Prisoned Series Box Set

by Marni Mann

  I reached into my pocket and put the phone up to my ear. “Billy, I’m going to have to—”

  “It’s Mario. Not Billy.”

  I looked at the slut next to me. “Hold on a second,” I said into the phone.

  I hit Mute on the screen and held the phone against my chest while the elevator climbed to the penthouse. When the door slid open to the entryway of my condo, I walked her inside and pointed at the living room. “Sit there. Don’t move. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  I headed toward my office without waiting for her to respond. I knew she’d sit there and wait for me. She’d wait until morning if that was how long it took me to get back. The girls I brought up here obeyed all of my commands. When they were anywhere inside this building, even on the top floor where I lived, I was their boss. And, if they didn’t comply, they knew there were consequences.

  When the door to my office was shut, I brought the phone up to my ear. “Sorry. I wasn’t alone.”

  “Pour yourself something stiff to drink, and sit down.”

  I pushed my back against the door and looked around the room. There was plenty of booze in here. None of it appealed to me. Whatever Mario had to tell me, I needed to hear it sober. Because the sound of his voice and the sharpness of his demand told me his news was personal.

  “Spit it out, Mario.”

  He sighed into the phone.

  A sound I fucking hated.

  “Billy was found about an hour ago in an alley not far from the boardwalk.”

  I gritted my teeth together and slammed my fist against the back of the door. “Say it.”

  “He’s dead, Garin.”

  My heart was beating so goddamn hard that I felt it in my stomach. I reached my fist forward and slammed it back into the door. The wood splintered under my knuckles; pieces of it stuck into my flesh. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a fuck about anything besides Mario’s words that repeated in my head.

  “He’s dead, Garin.”

  “He’s dead, Garin.”

  “He’s dead, Garin.”

  Billy Ashe. My best friend.

  Dead.

  I pulled my hand out of the door and walked to the other side of the room. “How?”

  “The needle was still in him.”

  “HOW?” I yelled.

  “My boys are looking into it right now. I got the call and wanted to tell you before you heard it from anyone else.”

  I knew the procedure. When one of us died, Mario’s boys got to the scene first. They’d take what they needed and leave what evidence they wanted the police to find. Billy wasn’t one of us, but Paulie was. Because no one had been blamed for Paulie’s murder, I was sure Mario wanted to see if the deaths were somehow related.

  “Send me the pictures,” I said.

  I knew he had them. Snapshots of the body, the weapon, the scene, the evidence—it all was part of the procedure. They were immediately sent to Mario along with a detailed report. He usually had it in his inbox before the police even arrived.

  There was that sigh again. “I’ll send them over in the morning.”

  “Send. Them. Now.”

  “He was family to you. You should wait until the morning to look at them. You need a second. Trust me on this, Garin. I’ve lost enough people to know.”

  “Send them.”

  “Fine…but I warned you.”

  I grabbed the picture frame off the back wall and walked it over to my desk. It now sat on top of a stack of folders and stared at me while I took a seat. It was of the three of us—Billy, Kyle, and me. We were in Mario’s basement. We were laughing. We were high.

  We were so fucking happy.

  “Have the cops filed anything yet?” I asked.

  “I hear they’re going to rule it an overdose because of where he was found and since the needle was still in him.”

  So, the police weren’t going to look into it. I wasn’t surprised. It was less work for them that way than pulling together an investigation. One less junkie on the street, they thought.

  Billy wasn’t just some junkie. He was my goddamn family. But having the police investigate wouldn’t help me. If there was something to be found, I’d find it on my own.

  “Who sold him the junk? Was it us?”

  “I’ll have that answer tomorrow. If it wasn’t us—”

  “I’ll want his name, Mario, and I’ll want to know who he works for.”

  “You’ll have everything you need.”

  I flipped the picture over. I couldn’t look at it for another second.

  Billy should have been in rehab, sober living, or clean and living with me in Vegas. But dead? Fuck no. My best friend shouldn’t be dead.

  He should have been saved.

  And I should have been the one who saved him.

  “You know we’ll take care of everything—the funeral, any other costs,” Mario said. “Whatever you need, you just tell me.”

  “Thanks.”

  I wasn’t looking forward to the call I needed to make. Billy’s ma rarely answered her phone. Hell, she wouldn’t have one if I didn’t pay the bill. I just hoped I could reach her before she heard the news from someone in The Heart. She needed to hear it from me.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be in Atlantic City by the morning.”

  “I’m sorry, brother.”

  “Me, too.”

  Seconds after I hung up, Mario’s texts came across my screen.

  Leaving my phone on the desk, I went to the other side of the room and poured myself a few fingers of whiskey. I’d heard the news. Now, I needed to numb it. I swallowed down the dark liquid and poured more.

  I knew where Billy should have been right now, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about this moment. I’d told myself plenty of times that the day I saw my best friend sober would be the day he was lying in his casket. Still, that didn’t mean it didn’t fucking hurt.

  I carried my third glass of whiskey over to the desk and picked up my phone, finally pulling up the snapshots. The first picture showed his face. The shot was zoomed in, his lips dull blue.

  The color, that blue, I couldn’t get it out of my fucking head.

  The second shot showed his whole body, his back slumped against a brick wall. His feet were out in front of him. His shirt was pulled up to his neck, and there was an empty needle sticking into his heart.

  His goddamn heart.

  I shook my head, my fist balling again. The only thing close enough to hit was the desk. The desk was going to get hit. So were the walls and the door and someone’s fucking face once I got my hands on them.

  Mario knew.

  I guaranteed that was one of the reasons he didn’t want to send me the pictures. He didn’t say anything because he probably figured I couldn’t handle it right now.

  Anyone who had been around drugs as much as we had would know.

  Billy had OD’d. There was no question about that. The heroin had been too potent, the dose too lethal for his body. That had ultimately caused his death.

  But Billy wasn’t the one who had stuck in the needle.

  A junkie hit up a vein. They shot straight into their bloodstream. They sure as hell didn’t stick a needle into their fucking heart.

  Someone found out that Billy had been looking into Paulie’s death. Someone wanted that secret to be kept buried. Someone thought that killing Billy would ensure that. So, someone filled that syringe with a dose strong enough to take Billy’s life and had tried to make it look like an accidental overdose. That someone had stuck the needle into Billy’s heart.

  They had murdered Billy.

  Whoever that motherfucker was…I was going to murder him for it.

  Twenty-Four

  Kyle

  “No!” I shouted as I stared at what was left of Garin, slamming my back into the chair, trying to thrash my arms and legs, even though they were bound. “How could you do this? How could you take him from me?” I dragged my
gaze over to the man who was responsible for this. “I hope you die. I hope your babies come out here and eat your flesh and chew off your fucking face and—”

  Breath grabbed my lips and twisted them. “And what, puta? If I’m gone, there’s no one here to take care of you. And do you know what would happen then?”

  He may have been holding on to my lips, but I kept on screaming. I screamed because they had put us in this prison and had done horrible, sadistic things to us. I screamed because we were still in here, and I knew I was never getting out. I screamed because Breath had tortured Garin to death and taken away the one man I loved.

  And I screamed, “Garin,” again and again because I just wanted him to lift his head and look at me, but I knew he wouldn’t. “Open your eyes, Garin.” My words were so muffled, but that didn’t stop me. “Come back to me. You can’t leave me, not after all this. Garin…”

  “Do you see his flesh?” Breath spoke close to my ear and held me so tightly I couldn’t move. “That’s what your pussy is going to look like. Torn up and bloody in a way that can’t be fixed.”

  His flesh…or what was left of it.

  Breath had placed Garin in a chair, two ropes crisscrossed over his chest and tied around the metal spine of the chair. His hands and ankles were shackled. His skin had been chopped, as though a butcher had been sharpening his knife across Garin’s entire body. All of him dripped blood. I couldn’t see a piece that hadn’t been slashed. His wounds were spread open; some so deep, there was raw muscle sticking out. The blood dripped, dripped, dripped down his body, forming a pool beneath him.

  A pool like the one that had gathered around Paulie.

  “Why did you do this?” I seethed, glaring at the man I hated more than anything in this world. “Why did you kill him?” Killing Garin killed me. Emptied me. Destroyed me. There was no reason for me to be here anymore. “Garin didn’t know about Paulie’s murderer. Only I did. You should have killed me, not him.” I looked down at the knife that was in Breath’s hand. “Slit my throat. Do it. Get it over with. I can’t live another second.”

  “I’m getting real tired of your screams, puta.” Two of his fingers slipped inside my mouth and clamped around my tongue. “If you look close enough, you’ll see his chest rising and falling.” He turned my head, so I faced Garin, and then he squeezed my tongue even harder. “Your boyfriend isn’t dead…yet,” he snarled.

  He’s alive?

  The tears, the screams, the anxiety, the guilt, the dread, the weight—it all lightened.

  Garin…was really alive?

  The sobs I wept were out of happiness as I finally saw the movement in Garin’s chest. His inhales were shallow, but he was breathing. And, suddenly, I was breathing, too. I was breathing for the both of us. I was breathing because, despite how terribly mangled he looked, my Garin was still with me.

  “Levanta la cara del prisionero,” Breath barked at Beard, who I now noticed was standing in the front of the room.

  Beard moved over to Garin and grabbed his hair, lifting Garin’s head so that I could finally see his face. There were slashes across his cheeks, his forehead, his nose. His lips were so beaten; they looked like hamburger meat.

  “Kyle,” Garin moaned.

  His voice was so soft. I almost didn’t hear him.

  “I’m here, Garin.”

  I tasted the tears on my lips. I tasted bile. I tasted plastic.

  I tasted guilt.

  Garin opened his eyes, stopping when they were just tiny slits of white. “Kyle,” he groaned. “Kyle…Kyle.”

  It sounded like when he was being beaten, when Breath had made me listen to Garin whispering my name over and over. I had thought those were going to be his last words. Now, I feared they truly would be.

  “He needs to go to the hospital,” I snapped at Breath. “He needs surgery and blood. He needs to be fixed.”

  “He’ll have all that,” Breath spit in my ear.

  “Then, take him.”

  Breath didn’t move. Beard didn’t either.

  “Take him right fucking now!”

  Breath walked around to my side, gently resting his hand on my shoulder. It was too late for gentle. Gentle wasn’t a language Breath spoke. I didn’t like it. And I didn’t know what it meant.

  “He’s not going anywhere until you give me what I want,” Breath said. “Then, puta, I’ll take him to the hospital, and he’ll get all the care he needs.”

  “And me?”

  He smiled, like I had just told him I loved him. “You’ll get the punishment you deserve.”

  I knew what it all meant now.

  “Confess and save Garin, or I’m going to kill you both. The choice is yours,” he said.

  I’d known all along I was going to die in this prison. Life beyond this cell was simply a fantasy. The two of us walking out of here, Garin’s hand clasped in mine, living the life I’d always wanted—that was fiction.

  It wasn’t what I deserved.

  Not after what I’d done.

  “Do you promise me?” My voice was loud and stern. “Do you promise that, if I tell you what you want, you’ll take Garin to the hospital?”

  I didn’t know if I could trust Breath, but I had no other choice. Garin was getting weaker by the second. He was losing more blood. He was slipping further away from me.

  I couldn’t drag this out any longer.

  “I promise you, puta.”

  This was the confession I should have made back then. This was what I should have voiced every time Garin and Billy had banged on my front door, when they’d waited for me in the hallway outside my classes, when Garin had cornered me in the alley.

  This was my second chance.

  “Garin, I’m so sorry.”

  His eyes opened again, looking at me through those tiny slits.

  “I could tell you why I lied to you and Billy, but it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no excuse for what I did. I was wrong. I know that. I’ve paid for it every day since. It’s eaten me up, and the guilt has never once let me go. I don’t deserve forgiveness. Just know that I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

  Breath stuck something sharp in the side of my neck. “Spit it out. I’m tired of listening to this bullshit. You’ve tested my patience long enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered again.

  I watched Garin’s face as the name of the murderer slipped through my lips. Even in his state, even with all the blood and all his wounds, I saw it—the anger, the resentment.

  The hatred.

  And then all I saw was black.

  Twenty-Five

  Kyle

  Twelve Years Ago

  “Roll up the fucking window,” the murderer hissed. “You have to be done puking by now.”

  It had been at least a minute since I heaved. My stomach was empty, my body still shaking. But the cool night air felt good against my burning skin, and the wind that blew past my face seemed to pause the nightmare that kept replaying in my mind. It was the nightmare that had made me throw up in the first place.

  Unfortunately, the pause was short-lived.

  He rolled up the window, and he yanked my face back in the car.

  “You’re a monster,” I spit. “Why don’t you let me out, so I can get the hell away from you?”

  He slammed his fist into the steering wheel. “You weren’t supposed to be outside. Why the fuck weren’t you home? Asleep? What were you doing out there?”

  “I was walking home from Garin’s.”

  “Why didn’t you just stay the night there?”

  I wanted to.

  I should have fought Garin. I should have begged him to let me stay. Then, I wouldn’t have seen Paulie or the gun or the shot that took him to the ground. Or the blood.

  But I wasn’t going to say that to him. I doubted he was looking for an answer anyway.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Kyle…I almost killed you.”

  I’d heard him say something similar to that before. But, back
then, we were just kids, and I was teasing him about something stupid, like the ridiculous porn he liked to watch in his room, and he would rant about how he wanted to kill me. It was a joke. All of that talk had been a joke back then. Meaningless banter that didn’t deserve a second thought.

  But there was nothing funny about what he’d said just now. There were no more jokes, no more teasing. There could never be again. Kill. He’d made that word come true. He’d pulled the trigger. He’d murdered a friend, a best friend. The guy to my left, the one who had the same eyes as mine, had become a killer.

  The drugs, the girls, The Heart. Whatever it was that had changed him, he wasn’t my brother anymore.

  “Maybe you should have killed me,” I said.

  “Don’t joke about that, Kyle.”

  “I’m not joking, Anthony.”

  I looked out the windshield as we passed through green light after green light. How was he not swerving all over the road? Not puking out his window? How did he not have tears running down his face, like mine?

  Did he not understand what he did? Was he high? Too high?

  Maybe he needed to be reminded.

  “Do you know how many people you just damaged? Including me?”

  He glanced at me quickly, his lip curled like something smelled terrible in the car. Not even the smallest bit of remorse was in his eyes. “I know what I did, and I don’t give a fuck. I told you, he deserved it. It’s been a long time coming. He’s fucking lucky I didn’t pull the trigger months ago.”

  A monster.

  “No one deserves to be killed. Especially not Paulie.”

  “Stop running your mouth, Kyle. I don’t want to be schooled. I don’t want to hear how you don’t approve. I’m not in the mood to listen to you at all, so shut the fuck up or—”

  “Or you’ll kill me?”

  He jerked the car to the right, and the tires screeched. We hit grass and then pavement. Anthony slammed on the brakes. I gripped the handle on the door, trying to brace myself for what was about to come. I didn’t know if he was aiming for the pole up ahead or if he just wanted to scare me or if he was going to open my door and throw me out. He dodged a fire hydrant and two curbs, coming to a stop at the side of a strip mall.