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“Help me out,” he said.
Elliot grabbed Jag’s arm to stop him from falling flat on his face as he struggled through the dam.
“I’m going to beat that bastard six shades of shit.”
“How poetic,” Ram drawled. “How is the beaver enjoying the pool I sent her?”
I sighed. Of course, it was from Ram.
“You stay away from her and from my friends,” Jag roared.
I turned back to Ram to tell him to fuck off, but he pointed into the open door of my cell, next to Beverly’s.
I stepped forward and glanced inside. The mattress was on the floor, the drawers had been ripped out of the desk, and the lone shelf stood empty. But ransacking happened often enough that I didn’t keep anything that mattered. I tore up and flushed all letters after reading them—the good ones alongside the threatening ones. I kept no journals. It was easier than losing personal information to my enemies.
The most worrying thing was on the other side of the cell window. Beyond the top of the prison’s outer wall, the air rippled like a stone dropped in water stained with gasoline.
It definitely wasn’t Juniper. She didn’t use portals, and if she ever decided to, she’d blow past the prison’s ward like it was nothing. Like she had done a dozen times already while trying to convince me to leave this place.
But then who in hell was casting these spells?
“Ah, you have noticed the portals,” Ram said, his voice low and dangerous.
I debated dragging him into my cell to question him about the portals, about breaking out, and about Juniper. But I decided, fuck it. I wasn’t playing his games anymore. I had promised myself not to when I had joined up with Juniper to take him down years ago.
“Be careful when you beat up Ram,” I said to Jag as the man yanked his foot free of Beverly’s handiwork. “He aims for the dick and favors uppercuts.” I shot Ram a smug grin and pushed past him into my cell.
“Wait,” Ram said, his voice losing its careful calm. “I can help you free Beverly.”
It was all a scam. I had put Ram in prison in the first place; he wasn’t going to help me unless it was a trap or a way to help himself. And I wasn’t interested in assisting a man who had wanted to steal the world’s magic.
I wished I could slam the door in his face, but they were all locked to the walls during the day so we couldn’t close them and do questionable shit. Instead, I turned to glare at him just as Jag slammed Ram against the wall with a thud. Ram groaned.
“If you want to escape, you need me,” Ram said.
“You set up my friend,” Jag hissed.
I was happy to let them fight it out, but Beverly growled as though distressed. Tensing, I stepped back into the corridor. Elliot, Moe, and Beverly looked completely lost as they watched Jag pin Ram against the wall and pull back his arm, fist aimed at Ram’s nose.
“I know what you three are in for,” Ram said.
“You don’t know shit,” Jag snapped.
“I agree that you don’t belong here. It was a cruel miscarriage of justice.”
And just like that, he had Jag like he had everyone. The man’s fist dropped to his side, and his grip on Ram’s collar loosened.
I clenched my teeth. “He tells you what you want to hear so you think he cares.”
Ram looked at me with his eyes heavy as though with regret. “Sometimes, I mean what I say,” he whispered.
The vulnerable expression in his eyes and the soft whispered words took me back to another time, far from here and long ago. In a room lit by the cold moon of the North Atlantic. A time of soft hands with uneven nails and skin that smelled of cedar and sweat and reminded me of the forests of my home before I was shipped off to boarding school. The forests where I used to hide before I hid in the dark and in him, where not even my best friend knew about it.
Remembering cracked the solid earth of my heart like dry soil in a heatwave.
But it had all been a lie. Just another mask Ram had worn like a Scooby-Doo villain who refuses to give up when caught the first time.
So I turned to Jag instead. “Do you think he gives a fuck about your sentence?”
