My revenge. If I had no one left to live for, I’d certainly live long enough to murder the Warden, and make him pay for doing this to us.
The guards hauled me back to my cell and threw me inside. I winced as I lowered myself onto the bottom bunk. My head swam, and I didn’t quite know which way was up or down. My stomach clenched, and I wanted to puke, but nothing came up.
Eventually, Chancey and Ivy returned with the chain gang.
“You look like shit, man,” Chancey said when he saw me.
“Where’s Marcus?” Ivy asked from the next cell.
“Taken,” I rasped out as I held my pounding head. “By the Warden.”
“What are they going to do to him?” Ivy squeaked.
“I wish I knew,” I said, trying to steady my breath. “There’s nothing we can do about it anyway.”
Ivy got really quiet. We all knew I was right. We could worry about our friends, but it did them no good. No amount of worrying was going to save them.
“Fuck. This.Shit!” I roared as I punched the wall. The radiating pain in my knuckles almost made me forget about my pounding headache for a second. Then it was all back a moment later. Pain pulsed through my head, my torso, my leg…everywhere.
I’d been in some pretty dark places, but this had to be the worst. It wasn’t the physical pain; I could handle that. Hell, I’d been on the edge of death more times than I could count. But until now, I’d never felt so powerless.
“Let me help,” Chancey offered, before placing a hand on my head.
I winced. “You can’t help me.”
“I can try,” he insisted. “Angels have healing magic. I’ve never done it before but… gotta try, right?”
His hand warmed on my skin, and I felt tendrils of magic enter my body. Angels had the power to heal, much like the Anichi tribe of Elementai culture. But it took a powerful angel to heal all the damage that had been done to my body. Chancey was average, at best, and I’d wager a bet he wasn’t as powerful as he considered himself to be. Ava’s healing magic would have knit my lip back together and fused my broken ribs in moments. All Chancey’s magic did was take the edge off, which honestly was better than I anticipated, so there was that.
Chancey tried again, but I waved him off. “Don’t strain yourself.”
To be honest, I preferred the pain. It was easier to focus on that than on the horrifying thoughts flitting through my mind.
Ava was likely dead by now. Ez, Opal, and Alistair had surely been executed the second they were found with the keys. They were no use to the Warden, so he wouldn’t bother keeping them around. Marcus wasn’t far behind any of the others, and who knew if Kallie was still alive?
If he didn’t kill Ivy and Chancey, they wouldn’t last long down here, anyway.
Maybe it was better this way— to just get it all over with. The Ancestral Lands sounded nice…
Except we had tomake it therefirst. With all the terrible things that me and my friends had done, I didn’t know if they’d accept us into the Blessed Haven. If we became trapped here, and couldn’t cross over into the afterlife, was it any worse than surviving in this prison? I didn’t know what your soul being trapped looked like. I’d witnessed a glimpse watching Thaddeus go through it, and I was certain I didn’t want his fate to be my eternity.
That thought sent me on another spiral, because it wasourfault Thaddeus was trapped in the first place. All my friends could end up just like him, haunting the Institute forever, stuck in this hellhole that none of us could escape.
This was bigger than the war going on inside my own head. Death wasn’t an end in the supernatural world, and if I gave up, I damned people like Thaddeus… like Ava. There was still a chance to save them.
I’d stick around as long as I possibly could to do just that. I would have my revenge on the Warden, but more than that, I would save the souls he’d trapped and tortured here at the Institute.
I wasn’t giving up. I wouldn’t play the Warden’s sick games— or Captain’s, for that matter. They knew the power of the mind, and how Cellblock 9 played on psychological turmoil. They knew as well as I did that the real prison was inside your head. They could lock you in these cells, torture and humiliate you, but we could not become their prisoners without consent. Theywantedme to give up, but I wouldn’t choose that option, no matter how much they pushed me.
Hours of agony passed. It was all too easy to see why an inmate would give up here. Going numb and succumbing to the madness was the only way to free yourself from it. Hanging on took conscious energy and effort. It was a hole you were trying to climb out of, only these assholes kept throwing dirt on your head. It’d be easy to just lie down and let yourself be buried alive.
But I was made of Earth, and I’d throw that dirt right back in these motherfuckers’ faces.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, until I heard a tray being slipped under the door of our cell. Chancey helped me sit up to eat something. It was the first meal we’d had in over twenty-four hours, and we scarfed it down within minutes. There wasn’t enough to satisfy me, but I was no stranger to hunger. All I could do was lie back down and wait for my next meal. That was the only thing worth looking forward to in here, no matter how nasty it tasted.
At some point, the exhaustion overtook me, and I drifted off to sleep.
I woke to the sound of guards yelling. Our cells hadn’t been unlocked yet, but heavy footsteps passed by as guards ran down the hall. I sat up and listened carefully, but inmates had started to rouse. People talked so loudly that I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
