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He’d always been able to see right through me, all the way until the very end. He hadn’t seen my betrayal coming. That had been the only thing I’d ever been able to hide from him.
I asked Jenna if I could borrow her car, and she agreed without even asking why. I was really starting to love that girl.
I drove in silence for the next couple of hours, spending the whole time shoring up the defenses in my mind so he couldn’t slip through.
And then I was there.
Strongmoore Maximum Security Penitentiary.
I’d never been here before, but I was more than familiar with it. In the beginning, after his arrest, I hadn’t just had nightmares…I hadn’t been able to sleep at all.
I was convinced he was somehow going to escape, and if I slept, I would wake up with him standing at the side of my bed, just like when he’d first popped into my life. I would spend hours researching everything about Strongmoore that I could. My hacker friend had gotten ahold of the blueprint, and I’d studied it all, trying to think like him and plot out possible routes of escape.
But then time had passed, and he’d stayed put. And slowly…I’d started to sleep. Sleep filled with nightmares, but at least I’d slept.
My hands were trembling as I gripped the steering wheel and stared at the barbed wire fences. The oily slick of his evil felt like it was coating my skin already. And I hadn’t even gone in.
I took a deep breath and turned off the car and got out, slowly approaching the entrance like I was marching towards my death.
Guards in dark blue uniforms watched me with suspicious eyes as I signed in. The secretary behind the glass, who looked like she smelled shit, took the clipboard and lazily stared at it before doing a double-take.
“You’re here to seehim?” she asked in shock. “He isn’t allowed visitors.”
“He’s allowed one visitor,” I whispered, dread dripping down my throat about what was inevitably going to happen next.
She typed something on her computer and then turned back to me with her lip curled up in disgust. “You’re his daughter?”
I nodded, doing my best to keep my face blank and not show the hurricane of emotions swirling inside of me.
“ID please,” she said shortly, and I was proud that my hand only trembled a little as I passed it to her. She grabbed the corner of it like she was afraid I’d taint her if our skin touched.
Look at me. One minute in the Demon’s orbit and I’d lost all my fucking backbone. Evidently, I needed the guys to follow me around and torture me constantly or I turned into a scared little mouse.
She slid my ID back to me. “It will be a minute. He’s in solitary at the back of the building.”
I mean, that made sense. I wouldn’t want to put a serial killer in with the general population of the prison either. Even if this was a maximum-security prison and most of the people in these walls were probably terrible people, I couldn’t comprehend someone in here being more evil than the Demon.
I went and sat in the visitor’s chair, ignoring the fact that the secretary and the two guards in the room were blatantly staring at me distrustfully like I was going to leap up and slit their throats at any second.
A while ended up being thirty minutes. Which was terrible because my nerves only grew as the minutes ticked by.
I was a wreck when a beefy guard whose neck was as wide as his head barged through the door and called my name. I stood up and almost tripped…on air, before walking towards the guard. My head felt light-headed, like I was going to pass out any second.
This was a bad idea. I needed to leave. Right now. I stopped right before I got to the guard, and he looked at me, confused.
The footage that had been leaked splashed through my mind, and then a myriad of different kills and tortures followed.
And that was enough to get me moving again.
It was amazing how quiet the prison was as we walked through the hallways. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, maybe having to walk past prisoners’ cells while they raged and gnashed their teeth in despair, but this area of the prison was clinical, almost like a boring office building.
We stopped abruptly outside of a door with a small window in it. I peered through and saw a glass wall with partitions every few feet. The room was completely empty, and I shivered as we walked in, wishing there was some kind of noise. Almost anything would be better than the complete silence of this place.
Maybe this was the punishment for prisoners. Silence so heavy that it drove them mad.
I’d once read about a room that had been built to be the quietest place on earth. Evidently, the longest anyone had been able to stay in it without going mad was forty-five minutes.
I was wondering if I’d somehow been transported to it.
