Never Let Me Fall

by Abbie Roads

  Also by Abbie Roads

  Fatal Dreams

  Race the Darkness

  Hunt the Dawn

  Fatal Truth

  Saving Mercy

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2018 by Abbie Roads

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover art by Kris Keller

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  An Excerpt from Saving Mercy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Be a ray of sunshine in someone’s cloudy sky.

  Chapter 1

  There were only two options open to Helena Grayse—survive or die. Never had that been clearer than on this night. Her final night in the Fairson Reformatory for Women.

  The lights were off, the shadows deep, and the minutes until morning passed slower than the previous ten years. Her heart throbbed, locking her in hypervigilance. She lay on her bunk, her gaze darting erratically around the darkened women’s dorm while she strained to hear even the slightest of sounds.

  The Eight Sisters Posse had despised her the moment she’d crossed the prison’s threshold, placing her firmly at the bottom of the food chain. At the time, she hadn’t understood their insta-hate, but over the years, they’d taught her all about it.

  She was better than they were. Not really, but that’s what they thought because she wasn’t a junkie, had an education, and—the thing they hated most, the thing they wouldn’t forgive—she acted innocent. She hadn’t bothered to tell them she really was innocent of murdering her boyfriend, Rory Ellis. They wouldn’t have believed her anyway. No one believed a felon.

  Dorm B contained bunk beds to conserve space. Five rows of five beds, double stacked. Fifty inmates. Prison overcrowding at its finest. Her bunk sat dead center in the room. Four of the Sisters slept in here. Better odds than eight on one, but still daunting.

  Carrie Lane slept in the bunk behind her, head-to-head with Helena. One freedom they possessed—which way to lie in their beds. “Lena?” Carrie whispered so quietly, it was barely a breath of sound.

  She hated being called Lena, but that was her prison name. Chosen for her. And like everything else in here, she’d had to live with it. She’d never particularly liked Grandma’s nickname for her—Helen—but now she’d sell what was left of her sanity to be called that again. That was the power of nostalgia.

  “You know they’re coming for you tonight.” Carrie’s words contained no real emotion. No concern. Just a passing along of information. “I hope you have a plan.”

  If she had a plan, she wasn’t going to share it with anyone. Trust didn’t exist in here.

  Cuts, scrapes, bruises, and broken bones happened when the Sisters were being nice. Tonight—the eve of her release—nice wasn’t part of their plan. This was their last chance to kill her. They’d almost succeeded countless times before, but by some double miracle, she’d survived a gang shanking, asphyxiation, and things she didn’t want to think about.

  Across the dorm to her left, someone sighed. At the same time on her right, there was a faint rustle of blankets. Was that sigh more than a sigh? Was it a signal? She sounded paranoid even to herself, but paranoia had kept her alive. Barely.

  She turned her head and looked toward the rustling blanket sound, but saw no one. Only two more rows of women sleeping quietly. That was a danger sign all its own. Things were noisier during the night. It had taken her years to get used to the noise of sleeping with forty-nine other women.

  Breathing. Coughing. Sex. Sniffling. Snoring. Farts.

  But tonight, there was just that one sigh. A signal from the Sisters.

  Her body vibrated from a terrible combination of fear and impatience. Why didn’t they just hurry up and make their move? End the awful anticipation that had its jaws clamped around her.

  Two bunks behind her and one to the left, Bertie started snoring. The older woman was silent as the night if she lay on her side, but turned into a lumber mill every time she lay on her back. Whoever bunked underneath Bertie inherited the job of kicking the bottom of Bertie’s bed until the older woman rolled over. Or else no one in the dorm would get any sleep.

  Bertie kept the racket up, the noise grating and annoying and ominous. Paranoia told Helena that Bertie’s snoring was part of the Sister’s plan. Disguise the sound of their movements—their attack—with Bertie’s chain-saw snores.

  From the corner of her eye, Helena spotted the first Sister. She crawled in the left aisle, her movements slow, silent, steady. A second Sister crept on all fours up the right aisle. It was too risky to stand because of the cameras. If the corrections officers paid the tiniest bit of attention, they’d be able to see the movement. But the COs weren’t paid enough to be that observant.

  Helena would just bet the remaining two Sisters were coming from behind her. They always attacked in numbers.

  Less than five seconds stood between her and death.

  “They’re coming,” Carrie breathed. Her warning surprised Helena, but there was no time to dwell on it.

  Her mind kicked into hyperdrive, sorting through options. Forward was blocked. Behind her was blocked. The guard station would be no help—they’d just tell her to go back to bed. Or if they did help her, they’d expect payment. Would blowing one of them be worth saving her life? Could she let her body be used
for their pleasure in order to survive the night? Not if she couldn’t live with herself afterward. And she couldn’t. She’d rather die fighting. Or running. Running seemed like the better option. She’d fight when cornered like she always did, but right now, she’d run.

  In one fluid movement, she rolled to the left off the bunk and onto the floor between the Sisters coming from the front and the back. She recognized both of them and sent a silent thank-you skyward that they were both big girls.

  “You dead,” one of them hissed.

  Helena dived perpendicular underneath the bunk across the aisle from hers. The bed sat so low to the ground, she banged her shoulders, the sound echoing like a gong through the dorm. Shit. If the guards came in and she was out of bed… Extra time on her sentence when she was so close to freedom she could brush it with her fingertips… That just might break her in a way nothing else in here had been able to.

  Helena’s head and shoulders exploded out the other side of the bunk into the aisle. A hand snagged her foot, halting her momentum.

  Adrenaline roared through her body. She kicked her free leg like a Rockette, connecting with something solid. An oomph of pain sounded at the exact moment her foot was released.

  She shot out into the next aisle and continued forward, going underneath the last row of bunks pushed against the wall. Only an inch or two of space separated her and the bottom of the beds. In her hiding place, the darkness was deeper, the feeling of claustrophobia nearly overwhelming. It smelled of dust and the warm, musky stench of body soil from the hundreds of women who’d used the beds above her.

  Score one for always being cold. She’d gone to bed wearing her dark-blue sweatshirt and pants. The dark colors blended into the shadows. The two Sisters she’d seen had both worn their white T-shirts—they practically glowed in the dark.

  She slid along the cold floor, using her hands and feet to propel her. Her hip bones scraped against the concrete, the material of her sweats not nearly thick enough to prevent the bruises she could feel forming. Her breath rasped in and out of her lungs, loud as an overweight ogre with asthma. She needed to quiet herself. There wasn’t one woman in this whole dorm who wouldn’t give her away if a Sister asked her directly. Her best bet was to keep silent and keep out of sight.

  Hide-and-seek as an adult didn’t carry the same appeal as it did when she was seven.

  The guard station behind a wall of glass was in the front of the room. She slid that way.

  Surely the Sisters wouldn’t murder her in front of the corrections officers. And surely the COs would intervene if they actually saw her being attacked—especially if it happened right in front of one of the cameras. They wouldn’t want the investigation or the paperwork a dead inmate would cost them.

  She stopped at the end of the row, looked all around, saw no one in the aisle, then moved out into the open and back over underneath the bunks she’d initially used to escape. The Sisters would expect her to cower against the wall. But she intended to move back to her row. They wouldn’t expect that. Hell, maybe she should move back to her bed. They really wouldn’t predict her being there.

  “What the—” A woman’s startled voice cut off with a thump and slap.

  Helena twisted just enough to look behind her and to the left. A Sister landed on her hands and knees three bunks back. They couldn’t fit under, so they were going over.

  Great.

  Helena stared at the guard station and willed CO Holbrook to look up at the monitors and see the Sisters crawling in and out of the aisles. But nope. He was tapping away on his cell phone. Probably playing a damn crush-the-candy game while she was in here fighting for the right to keep sucking air.

  Helena peeked out into the aisle to her right. Empty.

  Quick as she could, she slid out into the aisle and under the middle row of bunks. Her row. She held her breath to listen and craned her neck to see if anyone was coming from any direction. Maybe all the Sisters were in the far aisle checking for her. No way was she that lucky.

  “Goddamn it! I’m trying to sleep,” an inmate shouted. A Sister moved off a bunk into the aisle, squatting on her haunches, her back to Helena. The woman gestured with her hands, pointing to the row just on the other side of where Helena hid. They must’ve realized she wasn’t hiding over there against the wall and were all coming back.

  Helena made her move. Quiet in a way she never knew she could be, she slid out from under the bunk, across the aisle, and underneath the set of bunks she’d just left. Thank God the Sister didn’t have eyes in the back of her ass.

  This back-and-forth, back-and-forth felt like a tennis match. Could she do this all night without them finding her? The odds were not in her favor.

  The Sister crawled over Helena’s empty bunk into the aisle beyond.

  Another Sister landed in the aisle, hands-and-kneeing it until she moved up and over Helena’s empty bunk and went into the aisle beyond. “What the fuck?” Carrie yelled the words at a volume sure to draw the CO’s attention. “That was my hair you just ripped out.”

  At the guard station, CO Holbrook stood and looked out the glass into the darkened dorm.

  Yes!

  “Get off me!” Helena yelled the words at nearly the same volume as Carrie. Her voice snapped and broke. Her throat scratched from disuse, and best of all, no one would suspect her of yelling. It had been nine years since she’d last uttered a word out loud. Not since her first grade three concussion from the Sisters. After that, keeping her voice to herself had seemed the only way to keep ahold of her soul.

  Holbrook’s face transformed from an expression of merely listening to full-on rage-monkey because he was going to have to do his job. He turned away from the window and headed for the door leading into the women’s dorm.

  Oh shit. If Holbrook caught her out of bed… Helena sprint-crawled underneath the bunks until she was across the aisle from her bed. She dived the remaining feet, jumped into her bed, and ripped the covers up over her body.

  A Sister materialized on the right.

  Instinct and self-preservation raised Helena’s hands just in time to protect her face. The shank sliced open Helena’s palm, just before she caught the Sister’s wrist, preventing the weapon from gouging out her eye. With both hands, she fought the superior strength and weight of the Sister pushing the blade down.

  A light blazed on, and Helena saw her blood dripping down her hand, meandering to her wrist, then winding a path toward her elbow.

  The Sister’s pressure on the weapon shifted, and for a moment, Helena thought she might survive.

  Could she be winning? Could she outmatch the Sister’s weight with sheer tenacity and a will to live?

  Pain exploded in her gut. Breath woofed out of her. Her body went on lockdown from the gut punch. No oxygen came in. None went out. Her grasp on the Sister’s shank hand slipped, and she caught the blade just a few inches from entering her eyeball.

  Psychedelic spots formed in her vision. Her arms shook. She couldn’t hold off the inevitable for much longer.

  Shouting all around them. Male shouting. Shouts from the inmates.

  The blade was so close, Helena could see brown smears covering the sharpened edge. Dried blood? Her blood? From the last time they’d tried to kill her?

  The Sister’s body shifted, tilted, her full weight bearing down on Helena. She couldn’t help it—a scream filled with anger at the unfairness of life erupted just before the blade pierced her.

  * * *

  Thomas Brown drove toward a pain and purgatory he couldn’t deny. The only light in existence came from his truck’s high beams guiding him up the low hills, down the shallow valleys, and around the crazy twists and turns. The night and road conspired to soothe the smoldering anxiety that had taken him over ever since he’d gotten called out on this case.

  For one indulgent moment, he fantasized he was alone on the p
lanet. No people. No pain. No death. A smile stretched the scar on his cheek uncomfortably—a bitch slap back to reality if he’d ever felt one.

  The dancing gray lights of patrol cars suddenly came into view at the bottom of the next valley.

  A scene he was familiar with, except tonight for some reason, those gray lights were a glaring reminder of what he couldn’t see. Color. His memory told him those flashers weren’t plain. They were red and blue. At least they had been before his stepfather kicked him in the face at just five years old.

  Brain injury, optic nerve damage—the diagnoses didn’t matter—the result remained the same. Total and complete absence of color. He missed the everyday colors the most. The chestnut warmth of a dog’s fur, the ruby red of a ripe apple, the calming azure of a cloudless sky. He imagined all these, but tried not to. The act of remembering put a lump in his throat that made him yearn for a beauty he’d never have.

  A life without color was a life without passion. And lack of color wasn’t even the worst of it.

  Thomas pulled up and parked behind a long line of patrol cars. Every car in the county had to be out here. Murder was big news. He flicked off the headlights and killed the engine while he took in the scene.

  Past the cars, a group of officers huddled off to the side. A mottled shadow of sorts settled around them. Parts of it were dark, parts of it were light, and parts of it were as wispy as tendrils of fog. Even though he hated seeing the shadow, it carried a frightening beauty.

  The first time Thomas had seen the shadow was when he’d awakened from his stepfather’s kick to the face. Lacking an adult vocabulary, he’d called it a shadow monster. Over the decades, Thomas had come to call it by its real name. The shadow of death.

  The officers congregated in a large group, sipping from steaming mugs, chatting, and laughing as if they were tailgating for their favorite team instead of at a crime scene. Murder was a sobering event. There but for the grace of God and all that rang truer in the presence of a body whose life had been taken. But not here, not tonight. He shouldn’t be surprised. This was exactly the kind of department Thomas’s stepfather ran.