“Miss?”
I blink. The guard has the door open, revealing the grand entryway illuminated by a gleaming chandelier, but there’s no one lying in wait when I step over the threshold. Hushed voices reach my ears as I head across the suite. My heart pounds, nearly drowning them out.
“Clean this shit up...”
“Yes, sir.”
“Find out who they work for.”
Those men. The ones who attacked me near the subway—who knew exactly where a lone, unarmed woman would be that time of night. A traitorous snicker trickles out of me before I can help it while my eyes burn and begin to blur. I can only pray that no one heard me—the living room is empty, at least. Vinny’s men are busy tonight. I hear thuds and footsteps coming from the office. They could just be moving furniture—if it weren’t for the sickly thud made between the efficient tap of loafers on wood. The door is open, and I can’t stop myself from peering at the sliver of the room revealed beyond it.
I can only make out Vinny’s desk and a pair of thick hands braced on top of it.
“Lynn?”
I freeze in my tracks. “Yes...yes, Vinny?”
“Get to bed.” His tone is gruff, crisp. He’s angry. He’d brooding. The glee that fills him at the sight of death has faded to a smoldering lust for revenge. His emotions contain the same wild, untamed energy of a match—only a few whacks with a hoodie won’t be enough to put his wrath out. “Now, goddamn it!”
“Yes, Vinny.”
It takes me exactly twelve seconds to hurry down the hall and pry the door to my “bedroom” open. Vinny designed every last detail: the soft-pink walls, the white lace lining the canopy of my bed, and the plush, ivory floor rug.
It’s been a comfortable cage for the last four years. The only object out of place is a wide case propped carefully against the wall beside my vanity. I nearly choke on a wave of disappointment that swamps me, and I tear my gaze away to the window instead. I watch the city silhouetted against the sheer, white curtains as I peel my clothing off and tuck them neatly in the hamper near my bed. A white nightgown has already been laid out for me, resting on the white duvet. I shut the light off and pull it on in darkness. Then I slip beneath the blankets and try not to dream.
It hurts to dream these days. Instead, I close my eyes and picture a devil watching from the shadows.
CHAPTER TWO
Dante
We are supposedto strive toward freedom like rats on a wheel working for cheese. Time off for good behavior, they say. Parole is the goal—but, when the unexpected release of a convict is deemed “reintegration into society,” it all but implies that we have all been successfully rehabilitated the moment we walk out of the reinforced steel doors.
It’s all bullshit, of course. Just a way for the DA to be able to sleep at night, knowing that his inept office allowed yet another monster to slip through the hands of justice. Some poet somewhere probably wrote something deep to describe the cruelty of it, but I’ll settle for this: You can’t cure rabies with four walls and an armed guard. By then, the beast can’t even hear you. It doesn’t want to hear you. Why? It’s already imagining the uneven cadence of your heartbeat the moment it lunges for your throat.
Once tasted, blood is an impossible addiction to shake, unlike crack or heroin. The stain on your soul left by a death you commit yourself is incomparable to any other human disease. It corrupts your entire being. The aftermath paints the world gray.Crushing a man’s windpipe beneath your fingers or striking him down with a bullet you let loose mark the moment you decide to stop being human. Darkness consumes you, and even though a pretty social worker in a clinical lab coat tries to tell you to feel remorse...
You simply don’t.C’est la vie. That’s life.
“Mr. Vialle. Did you hear me?” An orderly is waiting by the door, a clipboard propped in the crook of his arm. “Detective Van Hallen for you.” He steps back to allow another man to enter the room.
It’s one of the interview rooms the prison uses for meetings with lawyers or impromptu so-you’ve-been-released well wishes from the cops. Whoever he is, this “detective” is tall. Graying black hair covers his head and matches the neatly trimmed beard around his mouth. Rather than look in my direction, he warily eyes the plastic chair placed on the other side of the metal table I’m already seated at. When he finally sits, he has to spread out his legs just to keep his knees from brushing the table’s underside.
“Good morning, Mr. Vialle,” he says, finally looking up. “I hope I’m not troubling you too much.” He makes a show of placing a battered, leather briefcase on the table. Then he takes his sweet time opening it and withdraws a rather sizeable file.Dante Vialleis printed on a sticker taped to the front of it. He makes sure I read the label before he opens the file and shuffles the pages inside it. “You have an...interesting record, to say the least, Mr. Vialle.”
I don’t answer. This jumpsuit itches. The fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling are set to the highest setting on purpose—so is the heat that’s blasting, though Mr. Van Hallen has enough sense to pretend he doesn’t notice. Stupid pigs. You’d think they’d get tired of playing the same old tricks.
“Well, I personally wasn’t pulling for your release,” Van Hallen goes on. He frowns at something he’s reading on one of the pagesin my file and begins to recite out loud. “Robbery. Arson. Attempted murder. Assault with a firearm. Assault with a deadly weapon. Felony assault. Possession with intent to sell. Kidnapping—”
“And yet my current charge is ‘trespassing,’ Detective,” I say. “A minor offense.”
He flushes, his jaw clenching. Mr. Van Hallen is one of a million. A carbon copy of the same cop to hound my trail since the day I first shoplifted candy from a Quick-Go Mart. They get off on the heroics—making the world a safer place. Little do they know that, when you put one rabid dog down, two more are already ready to take its place.
Surprisingly, Mr. Van Hallen cuts right to the chase rather than climb onto a soapbox. “Vincent Stacatto. Ever hear of him?”
I shrug as best as I can despite the handcuffs securing my hands to the table. “I can’t say that I have, Detective.”
“Don’t worry,” Van Hallen assures me. “You’ll hear of him soon enough. While you were trading sexual favors for a few cigarettes in this jungle gym they call a prison, Vinny Stacatto’s been running roughshod all over your old territory.”
