“Of course, I will.” I look up and catch Taliesin’s eye—give him a look that tries to sayshe’s ready.
His posture shifts. “Let’s find some place private.” Turning, he signals Clay to keep watch over the block, then leads us out of the hall.
Candy holds my hand tightly as we go down the clanging metal stairs, past the humming laundry units to a small, dead-end maintenance corridor where the steam pipes provide a screen of thick, white mist.
Layla follows me in, then sits on a rusted equipment crate. I take a spot on the floor with Candy, leaning our backs against the vibrating wall.
Taliesin stays standing, his large frame blocking the entrance. “Take your time, kid," he says, his voice less impassive than usual. There’s a hint of softness about his tone.
She stares at her, obviously several sizes too big, prison-issued sneakers. “Don’t be mad if I get muddled up,” she says. “It’s kind of scrambled in my head, you know, dates and shit.”
“No one is going to be mad about anything. We’re all just proud of you for being willing to share,” I tell her. “Right, guys?” I give the stink eye to both Layla and Taliesin.
“Yeah, kid. Just do what you can,” Layla replies.
Candy nods. “OK then. Well, um, I don’t remember my mom or dad,” her voice trembling and hard to hear, “the first things in my memory are men in the white coats and a cold room. I don’t know how long I was there, but I think they did something to me—not sex or that kind of stuff, that was later.”
I feel a chill despite the hot, wet air.
“They gave me injections that made my body feel like it was tumbling through space. I don’t know why. Sometimes I had something attached to my head and they’d shock me.”
Taliesin grinds his teeth. As I watch the muscle jump in his jaw, I realize he’s wearing an expression I’ve seen on my brother—the controlled, cold fury of a man born to command.
In this dim, grimy basement, the image is hauntingly clear. For a heartbeat, the flickering amber bulbs become the shimmering city lights of Havengard, reflecting off the floor-to-ceiling glass of a boardroom. He looks like he’d dominate that table. I can see him in a crisp, white collar and a suit that costs more than a Digger could ever imagine, leaning in to dismantle an opponent with a single, lethal sentence.
He isn’t a prisoner here. He’s a shark, waiting in the deep for the perfect moment to strike and destroy his enemies.
The traffickers.
The Conclave.
The Elite.
People like me.
I swallow hard, the boardroom fantasy dissolving back into humid reality. “What else do you remember, Candy?” I ask, my voice as gentle as I can make it while my own heart hammers.
“Well, some time later I was told I had a new owner,” she continues, her grip on my hand tightening. “New men took me off. They said I was going to a special school.”
She lets out a hollow, broken laugh. “It wasn’t a school. It was a huge house on an island. There were some horrible women there. They taught me to do things. Sex things. Then Mr. Grieves would come and take me and the others to ‘parties.’ Mostly on fancy boats, yachts. Rich men would sail up to the island and we’d be sent onboard. They’d do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t so bad when there were no parties. I made friends at the house, we ate nice stuff, but I hated…working.”
Layla gets up from her perch and moves closer until she has a hand on Candy’s hair, stroking it with a tenderness that seems out of place from a woman with a buzz-cut and jacked up muscles.
“I escaped during a transport to a mainland party.” Candy’s eyes are filled with shadows of everything she’s experienced. “I jumped from a moving van and ran into the woods. I lived on the streets for a year, eating scraps from trash cans and sleeping in empty houses. But this family came home from a vacation and found me. Locked me in a room then called the cops.
She starts to shake, a violent, full-body tremor. “And now I’m here. What if Mr. Grieves finds out? I can’t go back, I can’t. I’d kill myself first.”
The silence that follows is heavy. I look up at Taliesin. I’ve never seen him so purely, thoroughly angry.
“Doyle Grieves,” he says, the name sounding like a curse. “I know the name and the reputation. And his son, Regan. They’re the worst kind of filth Havengard has to offer.”
“But Candy’s OK here, surely?” I ask. She’ll be safer among the Diggers than she ever was in the world I came from. Out there, the “Elite” bastard men of my class think a woman’s vagina istheirs for the taking. A female body is merely a commodity to be bought, bartered, or broken.
But in this foul cell block, Taliesin keepsthosemonsters at bay. A bubble of hysteria rises in my throat, but I quickly quash it. It’s a weird fucking truth, but it’s the truth nonetheless.
This is the safest place I’ve ever lived.
“Has the warden seen you?” Taliesin questions. “Does he know any of this?”
