by Ella James
I step out of La Rosa, into the bright, pale day, and glance around the parking lot, not because I want to leave but because even my eyes aren’t sure what to do next. It’s then I remember: I don’t have a car.
Shit.
From where I’m standing, at the top of the stairs to the main entrance, I can see two guard towers, but no one is nearby except the guard who brought me out.
I pull my phone out of my pocket and turn around to see if she’ll leave me alone now so I can call a cab or even Holly if I need to.
Instead of leaving, she spits some fruit-scented chewing gum into a wrapper and puts a cigarette between her lips. It dangles there as I say, “I can’t leave right away. I don’t have a car here.”
She ignores that and holds out a pack at me. “Want to bum one?”
I shake my head, but I’m surprised she asked. Maybe I’ve finally found La Rosa’s one friendly employee. Besides Clinton, that is.
“Do you know Clinton?” I ask as she lights up.
Her thin, dark brows draw together. “You do?”
I nod.
Her gray eyes widen. “I remember you now. You’re the riot girl! I recognize you from the cameras.” She laughs. “If Clinton is your ride, you’ll be waiting as long as the lifers. He just got escorted out like you.”
“He did? Why?” I assume I know why—he’s part of the housecleaning that’s probably going to get rid of all Beast’s posse—but I want to hear what she says.
She tosses her gaze left, then right, like she’s trying to be sure no one is watching us talk. She steps closer to me as she blows smoke out the side of her mouth, toward the parking lot. “He’s under investigation.”
“Why?” I breathe.
“That’s not something I can tell you, doll.”
I bug my eyes out, as if to say what the hell, and she laughs a little. “Mostly ’cause I don’t know.”
“Where is the warden?” I try. “Is he still away?” I know the answer, of course, but I want to see what she says. See if I can figure out more about why the DA thinks he can come in and start messing with the system here. See if I can tell by her reaction to the question whether she knows I’m the warden’s daughter.
“You mean your dad?”
I nod. Question answered.
“I’m surprised that you don’t know. But yeah.” She nods. “We’ve got an interim—Jenkins, one of the three wardens under your dad—but Jenkins got suspended, too. We had the DA come out. Fancy suit and all. He’s all good and pissed off. Shaking things up.” She drops her volume a notch. “Some people are saying it started with Cal Hammond. The DA thinks Beast killed his granddaughter.”
“Huh?” I feign.
She nods solemnly.
“Do you mean the girl in the wreck that night? Uma Whatever Her Last Name Was?”
Her brows arch up. “You knew her?”
I shake my head. “I just remember her name. First name.”
She shrugs, and takes another drag, then slowly blows it out. “I don’t know much about the wreck, except some people died,” she says, still blowing smoke. “I don’t care, either. That man in there—” she jacks her thumb toward the doors— “is not Cal Hammond. They call him Beast. But then, I guess you know that…riot girl.”
I swallow, trying to loosen my throat. It feels tight. Because my body knows, a second before my brain does, what I’m about to ask her.
“Did he kill that guy tonight? The Aryan?”
“You tell me,” she says. “You were here for him, weren’t you? Don’t you lie to Maura. I can tell.”
I nod slowly, and she smirks. “Conjugal visits at all hours, that big fucking cock. I heard his cell is swank as shit, too. How did it go down? When they came for him, you were sucking his dick?”
I bite my lip. I’m not sure if I should tell her anything—definitely not whether I was sucking his dick when he got taken—but I figure if I want more information from her, I might need to give a little. “They just came and…took him. Two guys dressed in black, and one in a suit.”
“The DA,” she says, nodding. “One of the other assistant wardens told me he had it in for Beast.”
I grit my teeth. It’s wrong. So wrong. I don’t care if Uma was the DA’s granddaughter; he shouldn’t be allowed to pop up and start playing out his own vendetta. Not in a place like this, where Beast doesn’t have any rights. It’s abuse of power in the worst way.
“Don’t look so upset,” the guard scoffs. “He’s killed a lot of men in here. If you ask me, he gets privileged treatment.” She leans in a little, blowing a curtain of smoke into my face. “I fucked him a few times—privacy of the kitchen—” she smiles— “and he’s got a big, pretty dick, but he’s no warden. He roams the halls with no escort or nothing. Not that I don’t like to see that pretty face, but it’s fucked up, the way things are. Probably because he killed so many people. He’s got respect from all the men. Even the gang leaders treat him like a…I dunno. Some kind of Mafioso. I heard he bribes the ranking guards with money.”
“You’re not a ranking guard?” I ask.
“I’m just a junior. New hire.”
“Did you know the guy who…died?” I brave. “The…Aryan leader, or whoever he was?”
I’m nervous about asking, because she’s white. I’m not sure how the guards and the prisoners get along. Maybe the white guards like the white prisoners, and mentioning the dead Aryan will make her angry.
I’m relieved when she takes another drag of her cigarette and shrugs. “I heard he got offed in a shower stall. Buck ass naked. Someone squealed to someone saying it was Beast and the media found out like that.” She snaps her fingers to emphasize fast. “DA showed up and you know how that went down for Beast. People are saying your daddy’s gonna go when he gets back from his vacay. His head is gonna roll. There’s gonna be some changes around here. Everybody’s just a normal prisoner, and the new person is running things.”
“Who’s the new person?”
She shrugs. “Someone on the DA’s good list. He’s supposed to get here in the morning.” She looks me over and laughs, a little wryly. “Look at fucking me. I’m spilling all my fucking secrets.” She looks around, then frowns as if she’s straining to hear something.
Right about that time, I hear the rumble of a car’s engine. I peer around her to see a yellow van bouncing down the dirt road. The gate begins to open. I wonder if whoever called the cab would mind if I rode with them.
“That’s you, doll.”
“It is?”
She nods. “Germain, he called about thirty minutes ago. Said you’d need a ride out. Asking me to get you one.”
“How did he even know that?” I wonder aloud.
She shrugs. “Word here travels like a wildfire sometimes.”
“Oh.” It’s hard to get the word out, because my throat feels thick. I can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe I’m leaving, with no idea what’s going on. I start down the stairs, then turn to her and struggle to think of what to say. “Thanks for talking to me.”
She blows more smoke out. “No problem, hunny.”
I step down the first stair. Then I turn back toward her. “I’ve got a question.” She arches a brow, and I let my breath out slowly as I try to wrangle up the nerve to ask it. The nerve to hear her answer to it. “Could you do me a favor?”
“What now?” She looks both annoyed and slightly amused.
“Can you let me know if you hear anything? About him—Beast?”
She throws her head back and laughs. “Honey, you’re dreaming. He’s never gonna keep in touch with you. You’re just a lay. Even in the pit, he’ll find some pussy. That’s the way things are for a rich movie star like him. You won’t ever hear from him again.”
I nod slowly, discarding what she’s saying and trying to think of how to endear her to me so she’ll give me an update even if she thinks that I don’t need one. “I know I probably won’t hear from him or anything, but I want to know w
hen he gets out of solitary. And how he’s doing and stuff. Maybe it’s dumb, but I don’t care. If I give you my number, could you call? I could pay you or something…”
She presses her lips together, like she’s considering the idea. “You got plastic?”
I nod.
She snickers a little, and pulls a phone out of her pocket. “You got it bad, girl. Got it bad for Beast.” She slides her fingertip over the screen and flicks her gaze up to mine. “I make bows.” She rubs her hair. “You know, for little girls? Got a shop on Etsy. Give me your number. Two hundred bucks will help me buy more ribbon. I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow.”
I can feel my shoulders loosen as a little of the tension leaves my body. “Tomorrow. Okay, that’s perfect.” I hold up my finger to tell the cabbie to hold on a minute and pull my card out of my pocket.
“Ready?” I look up at her.
She nods, and I rattle off my card number. My head throbs as she punches it in.
She turns the phone around to face me, revealing a nifty little screen with a line for my signature. “Use your finger,” she says.
I rub the tip of my pointer finger over her screen, and am relieved when she shows it to me again.
PAYMENT ACCEPTED.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. I really mean it.”
She chuckles. “Welcome, hun. Now get going.”
I get into the van, clutching my phone like it’s a bar of gold.
CHAPTER 3
Beast
Nightmares are nothing new for me, but this one is fucked up.
I’m stuck in dreamland, and I keep blinking, because I’m looking at Guy in a body bag and I’d give anything to have my gaze somewhere else. The sides of the rubbery, black bag are zipped around all of him but his face.
And his face…
Unlike other nightmares, blinking doesn’t send me to a different room in the house of horrors. I remain right here in this miserable dimension, where I can’t look away from all the blood caked on him. It’s black, crusted and dried onto his blow-white skin. Except his skin’s not really white; it’s slightly blue. And his lips are black; black like a bruise. His handsome face is sunken in some places and bloated in others, and I’m starting to feel sick as shit.
I don’t want to see this.
I finally get my head to move so I can look the other way, but then there’s Uma. And yeah, I’m in a different place now for fucking sure, because unlike very dead Guy, dead Uma’s only a little dead. She’s still in the road. She’s sprawled out on her side, and her body is… Jesus. It’s fucking twisted—like a pretzel.
I try to look away, but a sick sort of curiosity compels me. It’s been a while since I had a dream this vivid. Years since I was confronted in the courtroom with the damage I did that night. So I blink and look at Uma’s broken body. At her pretty face, which I can’t see. Her head is blood. Nothing but fucking blood and gore.
I look the other way, and I wish I could get up and run from this nightmare I’m having, because I’ve got a decent guess what’s next.
“Oh God…”
Royce. I try to open my eyes but it doesn’t go away. I see Royce a hundred times. Like somebody took a bunch of Polaroids of his dead ass and taped them on a big, white wall.
It’s a…fucking…I don’t know. A fucking progression of death.
Royce is on the road and his skull is cracked open like a…
“Fuck.”
I try to cover my mouth but my hands won’t move. I can feel the vomit moving up my throat. Then I’m turning my head and it’s going everywhere, and someone is laughing.
I should try to see who it is. I should try to get up. But I’m too fucking tired. I lie there panting, looking out or up or somewhere at Brody. Brody Royce. The inside of his bleeding head is white like bone or brains or both.
I clamp my jaw down, hissing breaths out of my nose, and I remember Brody’s blunt that night. He wanted to smoke a blunt and I did this to him.
“Jesus,” I gasp.
I don’t want to see this!
I scrub my hands over my face, and I can feel the wetness on the heels of my palms. And I can feel the sticky cool blood on my face.
I’m dreaming I’m dead, too. That one’s normal enough. Except in this dream, it hurts. My right cheek hurts like a fucking bitch, and that’s how I realize: I’m awake.
*
Annabelle
In the middle of my sophomore year of college, I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. Misdiagnosed.
Of course, I didn’t know at first.
When the doctor at our campus clinic told me what she thought, I felt like I’d been punched in the face. The few days after that, I held onto my awful secret with both hands and learned what it was like to live in a state of perpetual terror. Inescapable dread.
Wanting to do something. Unable to do anything, because my campus doctor was contacting a specialist in Atlanta—but until that happened, I was just in limbo.
The few days after I leave La Rosa are just like that.
I want to know what’s going on with Beast, but there’s no one I can ask. Holt is still away. I’ve called his house and talked to his new wife, Bea, who tells me he is, indeed, in Honduras on a “business” trip.
“He’s visiting a prison there,” she says, almost defensively.
“When will he be back?”
“I’m not for sure. At least another week.”
“Can you have him call me?”
“I can ask.”
But she doesn’t, or if she does, he decides he doesn’t want to. Maybe he knows I’m wanting information about Beast. Maybe he knows nothing. That would make sense, if they’re replacing him as warden.
Days roll by. Stifling days where I fake my smiles for Ad and sit in the bathtub every night until the water turns cold.
Days—and my friend Maura, the junior guard who stole my money, never calls.
The news networks report the same story over and over: Cal Hammond killed an Aryan gang leader. It’s the first time he’s been in the news in years, it seems, and “average Americans” are shocked at his violent deed.
“I think he’s just playing a role,” says a woman interviewed in New York City on a late night show.
I hear a National Public Radio analysis of “Cal” and his career as I drive Ad and I home from Wal-Mart the next afternoon. Some stupid expert says the same thing. Just a role. Right. Because eight years in prison is nothing but a feigned tough guy mentality. Because he goes home every night to his Hollywood castle and only wears a jumpsuit in the day. Because murdering someone is just part of his effing role.
Why is it so hard to accept that sometimes people change? Not for the better. For the worse. That night, my Mom slips into a coma, and I cry into my pillow—because sometimes people change. Always, people change. And so much of the time, it’s for the worse.
When I fall into my tear-soaked dreams, I feel his mouth. His hands. His blood.
Exactly a week after the last time I visited the prison, they send a new hospice nurse to the apartment. She tells me, “We don’t think your mother will wake up again.”
I cry into my hands while Adrian eats a bowl of cereal behind me, peacefully oblivious, at least for now, and after that, we go for long rides in the “country.” There, I roll the passenger’s window down and let her lean out just a little. As her hair flaps around her rosy cheeks, we pass the spot where the wreck happened.
When we get home, Ad and I draw on the sidewalk outside our apartment door with colored chalk. The next day, when Mom’s blood pressure goes lower than it’s ever gone before, I teach Ad to ride the “Tangled” bike I bought her with Beast’s money.
The day after that, I break down and call the prison, pretending to be a relative of Clinton’s. I ask the operator for his phone number. The man on the other end of the line tells me he’s gone.
“Gone?” I say.
“He doesn’t work here anymore.”
I call two day
s later, at a different time of day, hoping for a different staffer on a different shift. I get a female this time, and ask if women can sign a waiting list for conjugal visits with Cal Hammond. She laughs. “Don’t you watch the news, honey? He’s not taking any visitors.”
Ten days drag by, and still no return call from Holt. Still no update from the guard I paid.
On the twelfth day, after hours hanging around Mom’s bedside, waiting for it to be time to get Ad and Holly so we can say goodbye, something shifts inside me, and I just can’t do it anymore. We haven’t left the house in days, but I don’t give a shit. I’m not standing here any longer, waiting for my mom to die.
I load Ad into the car and drive to Dad’s house.
I’m surprised when, on the third ring of the doorbell, Holt appears, wearing jeans and a “Mrs. Doubtfire” apron and holding tongs.
“Honey,” he says.
“Dad.” I tighten my grip on Adrian’s hand. “Why the heck haven’t you returned my calls?”
“I just got home last night,” he says, wide-eyed and innocent.
He smiles down at Ad.
My heart beats too fast. “Why did you never call me back?” I say. “I want to know what’s going on with Beast.”
“Who’s Beast?” Ad looks up at me.
“I don’t know,” Dad says over her head. “I’m only in charge of managerial oversight now. Prisoner relations is being done by someone put in place by the DA.”
“Is that even legal, that he can just come in and clean house this way? Is it the grudge he has over his granddaughter? Is that why he went after you and Beast?”
Dad waves us inside without looking me in the eye, then drops down and takes Ad’s chin in his fingers. “How are you, sweetie? You look pretty in your pink shirt.”
“Thank you, Holt.” She beams, and I simmer as we follow Dad down the hardwood hall, into his large kitchen.
Bea, Holt’s new wife, is there—of course. She’s sitting on a bar stool, playing on her iPad. When she sees Adrian and me, her eyes go slightly wide, and her thin lips make a little ‘o’.
