Page 25 of Captured By the Convict

“Calm down, ladies,” I declare sternly to the gaping gurgling goo-goo’ing crowd. “They’re not for sale. Now, who’s next in line? How can I help you, Miss?”

Connie shoots a worried glance in my direction, then flashes a hesitant smile, finally shrugs and gets back to wrapping cookies and boxing muffins and ringing the register. This is the first time I’ve worked the front counter side-by-side with my wife, and when I turn to grab a red ribbon from the back counter, the sight of our babies watching Mommy and Daddy work together almost breaks me with a wave of the most overwhelming love for my family, my fortune, my future.

I savor the wonderful moment, my back still turned to the crowd, my eyes almost tearing up when I think of how neither Connie nor I had the privilege of two happy loving parents to watch over us. In that moment I thank the universe for my luck, and promise again—like I have a million times this past year—that I’m never going to stray from my duties as a father and husband, never going to lose the possessive fire that claimed Connie a year ago and only burns hotter now with the fuel of family. All I want to do now is stay with my family, provide for them, protect them, love them, cherish them.

And that means I’ve got what I want.

Everything I want.

Always and forever.

And then I hear something that sends a dark chill up my spine, splintering my warm happiness with cold fear.

“Hi, Connie,” comes the prison Warden’s voice from behind me. “Heard you stopped delivering to the prison after what happened last year with the escape and all that. Can’t say I blame you for not wanting to be reminded of that trauma. But hell, we miss your cookies. So I thought I’d swing by and pick up a batch for my wife and kids.”

“Oh, wow!” Connie’s voice is almost a shriek as she just about manages to stifle her panic while I freeze with my back to the Warden, my vision blurring as my perfect world starts to unravel like that spool of red ribbon on the counter. “Warden! What a surprise! How are you? You . . . you have kids?”

“Two teenage girls,” he says before pausing and letting out a gasp. “Wait, are those yours? Twin girls?” Now I feel the Warden’s gaze rest on my broad back. Thankfully all my tattoos are well-hidden under my pink hoodie and black track pants, but it won’t matter the moment I turn around. “I didn’t know you were married, Connie. When did that happen? Is this your husband?”

My heart almost leaps out of my throat as I glance towards the doors leading back to the kitchen. I’m about to keep my head down and hurry to the back after muttering something about cookies in the oven, but then I remember I’d turned away from the front counter because I’m supposed to be wrapping a red ribbon around this pink box of cookies for some customer.

The waiting customer calls out to me now, and through my blood-pounded eardrums I hear Connie stammer out an answer to the Warden’s question.

“Y-yes, I . . . I am married,” she says to the Warden, her voice dropping with the same dread that’s pulling me down to the depths of some new kind of hell, the worst kind of hell, thespecial kind of hell that burns a hundred times hotter because you’ve experienced heaven for almost a year and don’t want to let go, can’t let go, fuckingwon’tlet go.

Now my heart thunders as my blood rises to levels of manic desperation, a raw determination to keep what’s mine, to do whatever it takes to keep this life, stay with my family, live out my forever with them.

I’ll fucking kill him, comes the blood-drenched answer from that dark place that will always live inside me no matter how much sunshine my family brings to my life. Yeah, I’ll take the Warden to the back, kill him quick and clean, burn his carcass in those ovens like I do to anyone who comes in the way of my forever.

Then I remember the Warden saying something about having a wife and two teenage daughters, and I glance at my own two baby girls and know that I’m not murdering anyone in the damn kitchen.

Which means I’m going back to prison.

This time for life.

My forever lasted less than a year.

For a fleeting moment I consider just dashing through the kitchen door, waiting customers be damned. But another part of me says I need to turn around and face this, that even if I make it through today without being exposed, the Warden is a ticking time bomb. He could walk in here again any day, which means I’ll never be able to step out of the shadows, never be able to enjoy the simple delight of working side by side with my wife while our children giggle and gurgle behind us.

Now something else sparks to life inside my hammering heart. My thoughts are racing through what happened last year, how the Warden signed off on the positive ID of the burned body, how he closed the file in a hurry because it suited his purposes too. It also occurs to me that the Warden would knowthat I was convicted on a trumped-up charge of felony-murder for accidentally killing some piece-of-shit drug dealers.

So maybe . . . just maybe . . .

Now through my spinning thoughts I hear Connie’s voice making up some excuse for me to go back to the kitchen without introducing myself to the Warden.

But I can’t do it.

There’s some instinct blazing through me, and I just whip my body around and stride to the counter and extend my hand to the Warden, look him directly in the eye through my fake-ass nerd-glasses.

“Liam O’Brien,” I say confidently, smiling warmly as the Warden’s face pales to ghost-white then darkens to blood-red. “Nice to meet you, sir. What can we get for you?”

The Warden gapes at me like a drowning goldfish. He swallows thickly, glances at Connie’s stricken face, then turns his shellshocked gaze back to me.

I’m still extending my hand out over the counter for a handshake. We’re holding up the line, but it feels like everything else is just background, just white noise, shadowy gray landscape surrounding this vividly colored moment.

The final moment of truth.

The Warden swallows again, blinks slowly, his gaze moving past me and resting on our twin girls perched on the countertop. I can fucking see the wheels turning behind the Warden’s eyes, hear the gears grinding behind his peaked eyebrows, sense the electric tension in his tight jaw.

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