Page 69 of Craving Venom (The Venomous Beauty Trilogy #1)

“I watched,” Terry confirms, stretching his legs out and flexing his fingers like the job was a casual favor and not digging up a buried, barely-alive man in the middle of the night. “After all, I wasn’t going to leave you alone in a prison graveyard before we cracked you out.”

“Prison graveyard?” Mark repeats, and huffs out a laugh, but it catches in his throat. He looks down, rubbing both hands across his thighs like he’s trying to scrub off the chill that’s only just settling in. “My family never claimed me, did they?”

I say nothing.

Because there’s nothing to say.

And he already knows.

“Right,” Mark huffs, shaking his head. “Yeah. Fuck it. Should’ve known.”

Terry leans his head back against the couch and closes his eyes.

“Okay.” Mark wipes his face once and straightens up. “What happens now?”

I rest my forearms on my knees. “I’d want nothing more than for you to stay here. But if you want out, I’ve got a guy. He’ll build you a new identity. Give you a clean slate. No priors, no flags. You can start over somewhere no one knows your name.”

“How the fuck do you have a guy for everything?”

I let the corner of my mouth tilt just a little. “Money may or may not buy you happiness…”

I spread my arms along the back of the couch.

“…but it sure as fuck buys you convenience.”

“And I’m guessing.” Mark bends forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “that kind of convenience is why Terry’s still breathing.”

Terry cracks one eye open and flashes the kind of grin that belongs to a man who’s already made peace with hell. “Still breathing, still ugly, still not sorry.”

“How the fuck did you explain an explosion that didn’t happen?”

“Oh, the explosion did happen. Only the fire licked one of the two of us, and it wasn’t me.”

“Two?” Mark questions.

I roll my neck once and ease into my seat, handing this one off to Terry.

He loves storytelling too much not to.

“There was a guy,” Terry starts, rubbing the back of his neck.

“His name was Stewart. He was a real piece of shit. He ran benzos and powdered fentanyl through the kitchen delivery routes. I was part of his crew. Not for long, but long enough to see how he ran things. He trusted me because I played the good soldier. We made drops. Collected. Cleaned the money. I was in deep. Just not in his pocket. He figured I was helping him expand, but the truth was, I was laying groundwork. Feeding him just enough ideas to steer him. ‘We should move a shipment through the old basement,’ I’d said.

‘No one checks that corridor.’ And he bought it. ”

“Because he was stupid,” I add, “and desperate for a shortcut.”

“So once Stewart bought the basement idea, I started making noise. Quiet at first, enough to get the right eyes on me. I told one of the corrupt guards, Jensen, that I’d seen Stewart pocket something during a kitchen run.

That I heard whispers about a move coming.

I played it carefully, too scared to snitch, but too scared not to. ”

“Terry let the right people overhear him,” I interject. “Made it seem like he was stuck between loyalty and fear. Just scared enough to be useful.”

“Exactly. I staged two conversations with Stewart, close enough to the corridor cameras to catch the audio, just far enough that it couldn’t be dismissed as coincidence. ‘We do it this week.’ ‘Don’t fuck this up.’ ‘You sure no one patrols the lower halls?’ Shit like that.”

“And Jensen took the bait?”

Terry smirks. “Hook, line, and fuckin’ detonator.

He pulled me aside two days before the escape and asked if I wanted protection.

I told him I just wanted out. That I’d go with him if he needed proof.

We took the lower stairwell near the defunct boiler chute.

No patrols, no cameras. I told him Stewart was moving product through the crawlspace behind Storage 9.

The dumb fuck still thought he had the upper hand. ”

“He had a gun on me the whole time, but the second we passed the outer sensor ring, I doubled back. Got him right in the throat with a crowbar we’d stashed in the conduit panel. He went down hard, so much so that his skull cracked the floor and rolled into one of the slabs.”

“You mean… the slabs.”

“Yeah. The motion sensor slabs.”

Mark’s head jerks toward me. “That should’ve triggered the blast, right?”

“It did,” I smile. “Exactly like we planned.”

“Zane mapped out every sensor radius,” Terry explains.

I nod. “Every dead angle. Every cable route. Every slab tied to the foundation pressure plates. I found the schematics when I traced the old construction records my grandfather kept in his study. This place wasn’t built clean. It was retrofit.”

I drag a finger across the edge of the table, tracing invisible lines.

“They planted those sensors after the west wing was added. Not to trap inmates. That wasn’t the point. They were meant to warn guards as an early alert if anyone got too close to the dead zones.”

“Dead zones?” Mark asks.

“Sealed-off tunnels. Abandoned sublevels. Places the prison buried and forgot about. Places we didn’t.”

“So when the guard hit one—”

“The slab lit the first detonator. Security thinks it’s just an anti-tamper response.

A scare tactic. But we’d buried our own explosives in the crawlspace days earlier.

C4 wrapped in shrink foil, placed right above the vent plate.

The pressure sensors blew the alarm, then ours followed.

Took out everything in a ten-foot radius.

Ceiling dropped. The blast hit the far wall. Took Jensen’s body with it.”

Mark stares at Terry. “But how did you survive?”

I answer before Terry can.

“There’s a bomb shelter.”

Mark’s brows shoot up. “In the basement?”

“In the foundation,” I correct. “Old Cold War vault. Never logged in any modern schematics. My grandfather built it into the original design—paranoia, legacy, whatever the hell you want to call it. Reinforced steel, rubber-lined seals, seven-inch-thick walls. No air vents, just an internal oxygen canister rigged to a manual valve.”

“Only room for one,” Terry says. “And I curled up inside it while the entire sublevel burned.”

“And nobody knew?” Mark asks.

I shake my head. “Not the warden. Not the guards. Not even the architects who drew up the later blueprints. It was never meant to be used. Which made it perfect.”

Mark lets out a shaky breath. “You buried a man. Lit your own explosion. And vanished through history like smoke.”

“Survival’s just death with better planning.”

“Okay, sure. You made it out. But how the fuck did you convince the media, the officials, the whole goddamn world that it was you who died down there and not Jensen?”

Terry grins.

Not the cocky kind. The kind that says you’re not ready for this.

“I left them a story they couldn’t argue with,” he says, stretching his arm across the back of the couch. “Blood. Hair. Skin. Enough DNA to sell a forensic report three times over.”

“And they bought that?” Mark croaks.

I answer, because Terry’s jaw is twitching and I know that pain probably still hums through his nerves.

“They didn’t want to not buy it,” I interject.

“The molars were enough to pass a shallow match. No dental records flagged because Terry’s file was already edited since we had a guy in Records who logged him as ‘cleaned.’ Cross-referenced with the melted ID tag on the body, they had their ‘John Doe.’”

Terry wipes his hands on his thighs. “But the teeth weren’t the key.

The narrative was. I sent every news outlet in Veridian a thumb drive.

No name. Just hard footage of Jensen pocketing bribes.

Statements from inmates. A full list of stolen medical-grade narcotics.

Even a video of him beating a restrained prisoner. ”

I cut in. “He built a digital dossier. Tied it to corruption in the guards’ union. Dropped Jensen’s name alongside two supervisors and a former warden who got caught up in a sex scandal three years ago.”

“So what… you blackmailed the media?”

“No,” I say. “We gave them what they love more than fear.”

Terry glances over at me.

“Scandal,” I finish.

“They didn’t need to ask for confirmation,” Terry says. “The footage spoke for itself. I didn’t need to be the source, I just needed to be the spark.”

“And Jensen?” Mark asks. “They didn’t question why he didn’t come forward to deny any of it?”

I laugh once. “They couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because the prison told them Jensen fled the country. Disappeared the morning after the explosion. No formal resignation. No exit paperwork. Nothing. They turned him into a rogue operative. Made him the villain and the runaway. Painted me as a casualty of proximity.”

“And it worked?”

“Perfectly.”

The room goes quiet.

Not the kind of silence that settles. The kind that waits.

Mark slouches back on the couch, staring blankly at the wall, only now realizing how close to death and manipulation he’s been living.

Terry rolls an unlit cigarette between his fingers, tapping it against his knee out of habit more than need.

My gaze, though, isn’t anywhere near them.

It’s glued to the top-right corner monitor where Faith just walked in, looking as if she’s been swallowed whole and spit out.

She doesn’t even take off her jacket, doesn’t change, doesn’t glance at herself in the mirror. She stumbles forward, drops her bag to the floor, and crashes face-first into the bed with her shoes still on.

I know that fall.

I know that posture.

I’ve seen it after every time I’ve touched her. She collapses the same way as if her body can’t hold onto her anymore.

I should look away.

I don’t.

I should feel guilt.

I don’t even blink.

The camera’s angle is wide enough to cover her bed, desk, closet, even the pile of laundry by the vent. I installed it myself. The night after Halloween. While she was sleeping. That night, I had to see. Had to know what she looked like when she thought she was alone.

So I watched. And I kept watching.