MAFIA POSSESSION ( Completed)

FORCED

Eliza was crying again. That’s literally all she did now. What she’d been doing every night since we’d been taken by my fiancée and locked away somewhere in the heart of L.A.  It felt like I was living in an alternate reality, because this couldn’t possibly be my life now. We had no knowledge of what had become of my family after the Red Wedding.  We were being kept isolated from the world. Though we counted the blessings in that at least he hadn’t separated us from each other.

But at the end of the day it was still the same nightmare… we were prisoners of war.

Prisoners of Anthony Romero.

Awareness of time was a luxury that once, in a simpler day, we’d taken for granted. How long had it been? Days? Weeks? Months? It all just blended together into this fade of time that was impossible to track. We were shut out from the world. We had access to only the guards who were ever-loyal
watchmen.

Hector and Carmelo loomed over every move we made that was out of the ordinary. They would do random inspections of the room we slept in, like they were searching for anything that might have magically appeared that we could possibly use to escape.  It was of course out of the question, since they were so damn uptight.

They brought us every necessity… food, books, my special shampoo— hell, they even brought me tampons, the preferred brand. But…it was prohibited to leave the confinement of this ‘secured’ location. We couldn’t go anywhere at all, not even to smell fresh air on the damn balcony. It had gotten to the point where it was impossible not to fidget about near damn everything. My anxiety completely whacked out of control.

My sister sniffled again, small droplets of tears staining her reddened cheeks. What words could be used to provide comfort at this point? I felt like there was nothing I could possibly say to make it ok. Everything was out of my hands, out of my control— just like it always was.

A heavy wave of guilt would constrict within my chest every time I’d see my sister shed tears of desperation. And I’d choke down any comforting words that would be just on the tip of my tongue because I had no right to offer them. It was my fault, I’d put us both in this situation.  I had been such an idiot… on so many different levels.

To think that Anthony would ever actually give me a choice. He had tried to sell me an illusion, and when I didn’t buy it, he used brute force to get what he wanted.

We should have run when we had the chance…should have tried to escape. Instead, my naïve trust in him landed us here, in L.A. guarded by men who hated us and had stripped away our freedom. We had no knowledge of what happened to our family back in New York. All we could do was pray for their safety and hope to God that they had made it out alive.

What’s worse? I couldn’t even cry. I could watch my sister cry for hours though. She cried for our family. For our situation. For the loss of freedom. And all the while I’d feel the hollowness of what was left inside me… trying to mend the fissures of my miserable existence. Of what I was becoming.

“I don’t know if I can take another day of this,” I said to my sister. If only to distract her from her own sobbing.

“Something we can agree on,” her voice was raspy, she sounded so bad, like someone had etched a nail into her voice box. The emotional toll was beginning to manifest in her physically.

“We have to do something,” I said, almost whispering this time, afraid to be heard by Anthony’s cronies who were just down the hall. “We have to escape.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Eliza wiped away her tears, scooting closer to me on the bed.  “What can we do? There is two of them.” She said cynically. “What if we try to escape and they hurt us?”