Page 103

The plastic bites into the scars on my wrists. It bit me in that same spot every day for most of a year, first in the Thornton barn and then down here.

My stomach rolls. For a moment the plywood floor of that barn is under my knees, and my wrists are tied in front of me. The lamp on the cigar room table brings me back.

Dutch turns me around by the shoulder to face him. He puts his face close to mine, and his breath stinks of tobacco.

"His name was Royce," he says.

"I know what his name was."

"He was my baby brother."

"He wasn't a baby when he dragged me up and down that hall."

Dutch's fist comes up from his hip and catches me on the left cheekbone.

The room flashes white. My knees hit the stone floor, and I land on my side with my hands tied behind me. My cheek goes hot and numb at the same time, and blood fills my mouth.

The floor is cold under my face. I know this floor.

My eyes go wide and fix on nothing. The sounds in the room start to fade. On this floor, that was how it always started, right before I went blank and quit feeling anything.

'Delilah. Eyes on me.'

It's Knox's voice in my head, low and even. It's the order he gave me on his back porch the night I couldn't breathe, and he didn't let up until I obeyed it.

'Where are you?'

He asked me that with his hands pinning my arms to his bed, and he waited for my answer before he did anything else.

I make my eyes move. A brown button from my shirt lies on the stone in front of my face, and I put my eyes on it and keep them there.

Audrey's tracker is still sewn into the heel of my left sneaker. Dutch didn't find it.

I'm on the floor of Whitlock's cigar room with my hands tied and my mouth full of blood, and I'm not going blank this time.

'Breathe when I tell you.'

I drag in air through my nose. It catches when pain shoots through my cheekbone, and I pull it the rest of the way down. I let it out slowly, and I can hear the room again.

Dutch hauls me up by my bound arms, and both shoulders burn.

"You go last," Dutch says, and wipes his knuckles on his jeans. "Once the others are loaded, me and you are going to have a talk in the cell where you killed my brother."

He marches me by my torn shirt back along the hall toward the stairs. Jenna watches Dutch's hands as we pass. Marisol doesn't lift her head. Kaylee presses her face to her bars.

He takes me to the cell nearest the stairs. The drain grate at the back still sits crooked. There's a plastic water jug on the floor.

The spot by the side wall where Royce died has been scrubbed pale, but newer bloodstains have dried on the concrete by the drain. That has to be Hector's blood.

Dutch shoves me inside, and I go down on one hip. He locks the barred door and pockets the key.

"I'll be back once the others are loaded," he says, and coughs out a laugh. "Don't go anywhere." He walks back along the hall toward the tunnel.

I get my feet under me and stand with my back to the wall, where the poured concrete stops at my waist and the raw limestone begins. The steel rods sticking out of the unfinished rock dig into my bound hands. I bent one of them loose a few weeks ago and killed a man with it.

The back of my right thigh still stings where Knox buckled his belt tight around my leg last night and left red marks. I said yes to it. None of the other marks on me were my choice.

I drop to my hip and scoot across the floor until I reach the door. I press my good cheek to the bars and pitch my voice down the hall, to the cells beside mine.