The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood - Prison Camp 1)

Not that he was going to live through this.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, he hoped Nyx had gotten free again somehow.

As Jack looked across the vast space of the Hive, he heard a rumbling off in the distance, one that rose in volume and gradually declined, like a massive vehicle was passing by somewhere close. When it happened again, his brain churned over the implications.

Double shifts called in. No prisoners in the main tunnel. No one here.

Holy shit. The Command was emptying the prison.

She was moving out everything . . . and everyone.

“What did you do with him?” Janelle demanded through the mesh and the iron bars. “The prisoner. What did you do with him.”

That furnished cell, Nyx thought. The one Jack had hesitated in front of.

Maybe he’d paused there not because he missed the female who lived inside, or yearned for her . . . but because she was holding him against his will and he didn’t know what to do about it?

Or how to get free, regardless of the relative autonomy he had around the prison?

“Which prisoner?” she hedged, to buy some time.

“The one my guards saw you with. The one you threatened to kill in front of them if they didn’t let you through.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re lying to me.”

Nyx shrugged. “I think the larger question is what you’re going to do with me. Everything else is just conversation.”

Janelle went silent. And then she slowly put the hood back in place, her face covered once more.

“I’ll answer that right now,” she said in a low, threatening voice. “Guards!”

As Nyx felt a cold rush of panic, Janelle turned away—and she did not look back as she left. The black-robed figure who used to be her sister just walked off, as if she hadn’t had a conversation with a close relative. Someone who she’d grown up with. Someone who she shared parents and a sister and a grandfather with.

In the wake of the departure, Nyx remembered standing in front of the Wall and seeing the bastardized version of her sister’s name carved into the slick stone.

One thing was absolutely clear.

The female she had once known as Janelle was well and truly dead.

I wanted to know what it was like to murder someone. I’m good at it.

Maybe that person had never existed.

The time for thinking ended as guards reentered the holding area and opened the cell. They were silent as they marched her out, one male at the crook of each of her arms, the three of them pivoting to shuffle through the doorway. Striding out into the tunnel, there was no wasted time. They took her directly to the Hive, and they entered through a side door—

Nyx looked up to the dais and lost her footing. Jack was chained to the center post, and there was something wrong with him. His body was trembling violently, his head jerking around on his shoulders, the chains keeping him in place chattering because of all the movement— that certainly seemed to be involuntary.

But he managed to focus on her. Even through his palsied condition, his eyes, those blue eyes, locked on her—and as she was brought closer, his shaking eased some. He couldn’t seem to talk, though, his lips moving and nothing coming out. Was he sick?

No, he was drugged, she decided.

The guards dragged her up onto the dais and stood her in front of him. Off to the side, Apex was down on the ground and not moving. When there was a rustling from the shadows behind the dais wall, Nyx expected her sister to walk out—no, not her sister.

The Command.

Instead, another set of guards emerged, and they were dragging a prisoner by the male’s arms, the torso and body lagging behind. They dropped the body like it was trash next to Apex, and Kane slowly flopped over onto his back.

Nyx gasped. His face was so bloody and swollen, she almost couldn’t recognize him, and as he breathed through his mouth, all that came out was wheezing.

She glanced back at Jack just as one more was brought in. Mayhem was fighting against the guards who had him tied in rough rope, big body jerking and twisting, white hair ripping around as he snarled and cursed. All that fight stopped as he got a look at the empty Hive. He was so stunned that as he was chained to the post on the right, he didn’t resist.

Then again, he was done for and he must have known that.

They were all done for.

The guards stepped back from them, forming a line on the left, and as Nyx’s biceps were abruptly released, her balance went wonky and she had to catch herself from falling over. She steadied her balance by focusing on Jack. She wanted to ask him what they should do, how they could beat this, but she knew the impulse was the immature part of her talking, the little girl inside the grown female who was desperately looking for someone she trusted and loved to tell her it was all going to be okay: She wanted the plan that would magically free Jack and Mayhem, that would bring Apex back to life and save Kane from his injuries, that would make her sister not dead and the Command someone else . . . that would see Nyx, herself, safely back to the farmhouse, this whole nightmare never having happened.