Chapter Twenty
Wesley
My eyes blink blankly at the stark white ceiling above me.
Odd, I don’t remember my prison cell being this white.
When I try to move, a crippling pain ricochets up my spine, and I scream out in agony, limbs frozen in place. That’s when I realize that something is covering my face… an oxygen mask.
“Oh! Wesley!” a sweet voice exclaims, breaking the chaos going on in my head. “Please don’t move.” She stops me from pulling the mask off, just as her angelic face appears above me, and for a few seconds whatever fear I have eases.
My sister, Ashleigh, takes my hand, gripping it tightly as tears fall down her cheeks. “I can’t believe you’re awake.”
“Where am I?” I question, too broken to really move more than an inch. My voice coming out like some respirator breathing super villain.
“In a hospital. You were… beaten to death.”
“To death? But I’m still here.”
She nods; those familiar brown curls pulled back into a ponytail.
Her deep blue eyes blink wildly a few times before she smiles, familiar dimples dotting the corner of her lips.
“Only you could survive something like this, Wesley.” She looks like she wants to hit me but holds herself back. “You’re too stubborn to die.”
My body groans in protest as I try to prop myself up on the bed, realizing I can barely see her through the swollen eye that’s taking up half my face.
“Is dad here?”
She shakes her head, motioning to one guard sitting next to the bed, and another posted outside. “He couldn’t see you like this.”
“You mean, his prisoner son, bloody and barely hanging on to life?”
She stifles a sob, catching it before it forms.
“It’s not like they would let him in anyway. They weren’t even going to let me in. But I drove overnight to get here. I begged them to let me see you.”
“And they let you?”
Ashleigh nods. “They didn’t think you were going to make it, Wes. They were just letting me say goodbye. But I knew you were still hanging on, and that somewhere in there was my big brother who’s protected me for most of my life.”
“Except when I couldn’t,” I grit out, the tears starting to sting.
She takes my hand again. This time more earnestly. “And yet you were still there for me after everything that happened. You never left my side. You let me stay with you, and didn’t tell Mom or Dad.”
The guard clears his throat, making Ashleigh frown. “They’re not going to let me stay, Wes. They’ve broken a lot of rules letting me in here. Luckily, you have some friends in there that are doing their best to protect you.”
She motions to the guard sitting behind her, who does his best to look uninterested.
“Just be careful, okay? Whoever wants you gone, will come after you again.”
“I know.”
She takes my hand one last time, kissing the back of it. “Rodriguez’s Promise me you won’t die, Wesley. Our family is already fractured enough, I can’t lose you right now.”
“What’s going on?”
She sniffs, wiping a few tears away from her face. “Mom’s really upset with Dad right now. She blames him for you getting hurt. She says he could’ve prevented all this.” She takes a deep breath, then lets it out in one long whoosh. “She’s asking for a divorce.”
“A divorce!” The words roar out of me, and instantly my ribs sing in protest, and I start to cough, which makes everything even worse.
My parents’ marriage survived my mother’s infidelity when I was born, staying together through one more pregnancy with my sister, despite my father not trusting her, but it took me going to prison to break them apart? Fuck my life!
“Don’t overexert yourself, Wes. The doctors say your attackers punctured your lung and broke a rib or two.
They had to get you stabilized at the Ely hospital first and then flew you straight here.
Apparently, your heart stopped beating twice on the chopper and they had to keep reviving you to keep you alive.
Whoever did this obviously wanted you dead.
But the doctors here have been working day and night to keep you stabilized, your heart working, and those lungs pumping.
That’s why you have on the oxygen mask; your O2 levels have been all over the place since your surgery, and they said it may be hard for you to breathe on your own once you woke up.
” She pauses, her smile fading. “If you woke up.” Tears pour down her face as a stifled sob stalls briefly before her emotions erupt. “Don’t die on me, Wes. I need you.”
“Ashleigh…”
The guard clears his throat again. This time making sure she knows her time is up.
“Just promise me you’ll stay alive.”
I nod, but even that feels impossible. “Okay, I promise.”
“I love you, Wes. So much.”
“I love you too, Ash.”
She frowns when she realizes she can’t hug me. I guess it was one of their rules. “I gotta head back to Reno, but I’ll be keeping tabs on you, okay?”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
Her smile slightly falters before she finally lets go, her eyes watered down with worried tears, her dimples only existing because of how prominent they are.
Then she’s gone, leaving me alone in the room with the guard who let her in.
“Thank you for that,” I whisper, unable to hide my own tears.
He nods. “Don’t expect it to happen again,” he grumbles.
“Don’t worry, I know the rules you guys have, I’m just surprised you broke them.”
He looks towards the window, his left knee jumping like he’s nervous. “I have a little sister too, and the last thing I’d want is for her to show up thinking I’m going to die, and not be able to say her last goodbyes. Gotta admit, Dover, I thought you’d be dead by nightfall.”
But I’m not dead.
My body might feel broken and bruised, and barely functional right now, but I’m still breathing. And even though I know there are people out there who have marked me for death, I’m going to get through this.
You only got three and half more years, Wes. If you can survive this, you can survive anything.
(Two Years Later)
Morning light filters in through the bars that line the window of my cell, waking me from a relatively good slumber for the first time in years.
Today is my parole hearing, the first one since getting put in this joint.
I’ve kept my nose clean, done my best to be a model inmate, and somehow managed to stay alive, despite all the odds against me.
It’s strange, but after the initial beating by JP and the few other inmates who attacked me, no one else has fucked with me. They call me The Reaper, saying ‘only a man who has looked death in the face and lived to tell the tale, could still be breathing after everything that happened.’
I just call it dumb luck, or maybe I’ve just spent one of my nine lives and don’t know it yet.
They escort me through the hallways, my chains rattling the ground, the heavy links making it hard to walk. I may be a low-risk inmate, but they still have to follow their protocols, and any inmate brought before the parole board has to be chained.
They sit me down on a hard, unforgiving metal chair, facing a blank screen.
A guard chains me to a table, the same guard that’s been somewhat protecting me since he let my sister come visit me in the hospital.
I only know his last name, Rodgers, but the man has been looking out for me ever since I was healthy enough to be sent back to prison.
He followed me from Ely to the hospital, and now here, a medium security facility in Lovelock.
He was the only protection I had after everything went down, and I have no idea why.
When I first got to Ely, I ran into my uncle.
The guy had been locked up for five years before I got there, and the second he saw me, he had me running the yard with his group.
It was weird seeing my uncle again after all that time.
I had no idea he was still alive until he confronted me on the yard, and basically stuck out his neck for me, offering me his protection.
And damn did I need it. That first year was absolutely brutal.
Not only was JP there tormenting me, but so were a few others who weren’t exactly fond of my dad.
My uncle and his friends kept me protected the best they could, but he had no idea about the hit, and couldn’t prevent it.
It took months of recovery for me to get back on my feet.
I was in the hospital for at least a month before they transferred me to a secure, long-term nursing facility, where I had to basically figure out how to walk and breathe at the same time again.
I made it… but barely.
It was Rodgers who told me that my uncle and his buddies retaliated hard.
Unlike me, JP didn’t survive his jumping, the shank in his carotid artery prevented it.
For some reason, his death didn’t bring me joy like it should have.
In fact, it did the opposite. It made me feel like shit.
Sure, JP fucked me up and almost killed me, but did the asshole really deserve to die?
The screen suddenly flashes to life, and three men and a woman sit on the other side, all of them staring at me with wide eyes of fascination. The guy in the middle grabs a stack of paperwork and lightly taps it on the table before sorting through it.
“This hearing of the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners is now in session regarding inmate Wesley Dover, Department of Corrections number 032726.”
He’s like a robot. Every word is said like he’s done this a thousand times before. There’s no judgment in his tone, just a strange neutral vibrato that sounds somewhat promising.
He looks down at the paperwork again, glances over the first few paragraphs then slowly raises his head, folding one hand over the other.
“Mr. Dover, you were sentenced to five years in the Nevada Department of Corrections following a conviction for aggravated assault stemming from an incident in a Reno club three years ago.”
It’s more of a statement than a question, but I find myself answering, anyway.
“Yes, sir.”