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18

I know my mistake the second the words leave my mouth.

My head thumps against the wall.

Good job, Porter. That’s not going to set her curiosity off at all.

“Isaac…”

Yep, I’ve done it now. “Forget I said anything.”

“Why would anyone—” She shifts against the wall, and I hear the strain she’s trying to mask. That procedure fucked her up. “You really feel that way? That’s?—”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. We can let it go.” I say it harsher than I mean to. Snappy.

“Okay.”

She’s quiet for several minutes, and I know well enough that it’s not because she’s letting it go. Once you’ve piqued this woman’s interest, she’ll persist until her inquiring mind is satisfied. But since she’s not pushing it just yet, I close my eyes and wait.

Before long, I’m imagining sinking into the wall behind me. I do that sometimes. Even more since Nick and Chloe had their night of fun. Our dynamic has changed—and not just in the sexy, flirtatious way. There’s a different level of intimacy I usually don’t go anywhere near. Maybe it has something to do with being forced to rely on words instead of…body parts.

I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would.

But right now, the things I’m imagining doing if I could materialize in that other room have nothing to do with our kinky alter egos. We’re both injured and exhausted. Tired, down to the bone. For my own sanity, I’ve been throwing myself into escape preparations, dreaming of creative ways to murder the man holding us captive.

But the longer the days drag on, it’s harder to believe our lives will end any differently than the others who found themselves here.

The mental and emotional strain is real.

In the end, I’m just a man. My life will be as easy to snuff out as the rest of them.

I hear her over there, shifting around, trying to find a position that makes her feel less like a stranger had just gone in and poked around her insides. If I could sink into this wall right now, I’d scoop Everly into my arms and just hold her.

And then we’d sleep.

I’m very near unconsciousness when she speaks again. “You know what I keep thinking about?”

Is it what I’m thinking about?

Likely not.

Knowing her, she’s magically deciphered everything I’ve kept buried just by the few telling sentences I let slip. She’s good like that. From what I’ve seen, there aren’t many people with better natural instincts…except for me.

Maybe Tanner, but I’d never admit that. It’s good to keep the guy on his toes.

I wait for her to spill my entire life story down to the letter when she says, “Bubble tea.”

Well, that wasn’t anything I expected. “That overly sweet stuff with those solid balls of goo that come up through the straw, so you have to chew your drink or choke on it?” I never understood the appeal.

“You haven’t tried it, have you?”

“God, no.”

“You should sometime.”

There’s a heaviness in that statement. The same weight that anchors the words see you soon. She’s still trying to convince herself there’s a chance of a sometime…or a soon. It’s how she’s survived this long, after all.

I’m just not sure either of us really believes it anymore.

“Sounds awful. What else do you miss?”

“Anything chocolate. I have a bit of a sweet tooth. How about you?”

I see this conversation for the reprieve it is. We were beginning to delve into heavy territory, and as usual, my involuntary reflex kicked in and I got surly. This is my out. A way to keep our connection without dwelling on the heavy stuff.

Thanks for that, Everly.

“Eh,” I say, flippantly. “I don’t really?—”

“Before you go any further with that thought, you should know that I’m dubious about anyone who doesn’t like chocolate, tacos, or dogs.”

“So, two out of three makes me around sixty-six percent passable?” Truthfully, I’m more of a cat person. Any animal that can tell you to fuck off just by blinking is right up my alley. Whatever. At least I’m safe on tacos.

Who doesn’t like tacos?

“I guess I can’t afford to be too picky.” Her laugh ends in a pained groan that makes me wonder if she really has been eviscerated.

“Are we playing the game of ‘torture ourselves by salivating over things we can’t have’ now?”

“Yep. Let’s see, are you a steak and potatoes kind of guy?”

I scoff. “Doesn’t matter much. Food is food. Gotta eat, or you die. What I really want is a cigarette and a bottle of whisky.” I used to keep a bottle of my favorite whisky in my apartment just to prove I could resist it.

“So, if a gourmet chef offered to cook whatever you wanted right now, you’re telling me you’d ask for whisky and cigarettes.”

“Just cigarettes. I don’t drink anymore.”

“Okay.” She lets that little tidbit go without further questioning. “That settles it. You can bring the bubble tea, and I’ll bring the cigarettes.” It’s tinged with a thread of hopelessness that breaks my heart.

Getting us out of here will take a fucking miracle.

In the quiet space that follows, I can’t help but dwell a little too long on the thought of that whisky, until I blurt something just as dangerous. “Chicken pot pie.”

“What?”

“That’s what I miss.” Turn around, Porter, you don’t want to start this… “Sara’s chicken pot pie.”

And there it is.

I just pushed on a boulder that’s balanced at the edge of a mountain, and there’s no going back.

“Sara.” Everly swoops in on the subject, but she clearly doesn’t know what to do with it. “She…she was…”

“My younger sister. Half-sister, technically, but since she was the only member of my family who cared to claim me, it didn’t matter.”

And now I’m all in.

I can almost hear Everly trip over the thoughts. Sifting, discarding, needing to know more, but treading very carefully so I don’t shut down. She knows me too well by now. “Your sister… She liked to cook?”

“No, she was terrible.” I laugh. “But she figured out how to make chicken pot pie, and it was the only kind worth eating. It was the first thing she made for me after she grew up and got out of the house.”

It was also the last, but I’m not touching that one.

“So, she sang, played the guitar, and made chicken pot pie.”

“That about sums it up.”

I’m full of shit. It doesn’t even come close to summing it up.

“Will you tell me more? What else did she do?” The desperation in that question makes me remember just how lonely the girl next door is. Sometimes I forget that my sister was one of her companions for a few fleeting moments. One she didn’t have time to get to know well enough.

Under different circumstances, there’s no doubt they would have been friends.

That’s what she wants from me now—a lifeline, a connection to the girl who sang to her on the other side of the wall.

“She saved me.” That’s the raw truth of it, really. “She saved my life.”

“What did she do?” There’s a detectable undertone of awe there, and suddenly, I can’t remember why I hid her away for so long. Why I refused to talk about her. Maybe I didn’t want to bring her memory into this place of darkness and death. But the thing is, she was already here.

“For some reason, she believed I was worth something. God knows why—most of the time, I wasn’t very nice to her, but once she made a decision, you couldn’t do much to change her mind. One day when she was six, I beat up this bully on the playground, and she was convinced I was meant to be a superhero.”

“I’ll be your sidekick,” she announced, swinging from her knees on the monkey bars. “I can even have a nickname. What should it be?”

“I don’t want a sidekick. You’d probably pee your pants at the first sight of the Joker.”

“No, I won’t. I can be brave like you. Oh, I know!” She pointed to a nest settled in the branches of an aspen tree. “I could be a bluebird.”

“Nobody’s afraid of a bluebird.” I pulled one of the braids hanging upside down. “Besides, that name is taken.”

I spent my weekends sitting on the floor of the local comic bookstore, reading. I knew these things.

“Why? If no one is scared of them?”

“Because…you’re a pain in the butt. That’s why.”

The next day when she went to school, she asked her first-grade teacher to help her come up with a name inspired by the birds, and when she returned, she announced herself as the Blue Jewel.

Of course, I thought that was ridiculous.

“She followed me around for years after that. Always afraid she’d miss out on helping me do something heroic.” Objectively speaking, my fists were just prone to finding trouble, but in Sara’s imagination, I was fighting for justice. Protecting the defenseless.

“That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I didn’t think so at the time.”

“Sounds like a typical big brother, little sister relationship.”

It wasn’t.

Truth is, I had very complicated feelings toward my younger sibling. As we grew up, she was treated like a princess—like she was solely responsible for all the light and hope in the world, while I was born with a shadow attached to me. One I could never escape.

I wanted to hate Sara for what she represented.

And I tried.

But in the end, she was everything her parents saw in her, and as I lean back against the barricade, my gaze fixed on the cot where she once slept, I let the essence of her bleed through my words.

I bring her back to life, if only in memory.

“When I was finishing high school and deciding on a career, my mother looked me dead in the eyes and told me I shouldn’t bother, because I was destined for prison, anyway.”

“How could she say that to her own child?”

“She had her reasons.” My mother was a complex human. Damaged, in her own right.

I believe she was hopeful once, but when life let her down, she turned bitter. Unfortunately, I symbolized the beginning of that. “Anyway, it was Sara who followed me out—who told me she thought I had a different destiny. That I was meant to save people.”

She believed in me so hard, it started feeling…possible.

Her dreams gave me this little pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel—just enough to keep me from giving up. I enrolled in the police academy because of my sister and her audacious dreams, but that’s a secret I’m holding on to for several reasons.

It doesn’t really matter. That was a different life.

Now I’m a prisoner, just like Everly. Like Sara.

Our lives, threaded together between two cells. Devoid of light. Destined to end the same.

“Good.” Everly’s voice carries the same hard conviction my sister’s used to. “Because you are worth something. You’re worth so much more than you give yourself credit for.”

“Yeah.” I smile to myself. “You two are alike in a lot of ways.”

She ponders this for a few minutes, her inevitable question lurking in shadow. “Why was your mother so cruel to you? What excuse could she possibly have?”

“It’s because of the way I was brought into the world,” I tell her, since there’s no reason not to anymore. “I was the constant, enduring symbol of everything that went wrong for her.”

“Did that have something to do with your father?”

“It had everything to do with him.” The boulder keeps rolling. Picking up speed. Tumbling down the cliffs.

“He wasn’t a good man?”

“He was a rapist, Everly.”

Silence.

Seconds upon seconds of empty air.

And finally, “Isaac… I don’t know what to?—”

“It is what it is, Bee. You don’t have to say anything.” What can be said for a man who made a career out of violently destroying other humans? Who got off on it.

“Did you know him?”

“Only by name. Court reports. Convictions. He took his own life in prison while serving thirty counts of sexual assault. There were more victims, undoubtedly, but that was all they could prove.” I don’t tell her that he was so notorious, if I said his name, she’d likely know it. I refuse to give that name power.

I’ve always imagined him serving eternity being eaten by maggots in the pits of Hell.

His legacy should go with him.

As I stare at the chain anchoring me to the floor, the similarity to my feelings about the man who forced me into this world isn’t lost on me. There’s no response from the other side of the wall, and I don’t expect one.

I’d rather there wasn’t.

My palms are slick, the back of my neck sticky. But the tile is cold, even through my jeans. This place is kept fucking frigid, so I don’t think it’s the air temperature. It’s more like?—

Fuck, I could really use a cigarette.

It’s the first time I’ve said any of this out loud. Tanner found out by digging around, as detectives do, but aside from a brief acknowledgment when the bastard died, he knew to leave the subject alone.

Other than that, there was my mother, my stepfather—who was indifferent toward me as long as I wasn’t causing trouble for the family—and Sara.

Now that it’s out, I feel…empty. As empty as this room.

“I didn’t even know who he was, at first, until my mother felt the need to explain what was inherently wrong with me.”

“That’s horrible. No child should have to go through that.”

“They shouldn’t. But that’s life. It’s a crapshoot, and some people roll a shit hand.”

The day it all finally sank in is burned into my memory like it happened yesterday. It was the first time I got suspended from school for fighting, and my mother was livid. She retaliated by making sure I knew how much I’d ruined her life. What a mistake I was.

In the past, when I’d asked about my father, she’d been evasive.

But not that day.

That day, she led me to her room, opened the very bottom dresser drawer where the evidence was hidden, and spread it all out across the bed. The court reports. The testimonies of women who sat on that stand when he was finally brought to justice.

The pictures…

I look too much like him to ever let her forget.

When I asked her why she even kept me, she explained that she was young and na?ve, and thought it was meant to be. Her family had been religious; they raised her to believe in the sanctity of life and told her everything happened for a reason. At the time, she was falling apart, grasping for something to believe in, so she convinced herself the conception of a baby—a new life, a clean slate—was a symbol of redemption.

She named me Isaac.

Then, her family decided that sometimes bad things happen because of hidden sin, and they rejected her.

And there I was.

We were stuck with each other.

To top it off, I wasn’t an easy child to raise, and never met her expectations. Over time, I became a symbol of an event that ruined her life. A bad decision that put her in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A sin.

She was an ocean of PTSD and ruined dreams, and my presence was a toxic oil spill. We didn’t mix, and as a kid, I never had a chance.

“Well…” I let my eyes close again, pressing my fingers into the pressure points just above my eyebrows. “Now that I’ve dumped all my?—”

“It isn’t genetic, you know. That kind of evil. I don’t believe that.”

I shouldn’t be surprised that she so easily uncovered the fear that dogged me through life, but it feels kind of like she’s been rifling through the long-archived files of my brain.

“Okay.”

“I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

Whether I believe it is a different story. Depends on the day. “Thanks.”

Mercifully, she drops the subject of my parentage, because I’ve gone way past my quota for dwelling on this bullshit. My head feels like that proverbial boulder was dropped right on top of it.

“Did Sara make music for a living?”

“She was a barista, actually, but that was just a convenience so she could be close to the adjoined cafe where she liked to play.”

“I can picture that for her. Sitting on a little corner stage under a light. Everyone stopping mid-conversation, mesmerized when she played her favorite song, and then running back behind the counter to make someone a half-caf nonfat iced mocha with a splash of sugar-free caramel.”

“Nailed it.”

“And that story of the jerk who made her stop playing for a while?”

“I’m sure you’ll be shocked to find out that was me.” Of course, I only said that to get her to back off. I’d spiraled into one of my self-loathing phases, and being around her innocent positivity just drove the knife in deeper. I’d moved out and needed to leave my childhood baggage behind. “Turned out all right, though. She found me again, once she was out on her own. Barged back into my life with the same enthusiasm and hounded me until I came to see her play.”

“Made you chicken pot pie.”

“That stuff was the shit.” Now my mouth really is watering. And, oddly enough, I feel lighter than I have since the day she made me my last chicken pot pie, walked out the door, and never came back.

Even while sitting here, chained to the floor.

Thanks for that, too, Everly.

“Isaac?”

I hum a response around the lump constricting my throat. All these memories… I don’t trust my voice right now.

“Thank you for sharing her with me.” Everly’s voice is softer, closer, like she’s entered the temple of something sacred. “I knew I liked her. I just wish I could have known her better.”

“I’m glad she had you to keep her company…at the end.”

I need to rest. To sit with my ghosts and be prepared to battle my way out of here. Because whether I believe there’s a chance I’ll get out in one piece or not, I still owe that bastard for taking my sister out of this world before her time.

And then there’s Everly…

I’m not sure why I feel compelled to bring it up when I already know the answer. “That guitar pick you have over there. It’s blue, right? Sparkly?”

“Yeah.”

I picture Everly cradling it in her hands like it’s something priceless. Her favorite memento. One I bought myself, years ago. It was special. Sara even gave it a name.

Jewel.

“It’s hers.”

My sidekick.

“I know.”

“Take care of it for her, okay?

Her answer is no more than a whisper.

“Always.”