Pacifier

🍀Sam🌹

I awoke in the early hours of the morning, darkness cloaked us, eyes squinting to see. To silence broken only with short shallow, controlled breaths. Breaths which were fearful and desperate not to seem it. 

Beside me the bed was empty, I'd fallen asleep holding her, one arm draped lazy over her waist, the way we so often slept together these days. 

And as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw Della's chest rising and falling slow and steady, catching the moonlight which was breaking through the thin curtains, she was trying so hard to be still and silent but she was shaking. 

And she was shaking because a stranger had her by the throat, their forearm locked around her neck, there other hand pushing the barrel of a gun to her temple. 

I froze, hoping they might not see my shadow move, might not see my eyes catch the light and flicker with fear, because in that moment I was terrified and taken completely by surprise. 

"I want Conway," the voice hissed in her ear, they were but a shadow, hood over their head, clothed black from head to toe, and more importantly they were talking to her. Not me. Focussed on her not me. 

She had her eyes wide and fixed on the curtains and the moonlight, her teeth gritted, her defiant streak switched on. And when she hissed her response her voice was laced with a bitterness. 

"Better not kill me then love," she said back, her voice as steady as she could manage, but when her gaze flickered back down to me, I caught her eye and saw the fear flash through them. I could see her mind racing in that moment, when the intruder pushed the barrel of their gun into her temple with a sudden violence, their temper flaring. Her expression changed too, her terror flaring when their forearm cut her air flow off and choked her. 

"Fucking wake him up and tell him to give me fucking Conway you little bitch..." they spat, their temper vile, their nature that spitting aggression which stems from insecurity and uncertainty. They were scared too but they thought they could scare her more. 

And that really was their first mistake. 

I sat slowly, hand sneaking under the pillow Della's head had rested that night, fingers searching for that little pistol I'd awarded her the day I'd promised to teach her to shoot, but it wasn't there. 

In sitting up I knew I would have given myself away, and, that if in their state of panic and adrenaline, they hadn't yet noticed me, they were about to. 

I had made the wrong move and there was no backtracking now. If I'd slipped from the bed or chosen to reach beneath the mattress for my own gun which I'd been hiding, if I'd tried to open the draw in the bedside table stealthily, then maybe things would have been alright. I'd have been able to speak with true confidence, true arrogance, knowing I'd outsmarted the stranger who thought they had already won when they'd found the bottleman girl sleeping peacefully beside me. 

But I didn't. 

"Wouldn't worry bout wakin me up like sweetheart," I said, addressing Della instead of the stranger, leaving the girl with wide eyes. Eyes which locked with mine and dropped their defences only for a moment. Long enough to beg me silently not to betray her. 

But she was safe. I couldn't have betrayed her if I'd wanted to, if it had been part of the job set for me. If my life had depended on it. 

"Conway!" spat the stranger, without a hello, without a threat, just the name, spat at me, his spit landing on Dellas cheek, making her squirm. 

"Do you mind," she winced, her voice full of a disparaging disgust as she hissed back at him, stunning both me and the stranger so that when she turned back to me, all traces of fear were gone from her and only her teenage frustration at having been woken in the middle of the night to be spat on by a man she presumed to be the lowest of the low shone through. "Sam this complete cunt wants you to give him "fucking" Conway back," she glowered at me, sullen and completely stunning with a gun to her head.