Nanny for the SEALs by Cassie Cole

48

Heather

Oscar and Ernesto argued for a minute about what to do. Oscar got his way—they were going to let me live.

For now.

Oh great, I thought to myself. I get to live long enough to feel pants-shitting terror. Lucky me.

We began driving again, faster than before. Chopped onions and tomatoes and other taco condiments slid off the counter and onto the food truck floor.

“We’re two hours from the compound,” Oscar told Ernesto. He was standing in the aisle up by the driver’s seat, swaying back and forth as Ernesto weaved in and out of traffic. “Then we can convince her to love us. You’ll see!”

“We should dump her before that,” Ernesto said calmly. Too calmly. “Plenty of desert on the way. Never find the body.”

“Nooo! We need to talk to her! You’ll see! She’s perfect, so perfect, even with all the dust…”

The body. They wanted to dump my body. Which meant they were going to turn it into just a body. Ernesto wanted to kill me.

Okay, so Oscar is the lesser of two evils. He just wanted me to love him. Or rather, he wanted Amirah to love him.

I wished I didn’t have the rag in my mouth. For one thing, it tasted like taco meat, which was making me queasy. For another, it was keeping me from telling them the truth. They wanted the real Amirah Pratt, not me! I was just a schmuck named Heather Hart! Nobody would kidnap her!

But of course, then they would probably just kill me. As long as they thought I was Amirah, they would keep me alive.

I take back what I said about the rag. I’m glad it prevented me from blurting out my true identity.

Oscar put his face very close to mine and gently stroked my cheek with his knuckle. “My beloved Amirah. I hate what they do to you on those movie sets. So much makeup. It doesn’t make you look like yourself. You don’t need it.”

I closed my eyes and thought about my SEAL lovers. Would they save me? Did they even realize who had taken me? There was a lot of chaos after the demolition and cloud of dust. We could be miles away now.

Please save me, I thought. You’re former Navy SEALs. You’re supposed to save people in danger, like me.

We drove for a while, and then the food truck rumbled to a stop. It drove in little spurts, a few seconds at a time. The man behind the wheel—Ernesto—cursed about Los Angeles traffic.

Suddenly he left the wheel and walked back toward us. “Take over. Traffic makes me want to kill something.”

Yes! Please take over so he wouldn’t want to kill me!

“Did you check her phone yet?” Ernesto asked.

Oscar shook his head while walking up to the driver’s seat. “No.”

I tensed as Ernesto patted me down. His palms lingered a little longer on my breasts, but otherwise he was business-like and focused. When he found my phone, he walked up to the driver’s seat.

“Toss this out the window. So they can’t track her.” There was a pause. “Wait. She has a text…”

Ernesto came marching back down the kitchen to me, shoving the phone in my face. “Who the fuck is Brady?” He read the text out loud. “Good luck today. We’ll be thinking about you. Who is he? Tell me!”

I couldn’t tell him anything because of the rag in my mouth, so instead I shook my head.

Ernesto began scrolling up, reading the texts Brady and I had sent. He sneered, showing yellow teeth.

“You’re a whore,” he spat at me. “Just like I’ve been saying.” Then he turned to the driver and repeated, “Just like I told you!”

“Let me see,” Oscar asked.

Amirah’s two stalkers put their heads together by the driver’s seat. A car behind us honked, and our truck moved forward a few feet before stopping again.

“Who is Rogan?” Ernesto asked. “You have two men? Unbelievable…”

Shit.

“Maybe it’s not what we think!” Oscar said desperately. He seemed afraid of what his co-conspirator would do. “Maybe it’s part of the movie role! Right?”

I nodded vigorously.

“This is fucking bullshit.” Ernesto spiked the phone on the ground, picked it up again, and then hurled it out the passenger window. Then he stomped back to me and roughly tilted my head up to face him. “You’re a whore. Admit it.”

I shook my head and begged him not to hurt me, but it only came out as a muffled moan.

“Ernesto…” Oscar begged. “Please just wait until we get to the compound…”

Ernesto let out a roar of frustration. He grabbed the nearest thing to him—a Tupperware container of guacamole—and hurled it in my direction. It hit the wall to my right, sending green goop in all directions.

“She’s not pure!” Ernesto screamed. “I told you she needs to be pure. I told you.”

Oh my God. This guy was batshit crazy. I was definitely going to die.

“We can make her pure,” Oscar insisted while driving. “I’ll help you. We can do it together.”

“No. I’m going to do it right now.” Ernesto pulled a knife from his pocket. The blade glistened in the light as he aimed it threateningly at me. “If we can’t have your purity, then nobody can.”

I screamed into the rag as he readied the knife. I couldn’t bear to look at it, so I clenched my eyes shut and waited for the steel to pierce my skin. My only hope was that it would be quick.

The blow never came.

I opened one eye. Ernesto was squinting down at me. He looked confused rather than angry.

He used the knife to move aside the part of the dress covering my shoulder. “What’s this?”

I glanced over. He was pointing at a small brown spot on my collarbone. My birth mark.

“Amirah doesn’t have that,” Ernesto told me. He turned to shout to the front. “Something’s wrong!”

“Just wait,” Oscar insisted, “we’ll get her to the compound and then take a closer look…”

Ernesto tore off my floppy hat and sunglasses. He squinted at me, his yellow eyes becoming small, and then going much, much wider.

He figured it out, I realized.

Ernesto sneered angrily. “You’re not Amirah. You’re an imposter.”