“Whatever,” I grumbled as I shoved my phone into my pocket. “I’m taking my bike. She shouldn’t be up for a very long time. Those sleeping pills knock her out. But if she does wake…”
“I’ll tell her exactly where you are, because I’m not lying to her like her father’s been doing over the last week,” Shine informed me.
I jerked my chin up. “That’s fine.”
With that, I left the house and rode my bike all the way to the Anchor County Prison.
There, I found my contact, Jale—which yes, I realize is quite comical seeing as he worked in a jail—standing outside with the back door propped open.
“Don’t kill her,” Jale ordered.
I nearly rolled my eyes. “You think that I would do that? In a jail?”
Jale looked me straight in the eye and said, “Yes. Yes, I do.”
I snorted and pushed past him. He was right. I would straight-up murder her ass if I knew that would make Sophia any safer.
Only, I had a sneaking suspicion that the woman I was here to see had an ulterior motive for hitting Sophia. Nothing had happened to escalate her to that level of hate—at least to Sophia’s knowledge—and I wanted to know what had triggered her.
As Jale moved aside, he jerked his head toward a holding room toward the back of the long hallway that ran along the south end of the jail. Not a person was in sight as I made my way toward the room.
It paid to know nearly every single person in the town.
It also paid that the people that allowed me to do what I was doing, or even helped in Jale’s case, believed in my line of work.
As I pushed through the door, Blakely looked up, and her face immediately closed down from hope to forlorn acceptance.
I closed the door quietly behind me, leaving Jale outside so that he could claim ignorance of this visit ‘just in case.’
Her eyes were haunted as she looked at me.
“You ran over the woman that’s been my everything for more years than you want to know,” I told her bluntly. “I’ve watched over her since she was ten. When she turned eighteen, I started noticing her as a woman. When she turned twenty, I knew that there was no denying what I felt for her. But one thing I can say for you hurting her so bad she had to be airlifted to the hospital is, I’ve finally stopped denying my feelings for her.”
Blakely looked at me wide eyed.
“Though I’m appreciative of you helping me get my head out of my ass where she’s concerned, I’m also extremely pissed the fuck off. Want to know why?” I asked carefully.
Softly.
Deadly.
“Why?” she whispered, voice barely above an octave that I could hear.
“Because you almost took the one thing away from me that I haven’t had yet. And I’m not sure you understand the meaning of need… but you seriously fucked up when you did what you did. Now, I want to know why.”
Blakely swallowed hard, her face losing whatever color she’d retained the moment I’d walked through the door.
“Umm…” She hesitated. “Uhhh…”
I pulled the metal chair out from the other side of the small table that she was cuffed to, then turned it around so I could straddle it backward.
Then I stared and waited her out.
She was squirming within two minutes.
“I can’t tell you,” she admitted. “I promised him I wouldn’t. That’s…”
“You can either tell me now,” I ordered as I reached into my boot and pulled out a knife. “Or you can find out what it’s like to have the skin pulled off of your hand.”
Her eyes were wide as she said, “You can’t do that. We’re at a jail. People will hear me scream.”
I pulled out a handkerchief from my pocket and held it out to her. “Did you happen to notice the small hallway that you walked through?” I grinned. “Did you know that this particular building has been here since the eighteen hundreds? And this part of the building used to be known as the ‘cell block.’ More notably, the walls here are eighteen inches thick because they wanted to make this a bomb shelter, as well as a structure that they could put ‘death row’ citizens as they awaited public trial in the square. Let’s just say, the only person that’ll hear you besides me is God.”
Blakely was shaking her head. “You’re a man. You wouldn’t hurt a woman.”
I flicked the butterfly knife so that the shiny blade was open.
“And look,” I said as I gestured toward her hand that was so nicely displayed on top of the table with cuffs holding her steady. “I have a nice thing to hold you still.”
When the knife started to drag across the top of her hand, her breathing sped up.
“Haylin,” she blurted. “That’s the only thing I know.”