“He’s got to have a safe around here. That’s where he put it,” thug number two said.
While thug number one looked through my room and tore it apart, Marco came close to me and whispered in my ear.
“Chase, if you have his book you need to hand it over now. Jose will kill you if he finds out you took it.”
“Marco, I didn’t take it.”
I used all the acting skills I could come up with, and I looked him straight in the eyes. I didn’t want him to think I was lying to him. If he thought about another person who could have taken it, that was my only option.
“No one else had to see Jose in the last two days?” I asked.
“Jose noticed it missing after you left.”
“That doesn’t mean I took it. Who else was there that day? Any one of them could have been the one who actually took it! Marco, you know me. You know I wouldn’t do something like that.”
He looked at me, then at the thug behind me that held my arm. There was a brief moment where I thought Marco might let me go. I knew I had put a slight amount of doubt into his mind about me taking the book. But apparently, that didn’t matter all that much.
“Break it,” Marco said to the guy.
“No. Wait. No,” I said as I looked desperately at Marco.
“Do you have it or not?” he asked.
“Marco, seriously, I don’t have it.”
“Hey, I have something here,” the thug that was destroying my room said from my closet. “It looks like a safe.”
When we walked over to my closet, the shelf had been pulled away from the wall and the door to my safe room was looking back at me. I felt the fear of knowing Jordan was inside there. I couldn’t open the door. I couldn’t put her at risk. And, I certainly couldn’t hand over the black book at this point.
“Open the door, Chase,” Marco said as he pushed me into the closet.
“I don’t even use this thing. I can’t open it.”
Marco looked at me and then at the two thugs. I could tell they quickly came to the consensus that I was lying to them.
“Open the door!” Marco demanded.
One of the thugs thrust his fist into my abdomen, and I felt the shooting pain as it went through my whole body. It was instantly hard for me to breathe, and I suspected his fist had broken one of my ribs. I wasn’t use to all the punching that was going on against my body in the previous days. It wasn’t my cup of tea, and I couldn’t wait to get back to my normal life where no one wanted to hurt me.
I lay on the ground in front of the door and gasped for air. The pain was horrendous until I felt the even worse pain of the man’s shoe kicking me in the exact same area. I closed my eyes as the pain shot through me, and I pictured myself in some sort of movie. Hopefully, my movie would end better than it was going so far.
If my ribs had not been broken from the punch, they were definitely broken from his kick. I gasped for air and couldn’t seem to get enough breath at all. Even trying to pull a tiny bit of air into my lungs hurt.
One of the men held up some of Jordan’s clothes from the other room and stood in the doorway to my closet. My heart sank, but there was no way I was opening the door.
“He’s got a lady in there,” the thug said.
“Chase, whoever it is, we don’t care. Just open the door so we can search the safe.”
“Seriously, that’s just clothes some girl left here. She sleeps over sometimes and has her stuff here. I don’t know how to get into the safe.”
Again, I tried to be as convincing as possible. But my voice shook as the pain of the moment overwhelmed me. I couldn’t breathe. With each breath I took, I felt more and more like I was going to pass out.
I looked up at Marco and tried my best to look him in the eyes. Something had changed in him when he thought I was lying to him, though. He didn’t look at me as the friends we use to be. Instead, he looked at me like a man he wanted to destroy in order to save himself.
Perhaps, Jose thought that Marco had stolen the notebook?
If that was the case, then Marco was desperate to find the person who really took it. He probably didn’t care at all what he had to do to me or anyone else if it meant that he wouldn’t be killed by Jose.