Deadline to Damnation (Sons of Templar MC 7)

I wanted to feel hope with that.

But hope was dead here.

By the time the prospect came in with lunch—a can of Coke, a turkey sandwich, and a candy bar—I had stopped staring at the feather. I’d managed to clean as best as I could. A pile of trash sat in the corner, all the things I’d ruined, including an expensive looking TV I didn’t even remember ripping off the wall.

He placed the tray on the bedside table.

Something rolled around beside the Coke.

My heart stopped.

It was a tube of lipstick. Black, with a distinct double C in gold on the top of the cap.

I picked it up with the same shaking hand that had cradled the feather hours ago.

I glanced up to the man who’d been silently staring at me as I gazed at a tube of lipstick.

“Thank you,” I said genuinely. Though giving thanks to someone enabling my captivity was kind of stupid. But he was a prospect, even if he had an opinion on keeping a woman hostage, he didn’t get a seat at the table. That was the whole point in prospecting for a club like this. To see the way of life, to understand there wasn’t a say in whether it happened or not, but to participate in it, no matter how ugly it got.

Something told me that life had already gotten plenty ugly for this man, and delivering meals to a woman locked in a trashed room was nowhere near the worst thing he’d done.

He didn’t reply to my thanks.

I didn’t expect him to.

He just picked up the barely touched breakfast tray. “You’ll get some of your shit later on today,” he said, his voice was thickly accented, Scottish if I wasn’t mistaken.

That surprised me. Not just the fact he was speaking to me but the fact they were letting me have some of my own things.

To be buried in?

“If I get a say in it, can I request nothing short or tight?” I asked, clenching my hands around the tube of lipstick. “Jeans and tees would be great.”

He eyed me. “Doubt you’ll get a say in it,” he replied.

I grinned. It might’ve surprised him, but his face displayed nothing. “Can you see if you can get me a pen and paper? I promise I won’t try and use it as a weapon or anything.”

He didn’t reply.

Just walked out.

But another three hours later, he returned with a bag of jeans, tees and a pen and paper.

He didn’t reply to my thanks then either.

I didn’t stop what I was doing when he walked into the room.

I didn’t react either.

Not outwardly at least.

“What are you doing?” Liam asked after a beat that I imagined he’d been watching me for.

I could ignore him.

Lie.

“I’m writing the things I’m grateful for today,” I replied, neither ignoring him or lying.

Another pause.

“Why?”

“Because I do it every day. Despite whatever situation I’m in. No matter how dire.”

“You would class this situation as dire?”

I still didn’t look up. “I don’t think there is a way to class this situation.”

He didn’t reply.

“Why do you write what you’re grateful for every day?” he asked finally when the scratch of the pen on the paper and our past got too loud.

Another question I wasn’t under obligation to answer, honestly or otherwise.

“Because it’s something my therapist recommended,” I replied. “It’s a common tool used on patients who’ve suffered something traumatic.”

I didn’t mean to add the last part. I really, really didn’t. Admitting I had trauma was begging him to ask the one question I didn’t know if I could physically answer, honestly or otherwise.

Anyone given such a statement would need the answer. As humans, we’re desperate for morbid information.

Liam stayed silent.

It was turning out to be his way, this new person. He asked questions when I didn’t expect him to speak, and he stayed quiet when my heart wouldn’t allow me to utter a word.

It was like he was tapped into some part of me, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like having a connection with a man that I was supposed to hate. I hated the fact that despite the years, the death, the pain, that connection remained unbroken, unchanged though everything else had changed. I hated that I was faced with Liam embodied in a person he never should’ve been. I hated most of all, that I couldn’t hate him. Not one bit.

I finished writing.

I could try and stare at the paper for longer, I guessed, but it was depressing staring at the emotional straws I’d tried to grasp onto.

I’m inhaling and exhaling.

I have this pen and paper.

I’m not tied in some basement being tortured.

Not being tortured had become something to be grateful for, apparently.

As I lifted my eyes, I knew I needed to cross that last word out. Because this was nothing short of torture.

I wanted to put Liam’s presence on the list to be grateful for. The miracle I’d prayed for every day since this all began. Since it all ended.