Manipulate (Deliver 6)

“Of course.” She stood with him and followed him to the door. “I’m sorry they got away. I hope you’re not too disappointed in me.”

“You never disappoint me, my girl.” He touched her chin in a featherlight caress of fingers and filth.

“Thank you.”

He entered the corridor and breezed past Garra, vanishing around the corner.

Garra remained, and his eyes moved over her like lie detectors. She gave him the same treatment, questioning every crease in his brow and twitch in his bearded jaw.

Did he know about Hector’s depravity? He was the most loyal man in the cartel. It was safe to assume he knew about and guarded every skeleton in Hector’s closet.

“I will watch over you again,” he said in Spanish.

“No, you will not. Did Hector tell you to—?”

“No.” He glanced down the hall and looked back at her. “I don’t want you wandering around alone. I know you feel safe—”

“I’ve never felt safe. Not in Jaulaso, and definitely not with you.”

He inhaled sharply. “Fine.”

As he turned away, she shut the door and locked it.

Her hand lifted to her face where Hector had touched her, and all the pain she’d pushed down over the past hour came roaring back.

She clawed at the stabbing burn in her chest and buckled over, gasping for breath. Her knees gave out as she hurled herself toward the sink, landing against it.

With the faucet on, she shoved her face under the spray and frantically scrubbed away the feel of Hector’s fingers.

He was so fucking vile and sick, and he was related to her. How could that be? How could she share DNA with something so atrociously inhuman?

She turned off the water and stared at the yellow stains in the sink. She was alone. Martin and Ricky were gone, and she had to continue on without them. She had to carry the weight of Hector’s sins without their protection or help.

It was too late to tell them about the things that happened to her last night. She’d made a decision, and she couldn’t take it back. She would never be able to curl up between their bodies and cry through the horrors she’d witnessed.

The safe, happy world she’d lived in with them was gone. That place would never return to her. They could never come back here.

They were gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Their absence swallowed all her attention, smothering her entire existence in desolation. She felt it in her face, throbbing through her gums and consuming her sinuses. Tears burned from her swollen eyes. Her throat filled with lava. The pain spread through muscles, arteries, and organs, weakening everything in its path.

She dragged heavy, useless limbs to the bed and buried her nose in the blankets, breathing in their masculine scents and seeking out the indentations of their body prints in the mattresses.

Mattresses that had been clawed by passionate hands. Walls that had been dampened by the press of sweaty bodies. Bedding that had tangled and twisted in the throes of hunger.

Surrounded by remnants of their time together, she rewound their love scenes, remembering them inside her and clinging to the blissful sensations. She knew them inside and out, and she would never forget.

Ricky’s panty-melting smile, the commanding rumble in Martin’s voice, the way they stared at each other so intimately and possessively, and how that captivating eye contact eventually included her—all of it tattooed across her soul.

She lost herself in the pain.

She grieved them with her whole body.

Once the sobbing began, she couldn’t stop. She fell into the black abyss and didn’t try to climb out. Curling up in the darkness, she cried through the rest of the day and into the next one.

No one knocked on the door or tried to invade her isolation. She wouldn’t have let them in. She was in no position to show her face.

A few cans of soup and early-morning showers got her through that first week. The two times she ventured out at three in the morning, the sounds of a crying child haunted her. But the corridors remained silent and empty.

Over the next few weeks, she pulled herself together long enough to inject her presence into Area Three.

At night, she walked the halls, listening for children and monitoring the vacant sewer room.

During the day, she watched the inmates from her favorite bench in the yard and swallowed her fear during visits with Hector in his cell.

On the surface, she was the woman she’d been for the past two years—aloof and unapproachable, present but not involved. She sat on the outskirts of the common areas with her nose in a book, just like she’d always done.

But on the inside, everything had changed. She couldn’t understand how the world could go on around her when her life had completely stopped.

Life had abandoned her the moment Martin and Ricky walked out that door.

She tried not to dwell on it, but it was a splinter under her fingernail that couldn’t be removed. Sometimes the pain dulled, but it never went away. She couldn’t think of anything else except for that damn splinter, stuck in a place it didn’t belong. Her entire body felt it. She couldn’t pull it out, couldn’t chop it off. She couldn’t escape it.