Eli (Mallick Brothers Book 4)

by Jessica Gadziala

  Fee had found a way around my rule.

  Because, no matter how hard I tried to hand them back, I couldn't force my fingers to let go of the letters from the girls. I had walls plastered with their adorably terrible artwork. Even though it was painful to look at them, knowing I would never be a part of their lives again.

  It was dirty on Fee's part.

  But she liked to play that way.

  "Yeah yeah yeah," the C.O. said, shaking his head as he flipped through the letters. "I know the drill by now. Oh, wait. This one isn't a Mallick." He held out the envelope with a shrug, showing me the name.

  Autumn Reid.

  Weird.

  "I'll take that one," I agreed, reaching for it.

  "Oh, and here, kid writing," he added, handing me a fat envelope.

  So far, they hadn't been letters. The girls weren't great at writing yet, let alone getting their thoughts together enough to formulate an actual letter.

  Just artwork.

  It was hard enough.

  Letters would fucking ruin me.

  I took them back to my cell, opening the one from Becca first, finding a surprisingly improved picture of Coop.

  Another knife in the heart.

  I loved that fucking dog.

  And I didn't have the damnedest idea what had happened to him. Had my family found him? If so, why was Becca still drawing him as a puppy? He would have been full-grown by now. If not them, then who? The pound. Ugh. I sure as fuck hoped not. Maybe Mark and Scotti took him on since Scotti wasn't like Lea who had a shoe collection that rivaled a department store.

  I could hope at least.

  I put that down to be hung later, climbing up into my bunk to rip open the letter from the Autumn woman, careful to leave the return address intact in case, for some unknown reason, I might actually need to write her back.

  Eli,

  You don't know me. Well, actually, you saw me once. On, um, the day you were arrested. Outside the coffeeshop. I was the girl filming the cop getting a little police-brutality-ish with you. Blonde hair. Blue eyes? Yeah, anyway. It took me this long to figure out who you are and, well, where you are.

  Sorry for the delay.

  I'm sure you've been worried.

  After you were taken away, your dog started flipping out. No offense, but he was one ugly little sucker, and I didn't want him ending up in the pound. So I took him home with me.

  He has a happy, active, shoe-chewing life.

  He got enormous.

  And he still likes those peanut butter treats from the coffeeshop.

  You seemed pretty attached to him, so I wanted you to know he had a safe and happy home where he has learned a few manners - and disregarded all others.

  I enclosed a picture. As you can see, he still won't be winning any beauty contests, but I think he is officially so ugly that he is cute. So he has that going for him.

  - Autumn

  My heart seized in my chest as I read the words, not realizing just how badly I had needed to hear them. It was a bit crazy, maybe, to have become so attached to a dog so quickly. Especially one as poorly behaved as he was. But, what can I say, I had never had a dog growing up and had always wanted one, but just never got around to it. Finding him had been fucking fate.

  The worst part of getting arrested was sitting in a cell that night wondering what happened to Coop.

  All for naught, it would seem, since he had been with this Autumn woman all along.

  I remembered her too.

  Kind of hard not to.

  She was a knockout with her tall, lean but womanly body, long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a certain kind of laid-back confidence she wore around her like a perfume.

  Hell, she had been shamelessly watching the whole scene with my ex, not even trying to hide how much she was enjoying the show.

  She was gorgeous.

  Then when shit went down and got a little uglier than it needed to, she had been quick to try to get it on tape, to make sure there would be evidence to back-up a claim if something ever happened to me.

  So beautiful, with her head on straight, and a dog lover?

  Sounded a lot like the perfect woman.

  Sounded a lot like somewhere I wanted Coop to be raised.

  I reached into the envelope to find a picture of the dog that had still been a bit of a puppy in my mind - small-bodied but big-footed. He still had big feet, sure, but the rest of him had caught up with them. She was right too; he hadn't gotten even the smallest bit better looking with age. He was now just a giant ugly dog.

  He seemed happy too with his big bright blue collar that matched his eyes, sitting on a sidewalk with a cookie half-hanging out of his mouth. You'd swear he was smiling.

  Curious, I looked past him at the store he was situated in front of, squinting at the picture that was taken from a distance.

  But then my lips curled up when I made out the sign.

  Phallus-opy.

  She took a picture of my dog outside a sex store? What's more, she sent me a picture of my dog taken out front of a sex store?

  Either it was a mistake, or this Autumn woman was one interesting character.

  I'd say time would tell, but, well, let's face it, it wouldn't.

  I had five more years behind bars.

  I would never meet this woman.

  It shouldn't have, but that knowledge gave me a small pang to the left side of my chest, deep in the black hole I didn't even recognize as a heart anymore.

  I figured time inside would do that to a man.

  It was harder for those who had a wife or girl on the outside, knowing they were away for a while and unable to fill her needs, worrying that she might step out on him, or get rid of him completely while he spends every night with his dick in his hand thinking about her.

  I was in the lucky minority in that I didn't have that worry. I didn't have a girl, and I sure as fuck would never have demanded she wait for me even if I did.

  So I wasn't plagued with that insecurity. And, well, I had a sex drive like anyone else, but suppressing it wasn't exactly hard in a place full of men, that smelled constantly of a bathroom and sweat and shitty food.

  "Jesus, the fuck happened to his hair?" my cellmate, Tank, though his actual name was Bobby, asked as he came in, leaning up into my bunk because the idea of 'personal boundaries' was wholly lost on the man.

  "Dunno. I found him like that when he was a puppy."

  "Thought you said you have no close family," Bobby observed. "You know, aside from the kids."

  "I don't," I agreed. Knife, meet gut. I still hadn't gotten used to the sensation. I wondered if I ever would.

  "Who has the dog then?"

  "Some chick at the coffeeshop where I got arrested. Took him home with her."

  Bobby's lips tipped up, giving his already good-looking face a little charm. "She hot?"

  "Incredibly," I agreed.

  "Well," he went on with a shrug. "I guess when you get out, you're gonna have to go take him back from her," he said with a twinkle in his eyes before he dropped down into his own bunk to read the half a dozen letters he got each week from various family members who never gave up on him, even though this was his fourth trip to prison since he was sixteen.

  Honestly, the idea never even occurred to me.

  Six years was probably more than half of Coop's lifetime. He wouldn't even fucking remember me. He had a good life with the Autumn chick.

  I had no right to go back and reclaim him when I got out.

  But, somehow, once the idea got planted thanks to Bobby, there was no stopping it from starting to sprout and grow.

  3 years

  "I wish my hustle was half as good as yours," Bobby said, shaking his head over my shoulder as I counted the cash that Big Tony had handed me for the huge canvas I had just painted for him. It was a massively detailed piece of him, his wife, their kids, and their grandkids that I had needed to put together from a dozen photographs he had handed to me and, well, my pure imagin
ation since there wasn't a single picture of more than two of them together and it needed to look like it was made from a real family photo session.

  It had taken me three weeks to finish it, just under the line for him to be able to get it to his wife in time for their fortieth wedding anniversary.

  How he was going to get it out to her, what palms he would need to grease to get that kind of shit done, yeah that was none of my business, but he apparently had it all worked out.

  The piece had set him back six-hundred, a number he hadn't even raised a brow at. You had to love the wise guys. They always had cash to throw around.

  "You need a hustle that won't add any more time to your fucking sentence, Bobby."

  A hustle was a prison term for some kind of job that you did that the prison didn't know about - or pretended not to know about - that made you some extra cash to spend at commissary or use to barter for other shit within the prison.

  My hustle was portraits or artwork. One guy had me do an album cover for him, even though he had another eight years left on his bid.

  Bobby's hustle was selling pot.

  How he got pot into the facility, quite frankly, I didn't want to know. All I did know was that he had almost been caught dealing it three times, and was looking at another couple of years if he did.

  "Easy for you to say. Not all of us are talented, man."

  "It took work," I told him truthfully, knowing the shit I had been putting out when I first arrived paled in comparison to what I could do now. "And there are plenty of guys in here with a clean hustle. Fucking Rick proofreads letters to families, lawyers, and non-profits, so the guys don't sound like idiots."

  "Barely finished eleventh grade here, boss," Bobby reminded me, shaking his head as he dropped down across from me at one of the chess tables.

  "Poet writes poems for anniversaries and birthdays. Marty cleans cells for commissary money. Andy fixes all the busted electronics. Thomas fixes shoes and clothes. Fucking Al makes candy in his cell. Plenty of hustles if you're actually willing to do a little work."

  That was perhaps a little bit pointed.

  See, Bobby was getting out in six months. He got time shaved off for good behavior since no one ever caught him handing out the pot. And I had a sick feeling that the bastard would be right back in again in less than a year if someone didn't try to push him toward a life that didn't involve ending up on the wrong side of the law.

  "That's your privilege talking, man."

  I snorted at that, shaking my head.

  Privilege.

  I grew up in a crime family. I was raised in a town that was nothing but criminal enterprises. Financial security didn't come until I was in my teens. Until then, we had to scrimp and save and barely get by just like anyone else. I didn't go to college; it wasn't even an option.

  Both of our stories were similar.

  We had good families in somewhat shady areas. We were both male, white, around the same age, and had the same chances in life.

  The fact that he continued to choose easy money whereas I planned on going straight, well, that wasn't privilege. That was a choice. A bad one. But a choice.

  It wasn't like when he got out, he was going to have no place to go, no one to help him get back on his feet. He didn't have to go live in a slum where the only money to be made was in illegal jobs.

  That was the reality for more than half of the prison population. But it wasn't for Bobby.

  He was just fucking lazy.

  "You got the same chance as me of getting out and keeping your nose clean."

  "Yeah, sure. You ain't never been in here before and gone back out there. When you do, then you can talk to me about readjusting. You don't know shit about it."

  Bobby blew hot too easily.

  Another reason he couldn't keep a straight job.

  The fact of the matter was, the time, it wasn't hard. For me anyway.

  It wasn't the hours locked in the cell, the fact that other people told you when to eat, shower, go outside, sleep. It wasn't the random shakedowns. It wasn't the shitty healthcare. It wasn't being stuck.

  All that, I dunno, I had adjusted well enough. It becomes rote after a while. If you weren't the type to bemoan your fate, the time wasn't awful.

  What was hard was the man I had needed to become to ensure my life could never go down this road again. What was hard was denying thirty-some-odd years of traditions, of loyalty, of love. What was hard was hollowing out a heart that used to be full of my parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and nieces, and making it stay empty. What was hard was knowing that three years in, they still weren't accepting that the Eli they knew and loved ceased to exist when he walked into these walls. What was hard was knowing that while I was a hollowed-out shell, they were still holding onto hope that I would come around.

  After three years, that wasn't even possible anymore.

  There was none of that man left.

  All that was left was the cold, the detached, the depersonalized psyche that the shrinks had wanted to medicate, thinking it was due to some prison horror that I wouldn't discuss.

  They refused to accept that it was self-inflicted.

  And, well, once you carved enough away inside, there weren't even any edges that could grow back together. You were just pieces.

  Disconnected was a state I lived in.

  I got up, I made my bed, I did checks, I brushed my teeth, I ate breakfast, I went to work, I showered on days it was allowed, I had my hour or two in the yard, I worked on my art, I slept.

  Rinse.

  Repeat.

  Feel fucking nothing.

  The only time there was even a hint of anything other than absolute and complete disconnection was when a letter would show up from one of the girls.

  Yeah, letters.

  Because they were big enough to write them now.

  Three years of Fee keeping that candle lit for them, not knowing she was only hurting them, not accepting that just banking it out would be the kindest course of action.

  Once I got the first letter, in all caps and full of information about her new cousins - you know, babies I would never get to see - I had felt a pain akin to something being ripped out inside. From then on, I accepted them, but couldn't bring myself to open anymore. Not even when they started not only coming from Becca, but Izzy and even Mayla. Then, soon after them, artwork started from Jason who couldn't have been more than a toddler by the looks of things, and whose parents, yeah, I didn't even fucking know which of my brothers had him.

  That realization was the last, most lethal, painful pang of my dying fucking heart.

  I kept all of them unopened now, locking them away in a box under the bunks. I tried not to even look at the names on the address labels.

  Better not to pry open that can of worms.

  Better to treat it like junk mail you keep forgetting to throw away.

  Better to not have a family at all.

  Better to shut it all the fuck down.

  "Yo, Mallick," the guard called, stopping outside my cell. "Missed mail call," he said, holding up a small white envelope.

  Normally, you missed mail call, you were fucked. But I had made this guy a portrait of his baby that died of SIDS to keep on his mantle, so he was a little more forgiving of any of my small indiscretions.

  "You know the deal," I said, exhaling hard. Mail days sucked.

  "Nah. Not your family, less you got some distant relative with the last name Reid."

  I turned fast, too fast, showing just a hint of a weak spot that I didn't want anyone - not even a guard - to see.

  "Girlfriend?"

  "Chick that stole my dog," I corrected, going for a calm tone as I took the envelope.

  "Stealing a man's dog then writing him. What a shit move," he said, shaking his head as he ambled off.

  My hands went almost a little frantically for the tab, sliding my finger under to rip it open.

  Why was she writing again? After two years of nothing?
/>   Did Coop get sick? Die?

  Why put that on some dude already in prison if that was the case?

  It was a pretty dick move.

  I couldn't tell you why I was so desperate to read it, aside from genuinely hoping my dog was okay. Maybe it was a genuine need for human connection, for a contact on the outside, to be reminded of normal life.

  It was easy to adjust to prison.

  When there weren't reminders that there was another way to live.

  I had successfully stayed clear of them.

  Except for now.

  Eli,

  Coop wanted to show you his Halloween costume.

  I hope prison is better than it looked on Oz.

  - Autumn

  What the fuck was that?

  Even as I reached for the picture still in the envelope, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the fuck she was sending me a letter.

  She was a good-looking woman. She didn't need to write some shithead in prison so she could get some male attention.

  What was her motivation?

  I pulled out the picture, unable to hold back a laugh/snort hybrid that escaped me at what was staring back at me.

  Autumn, whoever the fuck she was, was either really creative herself, or shelled out a shitload of money to have a three-headed dog costume made. With two extra of Coop's heads. One was missing an ear as if the real Coop had maybe gotten to it. Which, well, was very much like him.

  Unfortunately, looking down at it, my first thought was how much Becca, Izzy, and Mayla would have liked seeing him like that.

  This Autumn chick was making it hard to forget about my old life the way I wanted, to seclude myself away from it, to avoid any thoughts that could conjure up images of my family.

  Why then did I reach for a pencil and paper?

  Why did I write back?

  Why the ever-loving hell did I actually mail it when I did?