Detained

13.

❝Nowhere To Run❞
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Next day, May 2016
San Antonio, Texas

"Moira? Are you up yet?"

A harrowing gasp left Moira's lips as her eyes flashed open and she clutched at her bedsheets, her heartbeat erratic and a terrifying feeling of angst closing in on her as she recognized her mother's voice.

She didn't give herself any time to dwell on why Janice was in the house; all that raced through Moira's mind was that second room. Her left leg kicked away the sheets before she jumped out of her bed and rushed to the bedroom door. Shaky fingers struggled with the lock, and her adrenaline made it almost impossible to open it before she was successful. Moira braced her hand on the door's frame and eyed the hallway with apprehension.

Light chatter could be heard from the living room, and Moira recognized the familiar voices of her father and mother. She leaned further out of her room to get a glimpse of the second bedroom's door, and her eyes widened to an unimaginable width when she noticed the door was cracked halfway open. She inched past the threshold of her door and lightly sprinted towards the room the on-the-run Hispanic brothers had been occupying for the past two weeks.

With one heavy-handed swing, the door flew back and hit the wall behind it, but Moira ignored that and her mother's startled gasp from the living room as she gaped at the empty room in disbelief. Not a single thing was out of place—the bed was made, no clothes were sprawled over the carpeted floor—it looked as if no one had ever been inside. She clenched her jaw as she tried to piece together what possibly could have transpired in the few hours she slept.

The Amores brothers could have left in the early hours of the morning, way before her parents had stopped by and after the rain cleared. Her thoughts trailed back to the anxiety-dosed night she had before and how Santiano had learned about her hidden past. Moira tightened her grip around the wooden frame of the door as she thought about his warm breath blowing on her shoulder and the sullen tone in his voice before she inwardly waved the memory away.

Maybe they had been found and were with her parents in the living room right now, the older couple forced to pretend that everything was okay while they were being held at gunpoint. Moira quailed at the grisly image of Janice and Glenn crouched on the floor with a 9mm aimed at their heads.

Those two scenarios had to be the only options of what went down; the other scenario that lingered in the back of Moira's head tested her already dwindling sanity. She could accept the depression and the social isolation she had, but to get to the point of where she was seeing people or things that weren't there—her fragile balance of mind couldn't withstand it. Before Moira started to believe she was experiencing the early stages of schizophrenia, she felt a presence emerge from behind her, and she jumped when a hand landed on her shoulder.

"Oh! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you, baby. I was just trying to get your attention," Janice offered her daughter a small smile when Moira turned her head to see who it was before her mother glanced over the room in equal curiosity, "what were you looking at..." She trailed off of her sentence, watching her daughter with a confused expression as Moira dropped her hand from the room's door frame and silently walked away towards the living room.

Moira couldn't even answer because she was just as clueless as Janice. Moira's hand hovered over her mouth as she lightly gnawed at her fingernails in malaise. Something wasn't right and she hated that she couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was. Did the brothers really leave? Was she finally free of them?

Out in the living room, Moira glanced over the couch and TV area, the state of it the same as the second bedroom—empty and seemingly untouched. "Good Morning, Moira," Glenn warmly greeted, his smile faltering when he noticed the dazed expression on his daughter's face. He met eyes with his wife, who emerged from the hallway before he cleared his throat and called out to Moira.