Monique blinked. Had this piece of fresh meat, this newcomer, just swiped the food off his plate? Only a fool would disrespect another prisoner so blatantly, and this fool had chosen to tangle withhim?
Damian needed a reaction. Fast. Before the guards got involved. He picked up his mug and splashed icy, cold water in Monique’s face. Monique let the water drip off his nose and down his chin. He wiped his face without breaking eye contact with Damian. And then all hell broke loose.
If you’re going to get in a prison fight, be the first to strike,thought Damian, as he slammed his elbow into Monique’s throat, getting him in the voice box. It took the bigger guy a second to recover. By then, they were surrounded by a circle of convicts, keeping the guards at bay.
Monique lunged across the table, toppling Damian off his chair. The two men crashed to the floor, grappling with each other. Damian took heavy blows to his chin, his jaw, his chest. Each hit felt like he was being pounded by a hammer. Monique powered over him, stomping on his instep to keep him pinned down, so he couldn’t fight his way back on top. He grabbed Damian’s neck, clamping down on his windpipe, choking him with an iron grip, before bashing his head against the floor. All the air in Damian’s lungs left him in a sharpwhoosh. Damian felt like his face was going to explode, like all the blood had collected in his head and Monique was tightening the wrench, cutting it off from the rest of his body. Monique was dodging his punches, punches that were quickly losing force as Damian’s vision started to fade. The inmates looking down on them turned blurry, one blue uniform melding into another. The noise, the chaos, the chants turned distant. Skye’s face floated before him, haunting and frozen, the moment before he’d pulled the trigger, her eyes stricken, the silent ‘no’ she’d mouthed.
What do you do, Damian?He heard her voice in his head.
I fight back and I fight hard.
Damian’s eyes shot open. He grabbed hold of the beads around Monique’s neck and pulled. When Monique’s face was close enough, Damian head-butted his nose. Monique let go of Damian and clutched his nose. Blood spewed over his blue chambray shirt. Damian punched Monique in the jaw and got on top of him. By the time the guards got through, Monique’s face was raw and purple from smeared lipstick and Damian’s blows.
As they dragged Damian and Monique away, the sea of prisoners parted. Both men were unsteady on their feet, bloodied and battered, but one thing was clear: Damian Caballero was not a man anyone wanted to mess with.
Damian was thrown into isolation for instigating a fight. Isolation was the prison’s purest punishment. ‘The Hole’, or Solitary Confinement Unit was nine feet long and seven feet wide, with walls and ceilings of heavy gauge sheet metal. The floor was cold concrete. There was nothing in the cell except a metal bedframe with a thin mattress, crammed up against a toilet and a sink. Damian’s only point of contact with the outside world was the feeding slot. They took away his uniform and gave him a thin t-shirt and boxer shorts. At night, they turned up the air conditioning so he couldn’t sleep.
For ninety minutes a day, Damian was allowed into an exercise pen where he stretched and lunged and squatted, making the most of the extra space. For the remaining twenty-two and a half hours, Damian was left in total silence and darkness. For the first time since he pleaded guilty to the charges brought against him, Damian was alone. The isolation was supposed to break him, but he welcomed it. He had gone far too long without being held accountable for all the men whose blood was still on his hands:
Alfredo Ruben Zamora, the man who had tried to take down El Charro in the cantina.
El Charro.
Countless members of the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas, in the warehouse explosion.
But it was what he had done to Skye that weighed most heavily on Damian’s mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about the last time he had seen her, and even though it hurt like hell, he recalled every last detail.
When Damian walked into the courtroom, Skye was the first person he saw. His eyes automatically went to her because that’s how it was. When they werein the same space, she commanded all of his attention.
She looked different—not the girl who belonged in an ivory tower and not the girl who belonged in his island bed. She didn’t look like Warren’s Skye, or Damian’s Skye, or a torn up, in-between Skye. This Skye belonged to herself. Whatever she’d been through since the island had changed her. Damian felt the retraction, like she had closed herself off, not just to him, but to everything around her. She was sitting in the same room, but in her own zone, breathing her own air.
The bullet had grazed her shoulder and although it had exited without permanent damage, her arm was still in a sling from the injury. Damian could not look at her without thinking of her blood trickling through his fingers the moment he’d caught her. Blood that he had spilled. Warren’s men had apprehended him. They had carried Skye and Victor, who had passed out from blood loss, to the helicopter. Warren had flown to the hospital with them, while Damian was taken—handcuffed and guarded—to the police station. Rafael had kept him updated on Skye’s status and recovery, but he had not seen her since his arrest.
She was blond again. Her sleek, chin length hair was tucked behind one ear. From Damian’s angle, it accentuated her full, pink lips and made him yearn for things he’d lost the rights to when he’d pulled the trigger.
Skye was wedged between her father and Nick Turner, the guy she’d had dinner with on the night Damian had abducted her. Damian hated him for sitting so close to her, for beingableto sit so close to her, his shoulder touching hers. He hated him more for that one single privilege than all the charges Nick had brought against him, because Nick was also the lawyer who was prosecuting Damian.
Although Damian had dual citizenship—Mexican and American—he was tried in San Diego because he had kidnapped Skye on U.S. soil. Except it never got to a trial. Damian pled guilty. He had maimed Victor, kidnapped Skye, held her captive, cut off her finger and finally, shot her. Damian’s lawyer and Nick worked out a plea bargain, with Nick pushing for the harshest sentence.
Nick despised Damian for taking away the girl he had come to adore, and for the things he believed he had done to her. Although Skye refused to see Nick outside of legal proceedings, Nick was convinced it was because of the trauma she had suffered, and that with time, she would give him another chance. He did not believe her when she told him she had fallen in love with Damian. So what if Damian was this Esteban kid she had once known? Skye was not in her right mind and it was up to him and Warren to put Damian behind bars forever. They trumped the kidnapping charge to aggravated kidnapping, given that Damian had caused Skye bodily harm. They wanted to tack on aggravated rape, but Skye insisted that the sex had been consensual, and refused to let them turn it into something ugly.
Of course, Damian knew none of this as he watched Skye between the two men. He saw them as a unit, a trio of joined forces.
Whatever you choose, Damian, know that I will always, always love you,she had said to him.
He wanted to believe that. He wanted to believe that so much, but how could he, knowing that she was withholding the one thing that would have earned him some lenience? The fact that he had let her go. He had set her free, dropped her off and she had come back to him. That was something only the two of them knew. Yes, he had made the wrong choice. He had given in to the darkness when he should have stood by her, but he needed to know that she still cared. He would happily spend the rest of his life locked up in a cage for all the things he had done, but he needed that one fleeting moment of light, so he could go knowing that it had been realfor her.
As Damian stood before the judge, ready to receive his sentence, his eyes fell on Skye. One look, one glance from those haunting gray eyes, and he’d be redeemed.
Say something, I’m giving up on you.
But she kept her head bowed. She had not looked at him the entire time, and she did not look at him then. Skye knew that if she did, if she looked up from her lap, she wouldn’t be able to keep anything from him, and she had held it together for too long to let everything fall apart now. The sooner this case got wrapped up, the better for them all.
She had told her father and Nick that Damian had let her go, that she was the one who had gone back, but they were convinced she had suffered some kind of psychological breakdown. They were prepared to call in a psychiatrist to discredit anything favorable she had to say about Damian, and testify that she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“I can’t understand why you’re defending him, Skye.” Her father had paced the hospital room where she was recovering from the bullet wound. “Look at what he’s done to you. He shot you, Skye. He was going to shootme, but he ended up shootingyou. Is this the kind of guy you want walking free? Someone who is so blinded by revenge that he can’t see straight?”
“You were blind too, Dad, so blind that you couldn’t see what you did to MaMaL—”
