Whatever it was, I trusted Zaid. He was more like a father than a boss, and he never once took the prisoners lightly. Each of these people had killed someone, murdered innocent victims in the name of Eric, a diabolical crime lord. They had murdered people with families.
The trees opened to an open patch of flat grass. The moon illuminated the hatch in a dim light. I unlocked it.
The screams started, the moans settling in, the deafening sobs. I flipped the light switch. I had helped obtain many of them, bringing some of them down here myself. I glanced at the cells.
“Hazel Maben,” I said, my voice deep and reverberating, calling the room to silence.
A woman with shoulder-length bleach-blond hair looked up. I recognized her. She was leaning against the bars, the chains around her neck and limbs draped around her body. Her once sun-kissed skin was now clammy and pale. Her blue-green eyes were red-rimmed and piercing, blinking rapidly.
Her eyes said it. She didn’t need to confirm that she was the one I was looking for.
After pressing a few buttons on the panel, her cell doors and chains unlocked. I marched towards her, hunching my shoulders to show her that by size alone, fighting me would be futile. The restraints around her fell to the ground. She stood quickly, raising her hands to stop me from coming closer.
“Don’t come near me, you sick fuck!” She swung a fist and missed, and I grabbed her wrists in one hand and locked them behind her back. Bear-hugging her with the other arm, I hoisted her over my shoulder, taking her to the ladder. Before she could move, I grabbed a zip tie from my pocket and bound her hands together, wrestling her to comply the entire way. She hissed at me.
Setting her on the floor, I made her lock eyes with me. “There is only one way out,” I warned. “If you try anything, I will hunt you.”
She sneered, but the flash in her eyes, her pupils dilating for the briefest moment, told me that she was scared. But she was still willing to do whatever it took to obtain her freedom.
“Try me, asshole,” she said.
I climbed up the ladder, then waited. She hobbled up the steps, trying to climb with her wrists still bound, and almost lost her balance in the middle of the rungs. Once her shoulders were visible from the ground, I grabbed her arms and pulled her up the rest of the way. Steadied her on the ground. I pointed in the direction of the house.
“Walk,” I said.
“Or you’re going to kill me?” she asked. When I didn’t move, she ran to the side, not seeing the tree stump, and fell, her knee cracking against the wood hard. That would bruise.
I went to pull her up by the hair, but stopped. Why? She was a prisoner, not a person, I reminded myself. She had murdered a member of the Afterglow. I grabbed her arm and held her up.
“There’s nowhere to run,” I said. I pointed again, this time clutching her shoulder. We walked in silence at first; the soft thuds of our steps mingled with the crunch of grass and the flutter of insects.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked. She trudged forward, not making eye contact, as if afraid of facing the answer.
Killing her was not my order. When the house was in our vision, gleaming in the darkness, she turned to me.
“I didn’t kill Dean,” she said. “That was his name, right? Dean? He stole the cocaine out of my purse.”
“Walk,” I said. But she was frozen in place, waiting for me to acknowledge what she was saying. But she was a prisoner. She had killed someone, one of our members. She was lying. Like all of Eric’s followers.
“Eric kept saying that it was mine, you know? A gift. That I was supposed to go to that party and enjoy it by myself. Eric wantedmeto die from it. It was a mistake. But I didn’t know. I thought it was just coke, or I would have stopped Dean sooner.”
Her eyes shined bright, a sincerity to their turquoise color. She was pleading, begging for me to help her. To believe in her. But I couldn’t trust her. I had known Dean. While he wasn’t my favorite member of the Afterglow, dying in his early twenties shouldn’t have been his fate. There were members who had been devastated without Dean. Rumors about a sister who hadn’t slept since he passed.
I trusted Zaid. He had saved my mother, and I owed him my life. An order was an order.
“If you do not walk,” I said, “I will make you walk.”
I bared my teeth at her, and her shoulders drooped. She walked forward.
“The one time I’m telling the truth and no one will believe me,” she muttered. “Go fucking figure.”
At the sliding glass door, she grabbed the side of the house, as if she could prevent being dragged in, but with her hands bound together, the gesture was weak. I picked her up, and she kicked and thrashed wildly, trying to worm herself out of my hold. I squeezed tighter, and she struggled still, though her yells were quieter now. I carried her into the basement from the main entry, unlocking the cage and shoving her inside. I cut her zip tie with my pocket knife.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t leave me here.”
I didn’t like leaving people down here, especially vulnerable women. But the world was safer when Eric’s followers were behind bars. Until he was dead, this woman, Hazel, was safer down here too. If Eric found out that she was still alive, he would send someone to finish the job. I slammed the cage shut, locking it, and left her in the darkness.
A couple of hours later, after returning to my post at Club Hades and escorting Zaid and the prisoner’s sister back to the house, I waited inside of a hidden staircase leading to an undetectable entry point in the cage. My phone buzzed.
