by D. N. Hoxa
“Ms. Montero, can you hear me?”
Tall Guy’s blue eyes took up my vision. I hadn’t even noticed opening my eyes, but he was there, far too close to me, my body too weak to push him off. Thoughts came back to me in a rush, and a voice kept repeating to me that I wasn’t dead. Tall Guy was trying to wake me up, which meant he really hadn’t meant to kill me.
So why was he standing so close to me? They normally kept their distance, even with the cuff around my ankle.
“Can you hear me?” he repeated, over and over again, and then hands grabbed me by the arms and pulled me to my feet. I had fallen to the floor, apparently, but it took a good minute for me to be able to stand on my own. They must have seen that I wasn’t anywhere near thinking about attacking because all three of them were extra close to me still.
“Is it done?”
The voice rang clear in my ears, like a bucket of cold water over my head. I was pretty sure I’d never heard it before, but it still brought shivers down my back as if my body knew that voice was danger.
Tall Guy stepped away from in front of me and I finally saw the man who’d spoken. He was standing in front of the door of the cell, and he had two soldiers at his back, but he stood taller than the both of them. He couldn’t be a day over thirty, but his brown eyes were sharp, focused, the eyes of a predator.
“Yes, Mr. Connelly,” said Tall Guy. “She’ll need a second to adjust, but she’s okay.” Then he and his two friends with the robes walked out of the cell.
“Thank you,” the new guy said with a nod, his eyes never leaving mine. There was something about him that felt…off. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. He didn’t look out of the ordinary. Some might even call him handsome with the strong jaw and high cheekbones, and the dark brown suit he had on didn’t hide his defined torso. But the expression in his eyes was wrong. He looked at me like he knew everything about me, even the thoughts in my head.
When he stepped into the cell, I instinctively took a step back. The soldiers didn’t walk in with him.
“Ms. Montero, you are now free to be on your way,” he said.
I heard his voice. I even read the words on his lips, but they still didn’t make any sense to me.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, you are free to go now,” the man said, speaking slowly, as if to a child. Then he smiled and it made me want to jump back all over again. “Just a few things before you leave: the device in the back of your neck is a tracker, Ms. Montero. It will tell us where you are and what you’re doing at any given time. A lethal dose of poison is inside it, which we can activate at any time.” He took another step closer to me, but by then I was too frozen to move. “If you try to remove the tracker, you die. If you hit it hard enough, you die. If you cross us in any way or manner, you die. I can’t stress this enough, Ms. Montero—that tracker is your life, and I will not hesitate to end it if you give me even the smallest reason.”
Boy, did he sound pissed. My hand reached out for the back of my neck. Wet. My fingers were sticky with blood, but I couldn’t feel anything on my skin other than a tear that was already healing. But the tracker he was talking about was under it. It was inside me, and when I moved my head, it felt like it was attached to my backbone.
What the hell? Nothing was making any sense.
I cleared my throat, wiping the blood on my jeans. “I’m sorry, who are you and what the hell is going on here?”
Surprise flashed in Connelly’s eyes for a split second. When he smiled this time, it was easy to see that that was the last thing he wanted to do in that moment.
“You’re not untouchable, Ms. Montero. I hope you remember that. I’m sure Mr. Reed will give you the details soon enough.”
With that, he turned around and walked out of the cell, out of the room altogether with the two soldiers right behind him.
To say I was shocked would be an understatement. It all clicked into place like a puzzle in my head—why they hadn’t tortured me, why they hadn’t killed me, why they were letting me go.
I was walking and I didn’t even realize it. A hand was wrapped around my arm, guiding me, and I’m pretty sure we went through a lot of rooms, maybe a couple corridors. There were a lot of people around me at one point, but I couldn’t remember anything for the life of me. It was too much—all of it—and my mind couldn’t handle it yet.
Cold air inside my nostrils, burning my chest as it went down. I was cold. My teeth were chattering. Someone—a soldier, I think—said something to me, but I couldn’t understand his words. All I did was walk ahead, even though nobody was by my side to guide me anymore.
It was dark outside, the sky pitch black. Gates opened in front of me and I went through them, not even feeling the ground beneath my feet. As soon as I stepped on the other side, I stopped. I forced myself to close my eyes and get it together. The guilt suffocated me, but I pushed it down with all my strength. The cold helped in keeping me focused on my freezing body. I needed to move. I needed to leave. I needed to get out of here right now.
Finally, I opened my eyes to look at my surroundings and actually saw the buildings on the other side of the wide street. I didn’t recognize any of them, but the green light coming from the glamoured crystals over the street said we were in the Shade. There were no people walking around me, nobody watching me, yet I felt eyes on my back like heat off the sun. It was impossible not to turn around and look at where I’d walked out of.
A gasp left my lips. The building within the gates was massive. It was the widest, most bizarre building I’d ever seen. Half of it was full of square, smaller buildings put together like they were made out of Legos, and the other half was mostly round shapes, with two pointy structures in the middle of it, too. The exterior was painted a dark grey and the few windows that I could see were all barred. It was a good distance from the building to the street, and I hadn’t even noticed walking it at all, but now I did. The gates were massive and the metal fence surrounded the entire thing too high to even see the top. The fence just merged with the black sky, and it felt like somebody had taken all the spells of the world and dumped them all in that fence. I also noticed the silhouettes of the soldiers behind it, standing around the huge yard, still as statues. There were so many of them, I lost count after the first thirty.
There was no sign or name anywhere, but I didn’t need one to know exactly where I’d been. This was Judicum, the supernatural prison of the Shade that nobody knew about. I don’t know why that came as a shock to me. I hadn’t seen where they’d taken me because I’d been unconscious until they woke me up inside the cell, but I should have known. I shouldn’t have been shaking so badly at this point.
No big deal, I said to myself. I just needed to breathe.
I looked back at the street, but it only got worse.
I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want them to give me back my freedom because the price for it was too high, too much for me to handle. I wanted to run back in there and demand they kill me, just like they were supposed to. Just like I’d believe they would all my life. It wasn’t fair. How was I going to live knowing that Damian had given his life away for mine?
No big deal. It didn’t matter where I’d been or how I’d gotten away. For now, it only mattered that I got out of there as fast as my legs could carry me.
That decided, I turned to the street and ran until my lungs felt like they were going to explode.
Chapter Eighteen
The sky outside the window was a dark grey, even though it wasn’t even eight in the morning. It looked angry, angrier than I felt, and just as desperate. My stomach rolled, just like it had for the past twelve hours every time I thought about it, which was at least once a minute.
Someone knocked on the door and Kit jumped from the pillow. Malin entered her guest room with a steaming mug in her hand and a forced smile on her face.
“Hey, you’re awake,” she said and brought me the coffee. Even though it smelled heavenly, I didn’t even get excit
ed about it.
“Thanks. Is Jamie up?” I said, holding the mug between my cold hands. Jamie had slept on the couch in Malin’s living room the night before, while I’d taken the guest room.
Malin shook her head. “She’s still passed out.” Then she raised her hand again and showed me her phone. A number was calling, but she hadn’t picked up. “It’s Carter. He’s been calling for the past hour, ever since I texted him.”
With a nod, I took the phone from her hand. Though I didn’t really want to talk to anyone at that point, I knew I had to so I answered. “Carter, hi.”
“Sin?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed. “You’re okay?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not in Judicum?”
“No, I’m at Malin’s.”
A pause. “What the hell happened? We’ve been trying to get through to you all night, and nobody told us you were let go.” It was the first time I ever noticed panic in Carter’s voice.
“I’ll come see you later, Carter. Are you with the Pack?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll come by later and tell you everything.”
Carter wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t push. After I disconnected the call, I returned Malin’s phone.
The night before, after the Guild had let me go, just like that, I’d run without direction for possibly five minutes. Then I’d found myself right in front of Golem It, the biggest grocery store in the Shade, which just so happened to be right across from Malin’s apartment building. Maybe it had been the Shade who brought me there, or maybe I’d run there myself subconsciously, but I’d been so glad that I thought I’d explode into tears for a second.
Even better, Malin had been home, having taken the day off work after what had happened. Kit was with her, too, together with Dalia and the little ones. They’d stayed with her because they hadn’t wanted to be alone at the apartment. The apartment I’d spent the last five years of my life in, the place I called home. Now, it felt like a place out of a fantasy.
After I’d told Malin what had happened and watched her cry for me while I felt like a piece of fucking rock, I’d gone and showered, got dressed in Malin’s clothes. By the time I came out of the bathroom, Jamie had been there, too—crying. Maybe something in me was broken because I couldn’t produce a single tear to save my life.
Not that I needed to do that anymore. Damian had taken care of it.
“Does it hurt?” Malin asked after a second. Suddenly, I was very aware of the foreign object under my skin on the back of my neck. I flinched.
“No. I can’t even feel it unless I’m thinking about it.” Which was a relief. Even when I’d lay down on my back on the bed next to Kit and his family, I hadn’t felt a single thing until I’d remembered that it was there. Then I’d felt it under my skin all night long, along with all the scars on my body. The worst were on my face, especially my right cheek. The scar where that glass shard had gone through was still raw red, and it didn’t look like it intended to heal for a long time.
“Good,” Malin said, and for the first time since I met her, awkward silence stretched between us. Neither of us knew what to say.
Kit climbed on my body and settled on my right shoulder, looking out the window, too. I’d been so happy to see him and the little ones again, I thought for sure I’d cry then. I still hadn’t been able to.
“I know it feels like it’s the end of the world right now, Sin, but it’s going to get better. You’re alive. You’re free. That’s all you’ve ever wanted, right?”
“Not at the expense of someone else’s freedom.” Least of all Damian’s. Knowing his history with Guild deals only made it worse.
“He knows what he’s doing, Sin. He’s a big boy,” Malin said. She’d said this to me before, that there was a reason why Damian had done this, that he knew why he’d done it. It didn’t make me feel any better. He’d given up his whole life for me and now my freedom didn’t feel like freedom. It felt like…a different kind of prison. How did someone repay a debt like that? The guilt pushed harder on my shoulders. The more I thought about it, the heavier it became.
“Let’s go wake Jamie up. I really need to go see Sonny.”
Since Jamie was the only one of us who had a car, we took hers. They insisted on coming with me, and I didn’t even argue. My friends kept me distracted better than I could ever do it myself, and I was thankful for them. For everything they’d ever done for me.
Nova Terra Academy was located almost two hours away from Manhattan, in New Haven, Connecticut. I didn’t call Sonny to tell him that I was on my way until Jamie parked her navy colored Audi across the street from the campus.
The building was almost half the size of the Judicum prison, this one full of rich red bricks and fancy golden windowpanes. Four separate buildings were in the massive yard, and behind them were the fields and the tracks and the pool, and everything else the school needed for its students. We couldn’t see them, but Sonny had told me all about it on his last visit so it felt like I had been here before.
“Do you need us to come with?” Jamie asked. I looked out the window still, unable to make up my mind to just open the backdoor and get it over with. I already knew how much this was going to hurt.
“No, it’s fine,” I finally said. “I need to talk to him alone.”
And tell him what had happened—the whole truth. Sonny deserved to know. I wanted him to know why I was leaving, and maybe, hopefully, he wouldn’t blame me for it. At least not as much as I blamed myself. The girls didn’t argue and they let me have another couple of minutes of staring out the window before I got my shit together and went to see my brother. Kit came with me and his family stayed in the car with Malin. Jamie still couldn’t bring herself to even look at them for longer than a few seconds.
A few sun rays peeked from the angry clouds in the sky like they wanted to tell me that there was still hope. I ignored them and crossed the street to go see Sonny.
An hour and a half later I walked out of campus with Kit on my shoulder, my eyes as dry as they had been when I’d walked in. I did feel a bit lighter, though. I’d finally told my brother everything about me, and it felt good to know that he knew who his sister really was.
He took it well. Much better than I would have, had the roles been reversed. He did cry for a bit, but the best part was that it didn’t feel like he blamed me. He didn’t even make a big deal out of my leaving.
“But what about when you get home?” I asked him, completely shocked that he was laughing. We were sitting on one of the benches at the side of the first dormitory, and a lot of students were passing us by, but he didn’t seem fazed at all or afraid that somebody would be eavesdropping.
“You didn’t actually think I’d be living with you after college, did you? C’mon, Sin,” my brother said, a pink blush spreading on his cheeks.
Well, fuck. I had thought that he would be living with me after college. I just imagined we would live together for the rest of our lives, like we always had. It never occurred to me that he would want to have a life of his own, far away from me. I’ll admit that I was relieved. I’d be just a phone call away, but it still made me feel better that he had plans, especially when he was doing so good in college. I was so proud of him, my heart wanted to burst out of my chest. He was a good kid. I couldn’t have asked for a better brother.
Jamie was pissed to have had to wait for over an hour for me, but she didn’t make my life miserable about it, which was a pleasant surprise. She was cutting me some slack, and though I would normally hate that, right now I appreciated it.
Our next destination was the Bronx. I’d promised Carter I would go see him, and I intended to keep that promise. I considered him a friend—a good friend—one worthy of a proper goodbye, so off we went.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call Damian, Sin?” Jamie asked when she put the car in drive. “You haven’t talked to him since they let you go, have you?”
“I haven’t.”
“You can use my phone if you want,” Malin said, reaching for her pocket. My phone was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t had it on me when I woke up in the prison, and the Guild hadn’t returned it to me. Or my weapons—but I’d been too panicked to even think about asking. Since Malin was sitting in the passenger seat and I was in the back, it was easy to stop her by putting a hand on her shoulder.
“No. I will call him later. Just…later.” The idea of talking to Damian made me feel like I was already lying in the gutter. That fool had given up his freedom for me, and I didn’t even know for how long. What was I going to even say to him? How was I ever going to look him in the eye again?
It was too much. I was putting it off for later. As later as I possibly could.
The girls kept me distracted by talking about unimportant things, people Jamie met at the club and Malin met at the hospital. The little hellbeasts stayed on my person the whole way, bored out of their minds to be stuck in such a small space for so long. I’d told Kit he didn’t need to come with me, but he’d insisted. Now that the Guild knew who I was, I would never again have to hide it from anyone. There would be no need for Kit to stick to me like he used to, but he didn’t want to hear it. Now, I had to keep the little ones entertained before they made a mess out of Jamie’s car.
But it worked. Before I knew it, we were in the Bronx and my stomach was growling, demanding food. We’d stopped for gas and gotten a few things from the convenience store, but the bars and the soda hadn’t been enough, apparently.
“I need to stretch my legs,” Jamie said and got out of the car before I did. Malin did the same, and as soon as her door opened, all the little ones ran out.
“Don’t look at me. Go make sure they don’t get in trouble,” I told Kit and Dalia when they both turned their heads toward me lazily. They’d been sitting next to me in the back, wrapped up in one another, sleeping the whole way. I wasn’t going to chase the little ones outside.
