Chapter 6
Delilah Barrinheart
The door slams open and the world comes at me in a rush of sound and pain.
Hands like iron haul me forward before my eyes can focus, boots scraping stone as I’m dragged across the corridor and thrown back into the cell.
My knees hit the floor first, skin tearing on the concrete, and for a heartbeat everything goes white.
The impact jars straight up my spine, knocking what little air I had left from my lungs.
I hear King curse under his breath as they shove me inside, but the clang of the lock behind us swallows his voice until there’s only the echo and the copper taste of blood in my mouth.
I stay on my knees, breathing through the pounding in my ribs.
Every inch of me hurts in ways I can’t catalogue—bruises blooming like ink beneath my skin, muscles trembling from too many hours of questions and fists and the kind of cruelty that wants to erase a person piece by piece.
They want me hollow. They want me broken.
They want me emptied out until there’s nothing left but a shell that answers when spoken to.
But I’m not.
Not yet.
I force air into my lungs until the room stops spinning enough to hold still.
The cell smells of rust and sweat and something darker that clings to the walls like smoke.
Damp concrete. Old blood. Despair with a body count.
King is slumped against the far corner, his shirt stiff with dried blood, one eye swollen shut.
He shifts when he sees me, but the movement is small, a ghost of the force he usually carries, like even pain has had to ration itself in him.
“You look like hell,” he rasps, voice scraped raw.
“So do you,” I whisper back. My throat burns. Even that much speech feels like dragging glass over skin.
For a while we just breathe, the quiet between us heavier than the cold.
It settles low and mean, pressing against my chest until I want to scream just to prove I still can.
I want to collapse, to let the hours of torture pull me under and finish what they started, but something sharper hums beneath the exhaustion.
A thread of defiance. Of purpose. Something ugly and stubborn enough to keep my head above water.
When the guards’ footsteps fade down the hall, I reach into the hidden fold of my torn jacket and slide out the thin card I palmed earlier—a chipped piece of plastic I’d pried from the control panel in the interrogation room.
My fingers shake around it, slick with sweat and dried blood, but I keep my grip steady.
I’ve been planning this for days, memorizing doors, counting rotations, watching the locks.
It’s all I’ve had to keep me upright. All I’ve had that belongs to me.
King’s good eye catches the movement.
“Tell me that’s a magic trick and not you being reckless,” he mutters, a faint grin tugging at the corner of his split lip.
“It’s our way out,” I murmur, the words steadier than I feel. “I can pick the lock with it. Tonight.”
He tries to sit straighter, pain flashing hard across his face before he buries it. “You’re not serious.”
“I’m done waiting for someone else to save us.” My voice is low but certain, sharpened by every hour I’ve spent chained to this floor imagining all the ways hope can rot. “I’m getting out. I’ll come back for you.”
King lets out a breath that’s half a laugh, half a groan. “Always figured you’d be the one to drag me through hell, not leave me here.”
“You can’t walk. You know it.” I say it gently, but firm enough that he hears the truth under it. We both do. His ribs are probably cracked. His shoulder hangs wrong. One leg barely twitches when he shifts it.
His grin sharpens into something almost proud. “That’s the first smart thing you’ve said all week.”
Despite everything, a small, bitter smile tugs at my mouth.
It feels wrong on my face. Feels like using a language I forgot I knew.
The quiet stretches again, and in it there’s something like understanding—two people bound by blood, by pain, by the kind of trust that doesn’t need words.
It feels almost like having a brother. The kind I never had. The kind I maybe wasn’t made to have.
King studies me through the haze, breathing shallow. “Cash is going to lose his mind when you show up on your own.”
The name hits me like a pulse.
Jon.
The memory floods in before I can stop it. It never asks permission when it’s him. It just takes.
The mission had gone sideways earlier—intel wrong, timing off. I’d failed.
We’d both failed.
We’re stretched out on a hill just beyond the Greenport perimeter, the grass cool and damp beneath my back.
The dirt smells like rain and crushed pine.
A Hozier song bleeds softly through my headphones into the dark, sharp night air.
I say dark, but the stars are so bright they look like someone scattered salt across black velvet.
The whole sky feels too wide, too beautiful for the kind of day we had.
Jon lies beside me, silent, one arm behind his head, the other resting near mine but not touching.
It isn’t awkward. It’s heavy, the kind of silence that fills your chest and stays there, turning every breath into something slower, deeper, more dangerous.
His shoulder is just a few inches from mine.
Close enough that I can feel the heat of him.
Close enough that one small move would change everything.
He doesn’t tell me I did fine. He doesn’t lie to make me feel better.
He just lets me breathe, lets me listen to the wind like it might have answers and stare at the sky like those same words might be written somewhere if I look hard enough.
That’s always been his kindness—hard-edged, quiet, leaving room instead of filling it with bullshit.
If I turn my head, our eyes will meet and something unspoken will shift. The world will tilt on its axis and every sparkling ball in the sky will explode. Every rule I’ve built myself around will snap like wet thread.
I don’t.
I never do.
The memory shatters as quickly as it came.
The cell walls press back in, cold and unrelenting.
The music is gone. The sky is gone. There’s only concrete and blood and the taste of regret.
I shove the image away and force myself to focus on the weight of the card in my palm and the pattern of guard rotations I’ve memorized.
Left corridor every seventeen minutes. Outer post every thirty.
Cigarette break at the corner by the courtyard door. Weak hinge on the third latch.
King exhales slowly, watching me with that tired half-smile. “Just like that,” he murmurs, as if he knows exactly where my mind went.
I tighten my grip on the card and meet his gaze, steel for steel. “I’m getting us out,” I whisper, more to myself than to him. Because if I say it enough times, maybe it becomes true. Maybe I should stop sounding like a girl trying to convince herself she isn’t terrified.
And this time, I move. It’s cautious at first, swift but measured, knees against the cold concrete scraping scabs built up over days, but I don’t feel a single thing. I’m too focused on the prospect of freedom. Of air that doesn’t smell like other people’s suffering. Of home.
Not of him.
King smirks, half-broken and stupidly human, and I can’t help the laugh that rips out of me—wet and ugly and too loud in the cold air.
“Don’t forget my ass here,” King rasps, voice a raw thread of humor stretched over pain.
“Remember that time Larkin left me chilling in a conference room with a ‘scented candle’ and two strangers who turned out to be a religious cult? That shit was fucking miserable—don’t pull a Larkin on me, Delilah. ”
The joke lands like a slap and I cough from it, choking on a laugh that tastes like rust and blood, but it does what he intended: it lightens something that’s been too heavy for too long.
It makes the walls, for a second, feel less like they’re closing in and more like an obstacle I can push past. Something with edges. Something beatable.
I press the chipped card against the lock, breath shallow, heart a fist against my ribs.
Every second stretches thin as wire. I’m doing this for me, I tell myself—because sitting in this cell until they break me is not an option.
I’m doing it because I have to—because the silence is going to kill me if I don’t act.
But the truth is a slippery animal and it claws at the back of my throat: I’m doing it to run to him.
To Jon. To the place where the world still makes sense and my chest stops feeling like an empty room.
The lock clicks.
It’s a small sound, but it roars in my head like gunfire. I freeze, waiting for shouting, footsteps, some sign I’ve been caught. Nothing. Just that dying fluorescent buzz and King’s tight inhale from behind me.
I slide the door, the gap widening by careful increments that make me hold my breath like I’m swimming under ice.
The corridor beyond is a smear of gray and bad light, the kind that eats color and optimism until nothing’s left but shadow.
Concrete walls. Exposed pipes. A strip of flickering fluorescence that makes everything look diseased.
I move like a ghost. Quiet, careful, all the hours of practice and all the forced stillness in interrogation folding into muscle memory.
My hands tremble—so do my legs—but I keep going, counting steps in my head the way I counted rotations while memorizing the guard shifts.
Left, two, right, one. Breathe in, out. Don’t think about the blood on my palms. Don’t think about King’s grin.
Don’t think about Jon’s voice in my head telling me to be careful in that low, pissed-off tone that always made my spine straighten.