Traveler - The Price (Book 3)
Chapter 25

Until we don’t know the darkness in someone, we have no idea who they are. They say that no one loves you the way you want them to, that no one can read your thoughts, that fairytales don’t exist. I didn’t expect for a second that Aaron would appear at my door with the lost shoe in his hand, but I knew that it was a trace of magic in this world, which would need a little bit of faith to burst out.

“Let’s get out of here!” he says.

“Come on!”

“You didn’t ask me where.”

“You can take me even in the Underworld. All that matters now is that, finally, everything is as it’s supposed to be!”

He took my hand, and we started running on the street, just like two children we had forgotten to be. Happiness is in the small things, and I needed time to realize that. Our feet took us to the shore of the Orin Lake. We sat on the grass, and I put my head on his chest. I had waited for that moment so long, and I needed to enjoy it. I was looking at his fingers moving on my arm, and I was wondering of the beautiful way my life was complicating. It was just so great the way he had entered my world, and I couldn’t imagine how could I live all that time without those feelings.

In that very moment, all that mattered was the present, but I had a feeling that, after some years, we will still be in each other’s life. Maybe it was just a dream or maybe this moment could have lasted forever. Maybe the mere fact that we were there at that moment was going to turn our lives into an incredible adventure.

For the first time since we were back in Vals, the clouds gathered above us. The stars and the moon disappeared slowly, and the wind started blowing. With all of these, nothing ruined our peace, not even the rain, which began pouring on us with big drops. There was a time when I hated the rain, the cold, the snow, but now I appreciated all that nature had to offer.

I started laughing from the bottom of my heart, and I stood up. Aaron followed me, and we found ourselves running again on our way back home. Who needed a car when we had walked in the past years so much we hadn’t done in our whole life? Who felt the cold and the rain when we had slept under the clear sky in so many nights? The proof that our lives didn’t depend on material things anymore was the fact that we had forgotten to buy food. It didn’t matter that our cars were broken for the town seemed so small comparing it to the roads we had walked on.

When we arrived on the porch, we noticed that we had forgotten the door wide open. The matters from before were now insignificant. We threw our wet clothes on the floor, and we slammed the door.

The sun surprised us on the couch, in the living room. We hadn’t arrived in the bedroom. I woke up, and I went to look for some clean clothes, while Aaron went into the shower. I found myself smiling with all my teeth. It seemed like I didn’t run out of luck, and I could have a happy ending after all.

When I heard the bathroom’s door slamming, I ran there. I took a quick shower, and then I remained a few more seconds in front of the mirror. My hair had grown a bit, but I still had a temptation of cutting it shorter. I realized that there were beauty salons for a reason, so it wasn’t necessary for me to play the stylist. I put on a little blue overall, and I headed to the kitchen.

After a few steps, I heard a loud bang, then some noises of broken windows.

“What the hell?” I shouted.

“Jo, run!” I heard Aaron.

I froze for a second, but I remembered that I kept in my room a gun, for which I didn’t have a license. I rushed in there, and I took it, checking if it was loaded.

“I can’t wait forever for you!” says a familiar voice. “I know you will eventually come down!”

“This can’t be real!” I said while I was going down the stairs.

I saw a woman accompanied by two men standing in my living room, among the broken glass. When I reached the end of the stairs, I realized I was looking at Eva. One of the men had a gun pointed at Aaron, and the other one was holding him tight. They had entered with the car just in the middle of my house.

“Surprised to see me? Next time make sure that I’m not breathing before you leave!”

“It’s not real! It can’t be! I killed you!”

“Oh, dear, but it is!” she says laughing.

I was pointing the gun at her, but my hands were shaking without control.

“Shoot him!” she yells at the man with the weapon.

“Wait!” I shouted. “What do you want?”

“It’s simple. I want you to come with me. To finish what we started.”

“Fine” I said putting down the gun. “I’m coming, but let him live.”

Eva showed a smile, and the man walloped Aaron to the bookshelf. He fell unconscious on the floor, between the glass.

“Take her!” she yells.

They ran at me and put a bag on my head. I felt how I was thrown into a car. I knew that I had in there someone on both my sides, and I heard Eva talking with someone else outside.

“Make it look like a gas leak, but make sure you gather all of them in there!”

“Got it!”

She got into the car.

“What the hell are you doing? Isn’t it enough that you have me?”

“My dear, I don’t let unfinished jobs. Your friends will all disappear into that ‘gas leak’. I sent them a text from Aaron’s phone, to make sure the whole family will be there.”

“Wretch!”

“Save your voice” she says.

I felt hit from all around me until I didn’t know anything about me. Eva was talking in the background, and I was sure that everything was a nightmare or a bad joke. I was waiting to wake up to the reality every time I was opening my eyes. When did the things go crazy again? Why couldn’t I have my happiness? I was desperate when I was thinking that my friends were walking right into a trap.

I couldn’t decide what was the thing I was afraid the most. Was it the fact that I couldn’t see anything besides darkness? Why was I afraid of the dark when again it was proven to me that the masks that people wore in the daylight were more frightening than it? Maybe it was the fear of the unknown or the future.

“How did you get away? I killed you!” I said with a hoarse voice.

“I told you. Next time, make sure I am not breathing because as long as I am, I will not give up on what I want. It took some time to realize who I was and what I wanted, but when I realized that all I had was just an illusion, I knew I had to replace you.”

“I will kill you for good this time!”

“Sure! Just like the last time!” she laughs. “Your poor friends! Maybe they’re waiting for you on the other side now! But don’t worry! You will be there soon, just a little bit late. The fool moon is tomorrow night and where we are going no one can replace you. Oh, wait! There’s no one left to look for you!”

“Die!” I screamed among the tears.

“I will make sure these will be the most terrible moments of your miserable life! Don’t you see that you can’t ever win anything? You’re a loser! You have lost everything! I will always win! I always get what I want!”

I swallowed my tears, and I prayed to be strong. I prayed that her plan to blow up my house with the others in it to fail. I prayed to get into an accident and to see her thrown through the windscreen. I prayed a lot, but for nothing. It was again one of those days when the Universe was left without entertainment, and he was making from my life a grotesque comedy. After a road of a few hours, we stopped. I was pulled outside and dragged a few meters. I felt the mud sticking to me, but I couldn’t move. I was thrown in a room or at least some house with something hard on the ground. My hands were hanged by something cold, and I felt my face uncovered. I saw the light again. My hands were caught in chains, and I was hanging by something stuck in the ceiling.

“Let the fun begin!” says Eva.

She approached me, and she hit me with her legs.

“Do you remember how you thought you killed me?”

“Go to Hell!”

“I will make you beg me to kill you earlier! Until tomorrow night, you will regret you didn’t die sooner!”

The hits kept falling on me until I felt the room spinning around. It looked like a barn, not that it mattered anymore. I lost my consciousness.

Most of the times, we are too busy looking at the end line, and we forget to focus on our way there, which is often full of obstacles. They say that if you’re going through Hell, you have to keep walking. But how could I go forward, when my happiness was blown again in just a blink of an eye? What I had seen beyond the bag I had had on my head, was the image of what my life was supposed to look like. This thing made me go crazy. It was a curse, but also a blessing to feel things that deep.