“Don’t.” My heart breaks all over again when her hand shoots out to stop me from touching her things. The number of scars on her hands exposes that she used them to protect herself. They look like they were shredded to pieces. The surgeons who put them back together did wonderful work, but there’s no way her scars will fade to nothing within the next ten years. She will have them for life. “I will pack… just not yet. I need time.” When she chokes, I choke. “It’s all happening so fast.”
“I know. It wasn’t meant to be this way.” I stop before I say something I’ll regret, settle the croakiness in my voice, then try again. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
I race for her door so fast I trip over my feet like a clumsy newborn foal. The guilt hammering into me is horrendous, and it’s only just beginning. Justine is irreparably scarred, her parents were conned to sell their family home under false pretenses, and their youngest son is serving life behind bars. Things couldn’t possibly get any worse… until they do.
8
Maddox
One month later…
My fifty-seventh push-up halts mid-push when a snarky voice booms into my windowless room, “Are you ready to negotiate yet?”
When the padded door of my cell creaks open, I end my workout regime. The light beaming into the almost black space is too bright for me to ignore. I need to shelter my eyes with my arm. I am also desperate to take in the one photograph of Demi the guards let me keep when they moved my belongings from my assigned cell to the hole.
The ‘hole’ is the padded cell prisoners are forced to visit when they break protocol. There’s no time in the yard, no meal privileges, and absolutely no light outside of the two ten-minute allotments I’m granted to shovel down the slop delivered on a stainless-steel tray twice a day. I’m fucking starving, my vitamin levels are in the shitter, and I’m beginning to wonder how many times Demi and my family have been turned away from visiting me the past month. I told Caidyn to keep Demi away. That doesn’t mean she listened, though. My girl is as stubborn as she is beautiful.
After pulling down Demi’s photograph from its hidey-hole, I run my thumb down her glossy black hair before shifting my focus to the person approaching me. Even with my hearing hardly having any use the past month, I recognize the voice of the man slotting his backside onto a chair behind a thick sheet of Perspex. The thought he needs a barrier between us makes me smile. If he were a real man, he would have confronted me without any gimmicks.
Agent Moses plants his feet at the width of his shoulders before leaning forward, so his elbows rest on his knees. “How long have you been down here?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer him. “Twenty-eight days? Surely, you’re missing the sun by now?” I keep my expression neutral, but he must read the hell-fucking-no expression on my face. “No? Then what about food you don’t need a straw for?” When I don’t even flinch, he hits me where he knows it will hurt. “Your family then?” That awards him the faintest twitch in my jaw, but he wants so much more. “Or perhaps the smell of her hair?”
Nothing can hold back the flicker of my eyelids when he pushes a photo of Demi through the slot my meals are served through. It’s a recent shot. Unlike the image I have, her hair is styled in the pixie cut her uncle forced on her, and Max is protecting her front—like he always is.
I’m tempted to threaten Agent Moses as to what will happen to him if he gets close to Demi outside of these walls, but the pixilation of his surveillance image makes it unnecessary. Even to a novice, it’s obvious his picture was snapped at a distance, assuring me he already knows the rules. I might have made a deal with the devil when I agreed to come to this hellhole, but I’m not stupid. I made Demi invincible before I handed her protection over to Max and my brothers. If you so much as bump into her in the street, you better watch your back. That’s how fierce her protection is now. She is the safest she’s ever been.
With my attitude at a pinnacle, I make use of the light by utilizing the bathroom facilities. It annoys Agent Moses more than my refusal to speak to him the last three times he’s popped in to visit me. He almost rips his hair out of his head while raking his fingers through his messy locks. He’s at the end of his tether, and the desperation is heard in his voice when he mutters, “Five minutes. Alone. With her.” I’m unsure if his sentences are spaced because he has to work them through a tight jaw or if it’s because he isn’t good at negotiating on the spot.
I learn my answer when I spin around to face him. He is as surprised by his offer as me.
His shock doesn’t mean his offer hasn’t spiked my interests, though. I was already struggling knowing I couldn’t touch Demi for years in a normal cell, but being locked in the dark for over twenty-three hours a day has made the knot in my stomach so much worse. Last month, I could settle my unease by looking at her beautiful face. This month, I’m left alone with my thoughts. That wouldn’t be so bad if half of them weren’t the instigators of nightmares. I’ve remembered the bad times far more than the good times the past couple of weeks, and they’re haunting me even more than a lack of sunshine, fresh air, and food.
After snatching up Demi’s picture to ensure Agent Moses can’t leave with it, I compromise, “Twenty minutes.”
He scoffs as if I’m being ridiculous before he blubbers out a string of words, “I can’t do twenty minutes. Standard visitations don’t last twenty minutes, so there’s no way I could get you that long, alone. You need to be reasonable, Ox, or this experiment will be a woeful waste of time.”
As I jackknife back, my brow arches. “Experiment?”
Agent Moses’s Adam’s apple bobs up and down as his eyes shoot to mine. It’s rare for him to put his foot in his mouth, but there’s no doubt that is what he just did.
“This is an experiment to you?” I approach the Perspex so fast he has no choice but to stumble backward. I cracked bulletproof glass with my fists to get to Demi, so you can be as sure as fuck a bit of plastic won’t stop me. “This is my life! It isn’t a fucking experiment.”
The Perspex wobbles under the pressure of my fists a mere second before the hole is placed back into lockdown.
I don’t know if days or weeks pass before the door to my cell is reopened. The noisy grumbles of my tummy have me convinced they cut my meals back to one a day, but with my hunger hazing my mind enough for me to be on the brink of mental exhaustion, I could be mixing things up. I’m not in the right head space, and it’s showcased in the worst way when I groggily mumble, “Ten-minute unsupervised visits once a month…” Agent Moses sighs in victory, unaware I hadn’t finished my sentence, “… starting today.”
“Today?” His shriek is so high, it pierces my ears.
I won’t lie. It’s an effort to bob my head. I’m as physically drained as I am emotionally, but I am confident it will only take seeing Demi in the flesh once to drag me out of the hole I’m in. She has a way of giving me strength by doing something as simple as smiling.
When Agent Moses spots the weak dip of my chin, he breathes out of his nose before waving his hand through the air. It dawns on me that our exchanges are being monitored when the Perspex slides away like an automatic door, and two guards enter my cell for the first time in weeks. They hoist me off the floor before dragging me out of the sweat-scented space.
Once I’m plopped onto a chair, Agent Moses shoves a cell phone into my face. “One call. Make it quick.” He snatches back his phone before my hand gets close to it. “And only one visitor. No exceptions.”
I’m too close to hell’s gate to understand why he’d care who Demi arrives with. I’m barely lucid, and the fog in my head grows worse when I dial a number I know by heart only to be told the service has been disconnected.
How could that be? My family has had the same landline number for years.
“Try this number,” Agent Moses suggests while thrusting a piece of official FBI paper my way. It exposes that Demi is under surveillance, but not because she’s a suspect. They’re afraid she could become a victim.
