18. I Plead the Fifth, But Im Screaming Inside
I Plead the Fifth, But I'm Screaming Inside
I wake up, strapped to a table, inside what appears to be a hospital.
The room is white. My blankets are white.
And my gown is a baby blue with a slit up the back to expose my ass.
I have a handcuff on my left wrist, and it’s attached to the metal frame of the bed.
My right arm doesn’t move as well as it should, likely because of the bullet wound that’s been nicely bandaged.
One of the monitors must have snitched on me because a nurse peeks into the room a moment later, her eyes widening as she makes eye contact with me.
She then swiftly shuts the door and a few minutes tick by before it opens again, this time by a doctor arriving with an escort.
The escort has guns strapped to his hips and a hard expression, like he is itching for a reason to pull a trigger.
“Miss Blackwell, correct?” The doctor asks, looking at a piece of paper attached to a clipboard.
“Your reading skills seem to be adequate,” I say, though neither of them crack a smile. “Anyone want to tell me the reason for all this?” I pull my left hand up to show off my inconvenient accessory.
“Can’t have you escaping before trial,” says the man with the guns. He gives me a mocking smile, but I get the impression he would rather give me a few new holes in my body.
“Anyone want to tell me what I’m on trial for?”
I’m met with silence and a glare.
My right arm is in a sling and rather than baby blue with ass cheeks, I’m dressed in a white jumpsuit with vertical black stripes. My wrists are handcuffed to a belt and my feet are chained together, so I can only shuffle forward as I am led into the jail.
This isn’t the jail I once worked at; this one is located inside the mated district. I haven’t seen a single familiar person since I woke up in the hospital.
“I would really like to know what I’m being charged with,” I say to the officer holding me by my left arm.
He looks straight ahead and silently leads me into a small room with a single table and two chairs. I am sat in one, chained to it, and then left alone in silence. A television monitor flickers to life in the upper corner of the room. Two grim faces stare at me, a man and a woman.
“Kira Blackwell.” It’s the man who speaks first, reading my name from a sheet of paper. “Lifelong mateless. Former officer of precinct 16-M. You have been charged with rogue operations that resulted in the murder of William Roman. How do you plead?”
The man looks up from the paper, into the camera as if looking at me directly. The woman by his side has a softer look, but I recognize the good cop, bad cop bit.
A voice sounds over an intercom speaker. “Kira Blackwell. How do you plead?”
“This is some bullshit,” I huff. “Bill Roman kidnapped me and my partner. He tried to kill us.”
The intercom hums back to life. “Kira Blackwell, you will present your argument to the Bonded Bench in one week’s time for recognition.” The line cuts off, filling the room with silence.
Recognition. What a fucking joke. There are only two results of recognition: insanity or execution.
An officer comes in a few moments later.
He doesn’t speak, just hurries to unlatch me from the chair and then leads me to my cell.
The walls are white and slightly padded.
Can’t have anyone trying to hurt themselves before they are executed after all.
A metal toilet sits in the corner of the room, and there is a small sink next to it.
What will serve as my bed is nothing more than a white cot mattress lying on the floor.
I don’t even get a fucking blanket.
The officer leads me into the room, makes me face a wall, then removes my binds.
I’m instructed to stand still. The consequence for noncompliance is a zap from a taser, something I look to avoid since I’m not a fan of pissing myself.
I don’t move an inch until I hear the door to my cell shut with a loud click.
I exhale all the breath I’ve been holding in one long trembling stream while tears threaten my eyes. My throat feels like someone is choking me.
Where the fuck is Ghost? Killian? Fucking anybody. What the fuck happened?
The pain in my shoulder flares, as if my body is trying to help me remember the last moments inside the warehouse. Bill Roman’s body, jerking back as he was shot. But I hadn’t pulled the trigger. Ghost was supposed to kill Bill, but Ghost wasn’t there. Killian was.
Where is Ghost?
I need answers. A plan. Fuck, I just need somebody, anybody, to tell me what is going on.
I get up and inspect my room, looking for anything I can use to make me bleed.
But there’s nothing. Nothing except for my own nails and teeth.
Sitting cross-legged on my mattress, I get to work tearing at the skin on my wrist.
“Kira Blackwell,” the first judge of the Bonded Bench speaks.
I lift my head, taking in the sight of the ten judges seated around me in a circle. They alternate between male and female, all mated pairs, all here to recognize my crimes. Behind them sits the rest of the courtroom, where mated pairs sit in rows with stern looks.
They’ve come to witness a show.
“We are gathered here today to recognize Kira Blackwell,” the same judge that spoke the first time says, but we all know this show is scripted. “Kira, would you like to explain your actions to the Bench?”
I look down at the bandage on my wrist, the one placed by the prison doctor after I ripped open my skin trying to contact Ghost. I had written help me . There hasn’t been a response.
“I would like to plead insanity.” I raise my head, staring at the judge in front of me with an intensity made to make him feel unsettled.
The judge looks at me and smiles. It’s a mocking smile, as if his only wish for the day is to make sure I do not get what I want.
I’m out of options. I’ve been left to the wolves, and there’s only two routes out of this building.
“Pleading insanity seems like a rather sane thing to do,” one judge mutters, and I turn my head, trying to pinpoint who said it.
“I heard she tried to kill herself the first night in prison,” says a different judge, and I try but fail again to determine which one is speaking.
“If she wants to die, why wouldn’t she pick execution?”
“Pride. It’s probably pride.”
“See the bandage on her arm? The guards said it looked like an animal had attacked her.”
“Only someone insane could hurt themselves like that.”
“Can you all stop?” I say, ducking down and placing my hands over my ears to the best of my ability. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here.”
“Kira,” one of the female judges says and when I lift my head, she smiles softly. “We just need to understand what happened. We are trying to help. Why did you kill Bill Roman?”
“Bill Roman was trying to kill us,” I say, and she nods like she understands.
“When you say us, you mean you and your partner, Killian. Correct?” the female judge says, her tone soft and encouraging.
I nod. “Killian and I were out to dinner together.”
“You were in the mated district. Pretending to be mated,” another female judge scoffs, there is a sense of venom to her tone.
“We were working undercover,” I say, correcting whatever assumptions she assumed.
“Do you often pretend to have a soulmate?”
“What?” I ask, turning but unable to locate exactly which one of them asked the question. “I don’t pretend to have a soulmate.”
“The guards in the police station report that when they found you with your wrist torn apart, you claimed you did it because you were trying to contact your soulmate.”
“What?” I turn, this time recognizing the voice of the stern male judge in front of me.
“You don’t have a soulmate, Kira,” he says, with that little smirk. Like he knows what he’s talking about.
But he doesn’t. None of them do. I laugh.
The judges’ expressions change. Some are taken aback, while others look at me with a sense of uncertainty.
“You don’t know shit about me.”
The male judge in front of me narrows his eyes, before his gaze flicks to the woman by his side. She’s clearly his soulmate. Everyone here is sitting next to their soulmate, except me.
“You created a soulmate in your mind, Kira. You created him because the world would not love you. You missed your partner so much, you created another bond. But you must understand, it was all in your mind.”
My heart clenches when I think of Cathy.
“You wanted vengeance.”
“You wanted to be important.”
“So, you killed someone important.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “The Roman’s have been experimenting on people. They’ve had people killed. I was just trying to build a case.”
“You couldn’t find evidence, so you took matters into your own hands.”
“No!” I twist and turn, feeling disoriented by all the voices coming at me from every angle.
“It’s alright, Kira,” the female judge in front of me says, chiding me like I’m a child. “We see you. The question is, do you?”
The lights turn low, so low I can barely make out the faces of the judges around me. I can hear movement, chairs scraping as furniture is being rearranged. A spotlight turns on, just above me, making me squint. In front of me is me, or at least my reflection, trapped inside an ornate frame.
“Look. See the face of the one who betrayed you.”
I look into the mirror and for just a moment, I see the white painted skeleton of Ghost’s mask, just behind me.
I turn, squinting into the darkness, but cannot even make out the faces of the judges behind me.
It’s too dark. I turn back to the mirror and get a good look at myself for the first time in at least a week.
My skin is pale and haunted. Dark rings have formed beneath my eyes, giving me a skeletal look. My right arm hangs limply at my side while the edges of a bandage pokes out from the collar of my jumpsuit. A large bandage sits on my wrist, covering the brutal wound I inflicted on myself.
“Was it really me all along?” I whisper.
“We have recognized the fracture within you,” one judge announces. “You are not evil, Kira Blackwell. You are… unwell.”
“We forgive you,” multiple judges say at once, creating a harmony of multiple.
“You will be sent to Arkadia Asylum.”
I nod, looking into my reflection. A slight smile threatens to poke out from the edges of my lips. I get to live.
Ghost will come for me.