Preview Firefighters of Megève Book 1
Dark
Luke Dark closed his eyes and found himself back in the kitchen of his childhood home.
The floor was a patterned linoleum in shades of red, orange and white. A scuffed wooden table dominated the room, big enough for their family of five and the occasional guest. Sitting at one of the high chairs, his sister, a little girl in pigtails, waited for her milk.
Something he said made her laugh, a beautiful sound.
Outside, the neighbor’s dog barked.
As he poured the milk, he could feel the cold seeping in from the floor, through the soles of his bare feet.
He blinked, and went somewhere else.
This time, snow flew directly into his face, the frigid air making him gasp with every pained breath. It was so cold he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been warm.
Somebody behind him—one of his men—said something that made him smile, even though smiling stretched his lips and the skin around his mouth painfully.
They had many miles to cover and only a few hours of daylight, but they were all together, and as long as they kept moving, Dark knew they would be alright.
He blinked again, and found himself back in the box.
He knew this one was neither dream nor memory, but for a few seconds longer, he could pretend.
In the end, it was the cold that dragged him back to reality. It made sense that all his dreams took place in the cold. It was so cold inside the box that his breath frosted with every exhale.
Dark pulled up his knees against his chest. He wouldn’t complain about the cold. Although the isolation boxes were colder than the cells in the main wing, it was also quieter here, and he’d learned he valued silence more than he valued warmth.
This time around, he hadn’t even tried to get into isolation.
It’d happened naturally, when an inmate who should have known better had come into his cell and tried to steal the single book each man was allowed to keep in their cell.
If anything, Dark thought he’d been remarkably moderate in his response, only breaking the man’s hand and nose.
He didn’t expect anyone would try to steal from him anytime soon.
Dark shook his head, determined to get back to his earlier daydreams, when steps sounded in the hallway outside his cell.
Odd.
Guards walked by once an hour, every hour, but he could have sworn it’d only been a few minutes since the last round.
If there was anything that separated military prisons from their civilian counterparts, it was discipline. Everything happened at the same time every day, allowing everyone—both guards and inmates—the illusion of control.
The cold must be making your mind foggy.
“Get up, Dark.” Dark recognized the voice as belonging to a young, heavy-set guard with a reddish beard. “You have a Christmas visitor. Hands up where I can see them. You know the drill.”
Christmas.
It’s Christmas again.
That meant he’d been here four entire years. Sixteen left until his debt to society was paid.
And then what?
You’ll be fifty-one years old.
Dark shook his head.
He couldn’t— wouldn’t —start pitying himself.
He wasn’t a good man.
He wasn’t looking to redeem himself.
He just needed to keep his head down and—
“Come on, Dark. You might have all day, but I don’t,” the guard said impatiently.
“Who is it?”
“Mr. Smith.”
“I don’t know a Mr. Smith.”
The hole in the door clacked open, letting in more light than Dark had seen in the last few days. He squinted, giving his eyes time to adjust.
The guard gave a long-suffering sigh. “What do you want me to do about that? I’m not your personal assistant. Give me your hands.”
Knowing he wasn’t going to get any more information from the guard, and not really blaming him for his lack of interest in the matter, Dark stuck his hands through, waiting for the cold steel to wrap around them.
And then he was out of the cell, and walking down a long corridor. Prisons were made of long corridors, each one beginning and ending in identical-looking doors, and maybe that’s what made people go crazy when they’d been inside long enough, that feeling of moving without going anywhere.
He followed the two-inch yellow line painted on the floor, careful to stay on the line. Stepping off was a violation of the rules.
One of many rules .
The guard didn’t speak again, but Dark hadn’t expected him to.
Whoever this Mr. Smith was, he clearly held some clout, since one of the first things that happened to inmates in solitary confinement was that their visitor privileges were revoked.
That was no hardship for Dark, since he didn’t get visitors.
His sister had tried to visit when he’d first arrived, but he’d refused to see her.
He didn’t want to give her the idea that this is what she would be doing with her weekends for the next twenty or so years.
The guard led him into a private visiting room—that was interesting, since those were usually reserved for lawyer visits, and Dark was pretty sure his lawyer wouldn’t be coming to see him.
He hadn’t had much use for a lawyer. He’d admitted to his crime and, as a result, his sentencing had been swift.
No sense in wasting time or taxpayer money.
Inside, the walls were painted the same grimy yellow as the rest of the prison’s public areas, a color that attempted to be cheerful but only made the place feel more depressing. The room itself was bare, furnished with nothing but a table and three chairs, two on one side, one on the other.
Three chairs.
That was interesting.
“Your hands,” the guard said.
He clipped the chain between the handcuffs to a metal ring bolted into the tabletop, giving it a sharp tug to make sure it was secure.
Dark sat down on the single chair, facing the two empty chairs, and prepared himself to wait.
That was the other thing one learned to do in prison.
Wait. Wait to be allowed to go somewhere.
Wait to go back to his cell. Waiting, all the time.
He’d thought he’d learned patience in the military, but that was nothing compared to the kind of patience one needed to survive in prison.
He wasn’t kept waiting long, and that was a surprise as well.
He kept his expression neutral as two men in dark suits walked in, closing the door behind them.
The first one to cross the doorway was in his early forties, strong and tanned, with thick black hair and eyes so dark they looked almost black.
The second man, at least a decade older than the first, had mahogany skin and a forehead that was a textbook case for male pattern baldness.
His shoulders were no longer as wide as they must have been in his youth, but he looked like a man who kept in shape.
Regardless of their differences, they moved around each other like men who’d worked together for a long time.
They paused for a moment, as if waiting for Dark to say something. When he didn’t, they moved further inside the room, each taking a seat. Once again, communicating without words.
They’re not lawyers.
The first flames of curiosity flickered inside him, but Dark didn’t move a muscle.
In the last four years, he’d perfected a look of complete indifference—a protection mechanism against anyone who tried to get too close to him, for any reason.
Not that many people wanted to mess with a man his size, even in here.
Most were happy to let him be. But a few had had to be taught to leave him alone.
The two men took their time getting settled on the hard, institutional chairs, until they looked almost comfortable.
And still they looked at him.
Waiting .
Finally, the older, bald man broke the silence.
“We’re going to give you a choice today,” he said, bringing his hands together until the pads of his fingers joined their counterpart.
“I don’t know you,” Dark said. He didn’t mean it in a bad way. Just that it was difficult to have a conversation when he had no idea who these men were.
The older man looked at the younger one—deferred to him, it seemed, although Dark didn’t get the feeling the younger one was the boss.
“Our names don’t matter. What matters is, we can be your ticket out of here,” the younger man said. He had a distinctive, clipped British accent, the kind of voice one didn’t easily forget.
Dark wondered, not for the first time, if this was some kind of joke, or a Pavlovian psych experiment.
Dangle freedom in front of an inmate, see how long it takes him to start salivating.
Of course, that wasn’t going to work with him.
He didn’t deserve a second chance.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“Do we look like we’re the kind of men to waste time with jokes?” British asked.
He looked like the kind of man who’d never even cracked a smile, but Dark understood a rhetorical question when he heard one, so he held his silence.
Finally, the older man gave British a little nod.
“If you want your freedom, you’ll stand up and follow us when we get up to walk out of this room. If you stay sitting down, we’ll understand you’re not interested in our offer.”
Despite himself, Dark’s heart beat hard against his chest.
You could get out of here.
“What do you want from me in exchange?”
British answered first. “Finally, a good question. Unfortunately, not one we can answer right now. So let me ask you a different question instead. Does it matter ?”
It mattered to Dark.
Because, if these men had read his file, they probably thought he was a lost soul—a man without a moral compass.
A man who would be willing to do anything to get out of here.
And maybe they’re not so far off the mark.
Dark didn’t move a single muscle. He still sat the same way, sprawled back in his chair as far as handcuffed hands would let him. But already … already he could feel, he could smell, the possibility of freedom.
Which pissed him off, because he could also feel all his hard work from the last years—all the effort spent accepting this fucking place—unraveling, all in a single instant.
British’s nostrils flared. Like a shark detecting vibrations in the water, he seemed to detect the change in Dark.
“Come with us, Captain Dark, and all questions will be answered.”
There was nothing coincidental about the man’s use of Dark’s military rank. And it fucking hurt to think of everything he’d lost. Of everything he would still lose.
Don’t listen to them.
You don’t deserve your freedom, and you don’t want to know what they want in exchange.
Stay where you are.
He forced his tense muscles to relax. He would remain sitting down, even if it killed him.
Something flashed in British’s eyes, and then they were dark pools again.
“You’re here because you became part of the problem, Dark. We’re giving you the chance to become part of the solution.”
“Come with us,” Bald said, spreading his hands amiably to reinforce his words. “If you don’t like what we have to say, we will bring you right back.”
The emphasis was on the word back .
“All you’ll lose is a bit of time,” British continued, waving an elegant hand, “and it looks to me like time’s the one thing you have plenty of.”