Monster (A Prisoned Spinoff Duet Book 2)

by Marni Mann

  There was so many years’ worth of shit in here.

  So many nights when I’d stare at the bars and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  So many days I couldn’t find a place on my body to cut that wasn’t already thick with scar tissue.

  I wouldn’t miss it here.

  Once everything was in the corner, I lifted the kid’s letter and rolled it as thin as I could get it. Then, I took one of the plastic sleeves and rolled the two together. Swishing around all the saliva in my mouth, I spit it onto my hand and coated it over the plastic. And, finally, I brought it to the base of my ass and shoved it up my goddamn hole.

  It had been a while since anything was up there.

  Fuck, I needed some cock.

  I moved to the front of my cell and hugged my arms around the bars, so I could look into the hallway.

  The guard at the end of the cell block noticed me and said, “You ready?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “Don’t sound too excited, inmate. The guys at the door don’t respond well to smiles and giddiness.”

  I wasn’t fucking giddy.

  I didn’t even know what the hell giddy was.

  But, at the end of this asshole’s shift, I guaranteed he looked forward to going home and getting out of this hell. If he’d put in twenty-five years, like me, I was sure he’d be even more excited.

  If I ran into him on the outside, I was going to slice a smile into his face just for being a dick on my release day.

  Fuck, getting out meant I would be faced with a whole new issue.

  Anonymous.

  They knew I was being released, and I now knew they weren’t done killing.

  If they planned on coming after me, I hoped they wouldn’t wait long. Whoever it was, I wanted that piece of shit in my hands. And, eventually, after all the torture I committed to them, I wanted their blood. I wanted it drained to make the largest pool. I wanted to cover every inch of that pool with my cum.

  “Turn around,” the guard said when he reached my cell. “Stick your hands into the slot.”

  I turned my back toward him and dropped my wrists into the hole where he cranked a set of cuffs around them. Once my cell was unlocked, I walked out into the hallway, and he followed behind me, keeping a few fingers on the metal between my hands.

  “Walk,” he ordered.

  I checked out the other inmates as I passed their cells. I hadn’t talked to them much. It seemed like there were new prisoners every couple of weeks. I didn’t know what had happened to the ones who left—if they’d died or if they had been released. Words weren’t exchanged in here. Only crying and fucking screams.

  A bunch of pussies. They never would have survived my sentence.

  I didn’t say anything to them as I walked by. I just looked them in the eyes, and I smiled.

  It made me happy to see them on the other side of the bars.

  Suffering.

  Rotting away.

  I was going to need to hurt someone soon.

  At the end of the hall, the guard said, “Open the door and turn right.”

  His instructions brought me to another hallway where there was an office at the end. A man sat behind a wall of glass, and the guard brought me to the front of it.

  The man behind the glass looked at me and then at his computer screen, and I could tell he was reading something.

  “Number,” he barked.

  “Twelve, twelve, twelve,” I said.

  Twelve was the cell I had put Tyler in.

  More fucking irony.

  “Uncuff him,” the guy behind the glass said to the guard.

  The handcuffs were unlocked from my wrists, and I clasped my hands together and rubbed them.

  “That way,” the guard said as he pointed toward a door only a few feet from me. “You might want to move fast. Sometimes, we like to change our minds.”

  He was definitely dead if I saw him on the outside.

  But, here, I said nothing, and I didn’t look at either of them again.

  I rushed toward the door. I opened it, and I stepped outside. I had to put my hand over my eyes to block the sun. It had been a long time since I saw it. I couldn’t even remember when the guards had last taken me outside.

  There was a solid fence around the whole property, and it blocked my view of whatever was past it. I made my way over to it and knocked on one of the posts to let the guards know I wanted them to open it. As the metal ran over the tar, it made the loudest squeal. It moved slow as hell. But, as soon as the space was wide enough, I slipped through it.

  I wasn’t more than a few paces from the opening when I saw a man standing next to a van. I blocked my eyes from the sun again and gave him a good once-over. Part of me expected it to be Beard or Diego. Shit, I wondered what those guys looked like twenty-five years later. Then, I remembered the explosion and how it had turned my two best friends and my father into ash.

  I didn’t need to keep staring to know who this man was.

  He’d never sent me a picture.

  He didn’t have to.

  He looked just like me.

  And he’d come here, on my release day.

  He’d come to meet his father.

  Something in my chest started to pound, and I didn’t know what the hell it was. It hurt so much, all I could do was whisper, “Hey, kid.”

  Huck

  “Hey, kid,” my father whispered as I stood in front of the van I’d rented at the Margarita Island airport after Arin and I had flown in last night.

  Venezuela was our first stop. Grenada would be our second.

  For Arin to understand who I really was, which had to be the next step in our relationship, she had to see where I had come from.

  And whom I had come from.

  I’d thought about this moment, of meeting my father for the first time, for so many years. Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t been sure I would come. I couldn’t stand the person he was and the things he’d done to my family, and I didn’t know if I could be in his presence without wanting to hurt him. But I’d taken a look at his last letter, the one where he’d given me his release date, and I’d booked the trip.

  I had to meet him. I had to know what he looked like now in comparison to the one picture I had of him. I had to know what it felt like to shake his hand. I had to connect all the letters to the actual person, not the one I’d read about, and I had to see if he was still that disgusting piece of shit or if jail had changed him into someone different.

  And, now, after his twenty-five-year sentence, after exchanging so many words, it was finally happening, and we were walking toward each other on this long stretch of pavement.

  I took a step and another, and Shank did the same.

  He was much smaller than I’d expected. He was at least a few inches shorter than me and skinny as hell. I was sure the food in prison was the reason for that because Jack had never described him as gaunt. But there was a familiarity there, too. It wasn’t in our body shapes or our faces; it wasn’t even in the way we walked. It was the green of our eyes. The color was identical.

  I’d hoped I had gotten nothing from him besides being left-handed.

  I took another step and one more.

  This was the man who despised my mother.

  This was the man who had wanted my mother dead.

  This was the man who had wanted me dead.

  He hadn’t loved her. It hadn’t even been a mercy fuck.

  He’d raped her.

  He wasn’t the least bit ashamed of it either. He’d told me every goddamn detail in his letters, and the thought made me feel sick. He had been so brutal, so relentless, so convinced that he was doing it to help Beard.

  I didn’t know why she hadn’t tried to kill him.

  I guessed killing just wasn’t her thing.

  It was his.

  My pace started to slow, and so did his.

  He was only a few car lengths away, and I felt the knife in the back of my throat. I didn’t know wh
y it was stabbing me now, the tip gradually moving up until it hit my tonsils, and that was where it fucking plunged.

  It hurt to fill my lungs. It made my goddamn hands shake.

  He stopped an appropriate distance away and said, “Kid.”

  “Hey.” That was the only word I could get out, and even that one burned.

  He made no attempt to reach in for a hug. He didn’t extend his fingers either, so I did. He gripped them, and we shook. His skin was rough, and he didn’t squeeze me tight at all.

  That surprised me.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” he said.

  He had tattoos on his neck and a piercing in his cheek, both which I remembered from his picture. But the photo hadn’t shown the intensity of his eyes. The longer I looked at them, the more I realized they were nothing like mine at all. They might be the same color, but deep within that green was fucking evil, and it was so strong, I could feel it in the air between us.

  “I wanted to meet you,” I said.

  The stinging increased, and I tried swallowing some air to help alleviate it.

  “Sticking around for a while? Or you’re just here to witness my exit?”

  His tone was a mix of a growl and a rasp with a hint of a Spanish accent despite him being from the States. Now that I knew what he sounded like, I could hear every letter in his voice.

  The knife turned in a circle, pulled out, and stabbed right back in.

  “I booked us a hotel for a couple of nights.”

  His expression didn’t change.

  “I didn’t know what your plans were or if you had a place to go, so I booked you one, too.”

  He scanned the space around us, looking into the street, and then he glanced behind him at the gate. “Who’s we?”

  “My girlfriend, Arin. She came with me.”

  His eyes were on mine again. “Where is she?”

  “In the van.”

  He attempted to look through the windows, but they were too tinted. “She’s from Thailand?”

  “Does it matter?”

  His lids narrowed. “Yeah, it matters.”

  “She’s from the US.”

  “Where?”

  “New York.”

  He nodded. “I see.”

  He didn’t seem nervous. He seemed almost agitated and impatient, like he wanted to speed this part up. I wondered why he was asking so many questions about Arin and not a thing about me.

  Maybe I just needed to get him away from the prison.

  “You hungry?” I asked him. “You want to grab something to eat?”

  “Yeah.” He started walking toward the van, so I followed him. “There’s this place that was close to the prison where Toy and I used to go all the time. Don’t know if it’s still there, but we should go and see.”

  “That’s fine,” I told him. “You mind taking the back seat?”

  He didn’t answer. He just went for the back door and climbed inside.

  “Arin,” I said, leaning toward her to give her a quick kiss, “this is Shank, my father.”

  I couldn’t read the expression on her face.

  I was sure this was all a bit overwhelming since she hadn’t even known where we were going until we got to the Bangkok International Airport.

  She turned around in her seat and stared at him for several seconds before she extended her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Shank.”

  He said nothing, but through the mirror, I watched him shake her hand and eye her down. Not in a sexual way, more like he was trying to figure her out.

  I waited for her to face the front again before I started the van and pulled out of the prison’s parking lot. “You’re going to have to tell me how to get there,” I told him. “Or, if you have the name of the restaurant, I can get the directions on my phone.”

  “Phones do that now? Fuck.” He looked behind us, as though he were checking to see if anyone was following us. “Take a left.”

  The radio was off. The only sound in here was the air-conditioning blowing through the vents.

  Just as I was about to say something, he said, “Ever been to Venezuela, Arin?”

  “This is my first time,” she answered.

  “What about you, kid? Did you ever come back?”

  “Nah. I traveled all over but never stopped here.”

  “Turn left,” he said, moving between our seats.

  With him being so close, I got a whiff of him. He smelled stale, like old smoke and sweat, and his clothes were so dirty and stained black.

  After a few minutes, he pointed through the windshield. “It’s right over there. Looks like it’s still open.”

  I parked in a spot directly in front of the restaurant and waited for everyone to get out before I locked up.

  We all walked inside, and my father said something in Spanish to the waiter closest to us. The waiter replied, and then my father led us to the farthest table on the left and sat us directly next to the window. He chose the seat that faced the entrance, and we sat across from him.

  “I’ll order some of everything, and we can share it,” he said.

  I looked at Arin, and even though we hadn’t gotten a menu yet, I said, “Are you okay with that?”

  “That’s fine,” she answered.

  The waiter was helping another table, but my father yelled something in Spanish to him. The waiter glanced over at us, and my father held three fingers in the air.

  Then, he turned his attention back to us. “You’re here for a couple of days and then headed back to Bangkok?”

  “Grenada.” I reached across Arin’s lap and wrapped my hand over her thigh. “Arin’s never been there either.”

  “Staying at Toy’s place, or did you sell it?”

  During the flight here, I’d explained to Arin the basics of my childhood. She knew Jack had become my guardian sometime before I turned two and that everyone in Venezuela had called him Toy and that he had been in a relationship with my father. She knew he was now gone and that he’d been found dead. She knew about the prison and the explosion and how my mother had died in the fire. There were some things I hadn’t told her, like the actual purpose of the prison and the things that had gone on there, anything to do with The Achurdy, and the way my mother had gotten pregnant.

  Maybe, one day, I’d tell her.

  It wouldn’t be today.

  “I sold his place a month after he died,” I said. “I went there first and cleaned it all out and…” Fuck, my throat had begun feeling good again, but now, the knife was starting to tease it. “I had to bury all his animals, and then I took a few of his things home with me.”

  “What did you take?” Arin asked.

  I turned toward her. “A necklace that he always wore, some pictures—shit like that.”

  “That motherfucker had a bunch of rats, didn’t he? I knew he loved those babies so much, but I didn’t know he’d started his own collection.”

  “We didn’t have rats,” I said. “We had snakes.”

  “Snakes?” He sounded surprised. “Ah, that was because of his tongue, wasn’t it?”

  He laughed, and for the first time, I saw his teeth. Most of them were black.

  He was right; Jack’s tongue was the reason he’d gotten his first snake. It had been a gift from our neighbor because he thought it would be funny to see Jack and the snake both stick their tongues out. But Jack had fallen right in love with the boa, and he’d begun to buy more.

  “His tongue?” Arin asked.

  “I split that shit in half.”

  “I don’t understand,” Arin said.

  Shank kept his arms on the table but leaned forward to get closer to her. “I wanted him to give better head, so I took a saw and I pressed it against his tongue and I split the fucking thing in half.” He looked at me. “Any idea who killed him?”

  I squeezed her thigh, and she didn’t glance over at me. Her chest was rising and falling so fast, so I knew she was breathing. Finally, after a few seconds, she put her hand
on top of mine and squeezed back.

  “No,” I said, answering my father. “It’s a dead end.”

  The waiter placed a water in front of me, and I took a drink from it.

  “My friends weren’t able to find out anything.”

  “That’s fucked,” he said. “But don’t worry, kid. When I find that bastard, I’m going to fucking kill him.”

  Silence passed between the three of us.

  And then, out of nowhere, Arin asked, “Do you know who could have done it, Shank?”

  I watched his face as he processed her question. His stare intensified. His top lip almost curled a little. “Everyone I know is dead.” His gaze shifted to me so fucking slowly. “Except for you.”

  The door to the restaurant opened, and his gaze immediately turned to the front. I could tell the person was walking to the other side of the room because my father’s eyes followed him there and stopped moving when the person must have sat down.

  Then, his stare was back on me, dipping down to my hand, which was resting on top of the table. “Where’d you get that scar?”

  “Isn’t that from breaking your arm?” Arin asked.

  I slowly faced her. “How’d you know that?”

  Besides Jack, who had taken me to the hospital, and Shank, whom I’d written about it to in a letter, I’d never talked about that with anyone.

  “You told me.” Her cheeks turned a little red. “Don’t you remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She smiled, and it was more seductive than sweet. “It happened a few weeks ago when we were eating at that restaurant near the market. We split that bowl of liquor, and at some point, you mentioned that you’d broken your arm.”

  “My wrist,” I said.

  “That’s what I meant.”

  I remembered the night she was talking about—the restaurant and all the booze we’d shared. We’d each had a pretty good buzz going on, but I couldn’t recall that conversation.

  “That was also the night you told me about Rada,” she added.

  Rada was my ex. Hell, I didn’t remember talking about her either. I must have been a lot drunker than I’d thought.