Chapter 2
? Arden ?
WOMEN’S HIGH-SECURITY PRISON
Because it wasn’t just me on that thumb drive; it was them.
My everything. Creed. All of us dying slow, agonizing deaths as my family was forced to rape me.
It was an event that I’d blocked out efficiently and precisely, but there it was—the loves of my life pinned down on top of me, one at a time, sobbing, apologizing.
Thorne was first: I’m s-sorry and Please forgive me and I love you, little flame.
I love you so much. All of them were injected with drugs to make them hard, Kane trying to rip his own dick off before the guards stopped him, cuffed his hands, and forced him inside me as he screamed.
I’d never hurt you. I’d never hurt you. I’d never h-hurt you, sweetheart.
Never. NEVER. Please. Arden. No! I won’t hurt her. Stop it. STOP.
Those words did more damage than their hands ever could. They rewrote Creed in real time, took every vow we had ever made to protect one another and twisted it into something unrecognizable. I’d never hurt you—but they did. They had to. I told them to use me but watching it broke me.
Rafe’s was the worst. His silence and the way he fought the guards until he was forced with guns.
Kane raged until his body betrayed him. Thorne broke openly like someone still hoping pain might count as resistance.
Rafe did neither. He stopped looking at me.
He stopped being present in his own body, and I knew he was doing what he did with his own Buyers.
Watching him shut himself down like that because of me, the one person he should’ve never had to disappear like that with, made me vomit all over myself, unable to leave my seat thanks to my chains.
Inmates hollered for the guards, but it was too late.
I had been limp during their forced rape.
Absolutely gone. That had been a miracle for me—not being there for it—but the video showed me everything I had purposefully blacked out.
I retreated again. Just like after Thorne died.
My mind…it continued to rape me too, leaving me numb no matter how much I wanted to escape captivity, resuscitate Halden from the dead, and watch his flesh melt again and again between my fingers.
The guards at the prison had to carry me back to my cell, and for weeks after that, I don’t think I moved other than to idly chew on some bread.
I just kept seeing them, all of them, hurting me—the three people who vowed they never would—and more specifically, I saw Thorne.
I saw him vomit on me in the middle of it, saw him shaking and begging, and I saw Halden’s soldiers dragging him out when it was done.
It was all I could see. Over and over. Every good memory I had of Thorne just left me, just as he had, and the first year in prison remained like that.
Halfway through the second, I was still like that.
I’m ashamed that it took me so long to dig out of that hole.
It happened in little steps. Like a zombie, I traded my body around the prison until someone gave me matches.
It was a consolation prize, really. I missed my lighter, and it was as close as I could get.
But as I came alive again and started leaving my cell when allowed to read or workout or the few privileges I was able to take advantage of, searching for a way to escape and return to destruction, a certain guard took notice of me.
It was my light, most likely. It was slowly flickering back on, and he wanted to put it back out.
He started trapping me in corners of the library or sneaking into my cell, and I fought him.
I sent that fucker to the hospital the first few times.
Then he started drugging me, putting a sedative in my food rations, and there wasn’t much I could do… except what I did best.
I didn’t smile when I watched him burn alive, the flames taking my thin sheets and the cot of my cell too. If anything I was just relentlessly exhausted of having to burn anything at all.
They moved me to solitary after that, and again I had to be fucked to make the best of it, but that time it was at least sort-of by choice.
I let my new guard have his fun and in exchange I got my hands on a cellphone.
It took another year to get that number to the Ravens, but I still remember the sob that left me when that text came through.
An unknown number and one word that meant nothing to me without Creed:
Arden?
Mick?
Yeah, bella, it’s me.
Are they safe?
Mickey didn’t respond at first. It took him long enough that I almost cracked the phone from squeezing it so hard. Then finally:
They’re alive.
It was enough. That would always be enough to me.
I didn’t care what else Rafe and Kane were or had become in those three years it took me to get that phone.
Seeing that text felt the same as seeing their blood trails at the compound.
They were alive, and they were mine, and I would not let the world take them as it had taken Thorne.
I typed quickly.
Give me something. Anything I can use.
Well…
The first text came in. Then a few moments later.
How does billions sound?
Billions. Money. My money. I was…a widow.
A loaded widow. It was the first time it occurred to me that I had the same power of S.I.N.
, of the government, and it was one text away.
Dollars always spoke louder than my screams as both Doll and Creed, and I wept then knowing that even dead, Alex had once again saved Creed.
I typed, my eyes blurring.
Great, Mick. It sounds really fucking great.
We’ve already started bribing those working on your case.
And?
And we need more time.
My hands shook.
Didn’t they see the footage? It’s been three years, Mick, and all I’ve gotten is an FBI profiler asking if I’m clinically insane.
I bet that file calls you a pyro too.
Mick!
But I smiled a little. I missed him. There'd been a very brief period in the beginning where Creed was allowed limited visitation.
The public had helped with that. The judge presiding over the verdict had sympathy.
Not a lot of it, but enough to get us one visit a year.
It didn't end up mattering. The moment I lit that guard on fire, I was forced to revoke all visitation rights.
Before then, I'd gotten to see Mickey only once.
He'd been quiet, unable to give me much then either.
He told me the Ravens were trying, but I could tell he was still so trapped in his grief over Alex that he was only barely functioning.
I wasn't any better myself. The five minutes we had together were just fucking depressing.
Sorry, bella. The public is with you. People are sympathetic. But you were more than a victim in those videos. You all killed people. Multiple times. Bad people or not…it’s murder.
Hang in there. We’re doing everything we can. I promise.
“Time’s up,” a gruff voice demanded.
I turned a glare toward the devil guarding my solitary confinement, quickly deleted all our texts, and slapped the phone into his palm. “I want a lighter.”
A sharp laugh escaped him. “You must think I’m an idiot. I know what you did to your last guard.”
I stood. I was shorter than him, but he still took a step back, and I grinned. “I’m curious. Do they pay you well, officer?”
Time, the son of a bitch. Everything took time.
Mick bribing officials between one chain of command and the next and…
the bomb. Yes, another bomb. I realize my track record isn’t looking great, but how else was I meant to get out of there?
Mick wired a grand to my guard in solitary each month and in exchange I occasionally got whatever piece I needed to slowly build it.
That day at the precinct, when the world was finally watching, I’d wanted nothing more than to be fully explosive, and I intended to be, but prison had proven to be a harder thing to escape from than I thought.
Every second that passed in that cell, I knew that Rafe and Kane were changing, becoming monsters again.
I knew because in many ways I was. All that work I did with the Ravens to be the free, bright Arden again, it was null and void.
I grieved Alex every day, thanking him under my breath as I hugged myself in my cell.
Then in the mornings, I normally cursed him.
It was a brutal back and forth of loving him for giving me that tiny fragment of peace and hating him for letting me have a taste of what would never be mine again.
Grieving Thorne was even harder. His ghost hung in my cell like an impenetrable cloud of smoke, every breath I took dragging him into my lungs.
I tried to expel him with heavy exhales and screams, but he sank into me, captured me.
I became convinced that my life had become nothing more than a series of failures and hauntings, my nightmares filled with death.
I was building a bomb to break out of prison and go kill Viktor Shaw.
I knew that I would end up right back where I was, likely with an even worse sentence, but I just stopped caring.
Ironically, there’s freedom in letting the idea of freedom go, and it made breathing a little easier when I did.
I didn’t let myself reminisce on trying on clothes with the Ravens or riding super bikes with Creed.
I just focused on my need to kill, and it grew with every year that passed.
Eight. Fucking. Years.