dreading having to face everyone again, tonight a thousand times more than I had each day before.

“Feeling better yet?” Pablo said softly, greeting me as I sat down beside him.

“A little bit,” I murmured.

Pablo put his hand over mine, his thumb gently rubbing the back of my fingers. Juan stared at us in silence, from the other side of the table, nervously poking at the bruises on his temple.

No one was dead yet, and he’d changed his shirt, so I assumed Juan had been listening to my instructions, at least for the moment.

Aside from that, he was doing terribly. His eyes were red, filled with burst veins, and his lips still quivered the same as they did during our conversation in the bathroom.

Why, oh why, did the truth have to fall right in the ears of the least reliable man around this table?

I only had one tiny shard of freedom, and Pablo held it in the palm of his hand.

I only had one tiny chance of survival, and now it all depended on Juan.

The Truth

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