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I roll my eyes and turn to Lace, who doesn’t look pleased.
“I’ll meet you back at the unit, okay?”
“You don’t want breakfast?”
“Neh. Not really hungry.”
Lace’s eyes travel from my face and over to Jaxon’s. For a moment, I think she might argue, but instead she nods, just once, and drops my hand, shoving her fists into her pockets. Then, her tone drops a bit.
“Be careful walking around by yourself,” she warns, blue eyes violently uneasy.
“It’s alright, Willis, I’ll be escorting her,” Jaxon says behind us. Lace forces a smile and nod, but it’s fake. We both know the real truth: if Ronnie and her thugs want to get me, Jaxon won’t stand in her way. Nobody will.
“Just keep your head down, too,” I call out to Lace as she walks away. The mere fact that Ronnie could still very well go after Lace to get to me weighs heavy on my chest. I know with every fiber of my being that Ronnie would do it to just get the upper hand on me. I know I can’t protect her forever, and that’s harder than anything else I’ve faced in my time here at Ashgate.
Jaxon and I don’t talk as I follow him up the stairs toward the warden’s office. I want to talk to him, to ask him what he knew and how. I want to clutch him to me for protection, keep him close, even just for comfort. But I don’t, because I’m still an inmate and Jaxon is still a prison guard. At this point, I’m so defeated that I’m not even sure I want to hear Jaxon’s plan to prove my innocence, if he even has one. If I don’t know how to prove myself, why should I expect him to?
Jaxon knocks on Warden Flynn’s door, and I hear her yell for me to come in. I glance back at him as Jaxon nods, encouraging, then closes the door behind me, leaving the warden and me alone.
“Ms. Taylor, hello,” says Warden Flynn, pointing to the empty seat across from her desk. Warily, I take a seat, blowing out a breath between my teeth. Her office is as immaculate as ever, but not in a welcoming way—more like in a psychiatric hospital ammonia scrub kind of way. If one didn’t know this was the warden’s office, no one ever would have guessed it was occupied by anybody.
“Warden.”
“It’s nice having you back. We weren’t sure if you would be,” Warden Flynn says, smiling a bit. It’s not a real smile; it’s fake, like the rest of her. Fake, like everything else here.
“Why wouldn’t I be back?” I make it a point to look around, pretending to be interested in everything but her. “I didn’t kill myself.”
“No, no, you certainly didn’t,” the warden says, nodding her head. “But then again, that wasn’t your intention anyway, was it?”
“No, ma’am, it wasn’t.” I turn my gaze back onto her, squinting. “But you know that. Mr. Jaxon knows that. I think everyone in this prison knows that.”
“Yes,” Warden Flynn says. “We certainly know that now.”
“It doesn’t matter though, does it?” I ask, slouching down in the chair. “I wasn’t able to do what I set out to do, anyway.”
“And what was that?” the warden asks. “Did you set out to kill your sister?”
I shrug, just to play with her, and chew on my bottom lip. “Either kill her or get the truth out of her,” I say finally. “Unfortunately, neither of those options worked out, did they? Hence why I’m still here, talking to you.”
Warden Flynn smiles, brushing off my attitude, and straightens a crooked pen on her desk. “Nick Jaxon seems to think that you may be onto something,” she says. “For some reason, he thinks you could be innocent in all of this.”
“And do you believe him?”
Instead of answering, Warden Flynn folds her hands on the desk, still smiling. She doesn’t answer my question but continues to speak, anyway.
“The board is wondering if we need to put you into protection,” she says, her piercing blue eyes looking right through me. I resist the urge to cower under this new, sharp gaze. The truth is, I’m too tired to argue. Too tired to fight. My escape plan failed, and I’m still stuck here.
Innocent.
“I don’t need to go into protection.” My eyes hurt when I look at her too long, but all I can think about is Lace. And Camilla and Sabine. Putting me into protection would separate me from the women. Isolation.
“We don’t believe it’s safe in general for you,” Flynn says, clearing her throat. The lines in her face tighten. She’s wearing too much makeup, to the point that I can see every wrinkle as though it’s highlighted by the very foundation she’s trying to use to cover them.
“No one will hurt me.” I cross my arms over my chest and look away from the warden, turning my head instead to catch a glimpse of Jaxon standing patiently outside the window of her office. “All I did was try to escape.”
“All you did?” Flynn claps one hand down on the table, palm flat. She smirks and shakes her head. “You tried to escape from prison, Ms. Taylor, and you succeeded. That’s a pretty big thing in our world.”
“Maybe next time the women will join me and we’ll actually succeed.”
