I snorted. “It was harmless, and I was keepin’ an eye on her. I didn’t go tellin’ Kingsley ’cause I knew he’d fly off the rails, and when he flies of the rails, he does dumb shit. Tonight’s a prime example.”
Her head tilted to one side, eyes brimming with rage as they tried to dig under my skin and see me for who I really was. Good fucking luck finding it; I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Once upon a time, life had been simple. Kingsley pointed; I obeyed. Now . . . now, things were messy. I finally opened my eyes and saw a girl, and she drew me in and consumed me like a mindless drug. She made me feel things I thought I’d buried before entering the Underworld. Since meeting Nada, if Kingsley pointed, I hesitated, which I had no doubt would get me killed. I was replaceable, probably more so than Nada.
“I don’t know where your loyalty lies,” she finally confessed with a growl in her tone.
Taking a deep breath, I ran a hand through my tangled hair, gripping my neck to try and release some of the tension there.
“Ain’t that the million-dollar question, baby?” Rolling my neck, I looked her straight in the eye. She stormed forward, but I was ready for her. Her body spun as she delivered a kick to my sternum. Stepping back, I avoided as much of the blow as possible before she began flying punches at me. I was getting pretty fucking sick and tired of her fighting me; she was the only one outside the cage who dared to throw a punch at me. It turned me on, and I liked the fire in her belly, but I wasn’t particularly fond of getting hit. With a roar, I spun her around and grabbed her wrists, holding them across her chest as I slammed her hard against the wall. My arms, locked in front of her body, took the brunt of the collision, and while she wriggled and bucked, I held her steady.
“I liked it down here just the way it was; I was nobody in the world above. A nobody who couldn’t even keep a girl safe. Down here I was somebody with nothin’ to lose. I was willin’ to do whatever I had to do to protect my new life and my new world. Then one day I saw the blood on my hands, and I realized I didn’t much like the person I was anymore. Someone showed me that being nothin’ was pretty damn good and having somethin’ to lose made me feel more alive than I deserved to feel. I failed a girl once, but I won’t fuckin’ fail again.”
With each word, Nada relaxed, until finally her head and shoulders slumped forward. When her body began to shake, I braced for round two, until I realized she wasn’t shaking with anger. A sob racked her body, and I felt her warm tears fall on my arms that were still holding her tight against my chest.
“I failed her,” she choked out.
I’d never been much good with weepy females; their tears cut deep into my heart, and I had no idea how to fix them. Spinning Nada around, I scooped her into my arms and sat on the edge of the bed with her in my lap. At first, we were both stiff and awkward, but as I began to rub soothing circles on her back, she leaned into me and let her quiet tears soak through my shirt. I didn’t offer her words to make her feel better; I wasn’t one to sugarcoat shit. Some might have said, “Everything will be okay,” but it wouldn’t, because everything was not going to be fucking okay. No matter how hard I tried to think of a way out of the massive pile of shit we had found ourselves in, I couldn’t see any way to fix it.
“I’m going to die,” she confessed, and her words broke something inside me.
“No, you’re fuckin’ not. I won’t allow it. You’re mine and I protect what’s mine. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Wriggling off my lap, Nada sat on the mattress beside me and reached under it to drag out that damn book. She quickly flicked through the pages until she found the pressed rose. Her finger caressed the dry flower with such a reverence some might have thought her obsession with the object unstable. I got it, though. I understood her need to have just one little thing from another world, a world that just might be better.
“Tell me about her, the girl you failed,” she whispered with a sniffle.
An ache thumped at my heart and my lips pressed together, as if conditioned to hold all my secrets, regardless of whether or not my heart and head wanted to divulge them.
“A secret for a secret.”
The selfish bastard in me was intrigued to know more of her secrets; the honorable man I might have once been just wanted to give her the truth, just a little piece of another me from another world. When she mutely nodded, my mouth opened and the damn broke. My story of heartbreak, the night my life had ended and another began, spilled from my lips.
“We were high school sweethearts. She was too good for me; I was just a dumb mechanic with tattoos, and she was a pretty little dancer who got straight A’s. We were the proverbial ‘opposites attract,’ and I loved her so fuckin’ much I was willin’ to kill for her.”
“Did someone hurt her?” Nada pressed when I became silent.
“Yeah, someone tried to hurt her.”
My mind slipped back to that night as though it was only yesterday. As though fifteen years of blood, sweat, and chaos hadn’t filled the yawning gap between now and then.
It had been a warm day, and we’d spent most of it lying around the hot, box of an apartment I lived in above the garage I worked. We’d fucked ourselves into exhaustion, and when Alanis awoke, it was with a voracious appetite for ice cream.
“Whatever my girl wanted, she got. If she wanted fuckin’ ice cream at ten o’clock at night, she got fuckin’ ice cream at ten o’clock at night. I drove her into town to the only place I could think that would still be open. I was naive. Livin’ in the above world makes you complacent; it lulls you into this false sense of safety. They’re fuckin’ delusional to think their pretty little world isn’t full of sociopaths. They just know how to hide; they’re there, lurkin’ in the shadows. I didn’t have enough change in my pocket when we ordered the ice cream, so Alanis ran out to the car to grab some more. She was takin’ too long. When I went to check on her, it was to find some NIM fucked gangbanger tryin’ to drag her down a side alley. I just fuckin’ snapped. I saw red, and I had one single thought that narrowed my vision to a single focus: kill him. I grabbed a tire iron from the back seat of the car and beat him until they needed dental records to figure out who he was. I don’t regret it, though; I’d do it again to protect Alanis.”
“What happened to her?” Nada asked with a soft voice full of genuine curiosity.
“Dunno. When they dragged me away from the crime scene, I could hear her screamin’ and cryin’ for me. I never saw her again. Twenty-four hours later, I was beaten to a bloody pulp and dropped into the Wild Zone.”
“You were defending her.”
“I killed a man.”
“You saved her; she could have been killed, or raped.” The last word spat off her tongue with all the disgust she rightfully owned.
“But I killed someone. There ain’t no grey in the world above, only black and white. I murdered a man, and it don’t matter why, all that matters is I did.”
We fell into an easy silence, Nada stroking that fucking flower, me dropping to my back and staring at the stone ceiling. That stone ceiling was nearly my undoing when I first arrived here, the feeling of claustrophobia thick and pungent. Eventually, I realized if the roof caved in and crushed me to death it would actually be a blessing. Working for Kingsley had given me the distraction I needed to survive, but it hadn’t given me a life worth living. I didn’t want the fucking earth to cave in on me anymore; I had something worth fighting for, something worth living for.
“The first time I saw you was three days after I arrived. I was fresh, green . . . fuckin’ scared. You walked into your father’s room, and everythin’ just stopped—my fear was gone. Then Kingsley had you whipped. I almost threw up watchin’ him abuse you like that. He tried to justify it by sayin’ you were evil, that you were a disgrace and had no honor. He said he needed to keep you in line because you were dangerous . . . and I believed him. Over time, I realized he was full of shit, but I did nothin’ to stop him from hurtin’ you, and I gotta live wi
th that regret. I’m not sure what I have left of a heart, Nada, but whatever I have left is yours. You said you didn’t know where my loyalties lie . . . they lie with you. You feelin’ me, tough girl?”
She was still and silent for so long I wondered if she had heard me. Then movement at my side alerted me to the fact that Nada had moved away from the bed, and I thought perhaps I had crossed some kind of line giving her the truth like that. The sound of stone rubbing against stone filled the small space, and then the mattress at my side collapsed under her weight. After a long time, she sniffled, and then sighed as something was pressed against my chest.
“My secret is hope.”
23
NADA
I was taking a massive risk in sharing my secret with Shadow, but I knew the man who had been my father’s loyal second in command, the man who had stood at his back protecting him for over half of my existence. I knew his allegiance had shifted. He had just bared his heart and soul; the least I could do was bare the secret I had never shared with anyone. Confronting him just moments ago and drawing the truth from his lips had settled a churning feeling in my gut and acceptance had found me. His confession about the woman he loved, Alanis, hurt. It hurt that he cared for someone with so much passion, but it hurt more that his happy existence had been shattered by a system that accepted no fucking grey. Respect is earned, loyalty is demonstrated, and Shadow had proved himself on both counts. He respected me as much as I did him, he was as loyal to me as I had become to him, but trust . . . trust had to be given. And we had yet to give each other that last piece of missing fabric that would stitch our lives together.
Pressing my piece of hope to his hard chest was a gamble I was willing to take. Shadow raised the piece of paper to his face, then slowly sat up and moved towards the candle. For a heartbeat, I feared he might set it alight. Not that it mattered; the information on that piece of paper was etched into my memory forever. Instead, Shadow knelt beside the candle, his eyes moving around the sheet of paper that was thinning to the point it might fall apart at any moment. For eight years, I had carried this sliver of hope with me. For eight long years, this secret had stayed with me alone; sharing it scared me to death.
My thoughts slipped to Regan’s lifeless body hanging in the dungeon below, and I shuddered, pushing the thoughts away. If I allowed myself to think of her, I’d lose it again. I’d break, and I didn’t like the way it felt to break. The emotions made my heart split in two and my stomach roll with discontent. One day I might allow myself to feel them again, but not today.
“Stay in Day Inn, San Francisco . . . this is a brochure for a motel.”
I knew exactly what it was. The faded yellow paper had a picture of a brick, two story building with a row of stairs ascending from either end. A vehicle was parked out front, and a large palm tree stood tall and proud to one side. Yellow skies blended into a faded blue as the sun set behind the building. The Stay in Day Inn, a three-and-a-half-star luxury motel, offered air-conditioning, en suite bathrooms, free Wi-Fi, mini-fridge, microwave, and coffee machine, along with a complimentary buffet breakfast and free parking. It sounded like heaven. The first time I’d read the leaflet I had no idea what any of those amenities were, but I’d read enough books since then to get a clear picture. A self-contained room with its own bathroom, queen size bed, clean sheets, pillows, uninterrupted electricity, and temperature control. I would never have imagined such a place existed if I hadn’t seen the brochure for myself and heard the stories passed on by people from the world above.
“Turn it over,” I whispered nervously.
I watched him as he did, noting the way his creased brow vanished as it rose high in shock.
“Where’d you get this?”
This was the tricky part. Fiddling with the corner of one page from my book of roses, I contemplated how much I should tell him. It felt like an all or nothing situation, and this would be putting my trust in Shadow to the test. I figured I had little to lose. Odds were I wouldn’t survive my fight with Beast, and even if I did, Kingsley would be there, ready to take me the moment I stepped out of the cage. I really did have nothing to lose.
“I found it under my door, right after my first meeting with the rebels.”
I watched as astonishment invaded Shadow’s features, before he quickly shut it down with an indiscernible expression. I could tell from the hard set of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders he wasn’t happy, but he didn’t move as he knelt before me, the motel brochure beginning to crumple in his fist. Steeling myself, I pushed my shoulders back and sat a little taller, my tears long dried, and I held his challenging gaze.
“I was sixteen, and Kingsley had sent me up to the Wild Zone in the middle of the night for clean-up. He was going through a faze where he thought he’d break me with sleep deprivation. It didn’t work because I had already learned to function on little to no sleep. Anyway, someone grabbed me from behind, and I fought. I thought I was going to be . . .” I paused. I knew words couldn’t hurt me, but for some reason, this one did.
“What happened?” Shadow prompted.
“I was bound and gagged. My eyes were hidden behind a length of fabric, and I was dragged down a number of corridors and shoved into a room. I thought it was my time to die, that I’d pissed Kingsley off one too many times. I was ready for that; life had been brutal and hard since the moment I was born. I was tired, and I was accepting of death. Instead, I found something else. Hope . . .”
Recalling the way I felt as I was shoved into a chair in an unknown room with unknown people was easy . . . I hadn’t been afraid of death, but I had been terrified of what they would do to me before they killed me. I remembered the smell of body odor, the sound of clothes rustling, the feeling of the heavy hand that remained on my shoulder to hold me in place.
“A man started talking. He told me I could call him Unit Leader 106, and that he was part of the rebel cause to liberate the whites of the Underworld. They knew about my photographic memory, and they wanted a vast amount of information. At that first visit, I was selective with what information I gave them. I didn’t trust them. They were up front with me; they told me I wouldn’t be able to leave the Underworld. I’d already made my first kill, which made me a red, and no reds were allowed to leave, only whites. When I got back to my room in the early hours of morning, that was under my door.” I pointed at the map Shadow clenched in his fist. “Every year, on the same day, I sat in the cell furthest to the left in the Wild Zone with my hands behind my back, blindfolded, and I’d wait for them. They always came, and each year, I would tell them more.”
“Why so long? Why haven’t they come for the innocents yet?” Shadow asked in a deep guttural voice.
“They were building their numbers; 106 claimed they needed time to gather and train recruits. They were also working on building a facility to house the innocents when they got out. It wasn’t like they could just stick them in the cities and let them find their own way.”
“And you’re still meetin’ with them?”
I shook my head from side to side. “Not any more. My last visit was a month ago.”
Shadow’s head tilted to one side as he did the math. “Eight years? You’ve been meetin’ with them for eight years?”
I nodded, and he stood abruptly and began to pace my room like a caged tiger. He was big and intimidating in my small space, but I kept still and remained seated so he could see I wasn’t afraid of him. No matter how much anger bled from his skin, I wasn’t scared of him.
“We’ve been searchin’ for the fuckin’ mole for two years, Nada. Two fuckin’ years of spillin’ blood, for nothin’!”
“That’s not on me. That’s on Kingsley.”
“That’s on me, Nada! Who the fuck do you think spilled that blood!” Shadow spat angrily.
I said nothing while my defenses slowly slipped into place. I took comfort in the feel of my knife beside me, pressed to the mattress. Shadow had never been openly hostile towards me. I’d seen hi
m angry, but it was never directed at me. Now, I wasn’t so sure what to expect from him.
“What did they wanna know?”
“Inmate numbers, a detailed layout of the Underworld, the structure of Kingsley’s army.”
Shadow stilled. “You told them about me?”
His eyes spat anger and hatred, but I kept calm as I answered him. “Yes.”
“To what end? What do they want with us?” he yelled.
“They want to take down Kingsley and liberate the whites.”
Shadow began to pace again, but fell silent. Eventually, the mounting question burst free. “Do they honestly think that takin’ Kingsley down will make it all better? He’s a tyrant, and he is replaceable. As soon as he’s gone, someone else will step in, and if that person isn’t just as fuckin’ bad, it’ll be worse. The Underworld needs a brutal hand to lead it. If the next leader isn’t as mad as Kingsley, the inmates will destroy him and everythin’ Kingsley has built down here. I know he’s fuckin’ crazy, but you need crazy to rule fuckin’ hell!”
I nodded in agreement. “I told 106 I knew of someone who was strong enough to lead, and would do so fairly.”
His pacing ended abruptly in front of me as the full wrath of his anger and disappointment settled in my direction. “Who?”
I stared right back, feeling more than a slight pang of sorrow over his volatile reaction. I hated seeing his anger directed at me, but I couldn’t help but find beauty in his rage. He was such a strong man, so handsome in his own rough kind of way. Yes, he had blood on his hands, but not willfully put there by his own conscious decisions; instead, it was forced on him by a ruthless man who had a thirst for violence and power. I knew, in my heart, Shadow had the potential to be as fair as a man could be in a world where fairness had no business. I took a chance nominating him, and for some reason, the rebels agreed.
“You,” I finally breathed out.
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