“I don’t know,” I snap, panic bleeding through my control despite my best efforts. “But I’m about to.”
We cut through two corridors and down into holding without slowing. The farther we go, the quieter it gets. No guards at the intersection. No voices from the observation room. No movement on the monitors. Just fluorescent hum and the sound of my own breathing starting to go thin.
The doors slide open.
And my stomach drops straight through the floor.
The holding cells are empty.
No guards.
No noise.
No movement.
Just cold concrete and steel bars and fluorescent lights humming overhead. The main cell door hangs slightly ajar. One of the cameras is dark. Another blinks on a loop that shouldn’t be looping.
Inside, the room is bare.
No cot. No restraints.
No prisoner.
Just a dark floor and faint stains that shouldn’t be there.
Stains that my brain doesn’t want to name.
My breath catches in my throat as I stop so suddenly Delilah almost runs into me.
“What the fuck,” I whisper.
It doesn’t feel real.
It can’t be real.
Delilah steps up beside me, her face draining of color as she takes it in.
“He’s… gone?” she asks quietly.
“Yes,” I answer, my voice hollow.
Gone.
Not escaped. Not transferred. Not relocated.
Gone.
My fists clench again, nails biting into my palms. This wasn’t protocol. This wasn’t procedure. This wasn’t an accident. This was someone deciding there are some monsters you don’t keep alive long enough for paperwork.
And King’s calm suddenly makes horrifying sense.
He knows exactly what happened and he’s made peace with it.
That realization is worse than any explosion. Because now I have to ask myself the question I’ve been sidestepping for years: not whether he was capable of it, but whether part of me expected it. Whether part of me is furious because justice died in a cell, or because I didn’t get to decide what shape it took.
Something is very, very wrong.
Whatever rules we were still pretending to follow?
