She shakes her head, sitting up and leaning against the wall, her elbows braced against her bloodied knees as she stares at the dark wall in front of her, refusing to respond, but I don’t blame her. Hearing someone talk so casually about your impending murder isn’t exactly riveting conversation.
The minutes tick by, and the longer the silence grows between us, the heavier it seems to get. “I’m fucking sick of this shit, Menace. It’s just you and me now. Start talking.”
Aria scoffs and glances at me, her brows pinched in the center. “You realize you’ve got the wrong girl, right?” she says, looking up at me with a heaviness in her broken stare. “I don’t know what to tell you, Stone, but you’ve got your wires crossed somewhere. Whatever you think is going on here is some kind of messed-up coincidence, and I don’t want anything to do with it. I’ve never met you before. Never seen or spoken to you before today. The first time I saw you was seven years ago, along with the rest of the world, on a shitty TV screen. I just . . . I can’t work out what the fuck I have apparently done to you that is so fucking offensive that it’s going to cost me my life.”
“Stop with the bullshit, Aria. Why are you really here?”
“Holy fucking shit.” She drags her hands down her face, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes. “I don’t know what more I can say. My name is Aria Ashford. I’m twenty-four years old. I live in a shitty apartment complex, with an even shittier AC. I’ve been working at Pulse Media for four years, and I hate most of my colleagues. But despite the attitude that I use as a shield, I like to think that I’m actually a really nice person. I feed my neighbor’s cat when she goes on vacation.”
“Why the fuck are you telling me this?”
“So you can finally open your eyes and realize that I’m not who you think I am,” she pleads, but there’s no mistake here. I know this woman better than I know myself. I know the smell of her skin. I know the sound of her laugh. I know the way her feet sound as she’s running across the rain-soaked pavement. Every scar on her body. Every broken heart. I was there for it all. And the fact that she has the nerve to sit here beside me and pretend that she’s not the woman I know her to be isn’t just a fucking insult, it’s a goddamn slap to the face.
“I—”
A branch snaps under the weight of somebody’s foot on the opposite side of the wall, and I spring forward, my handclamping over Aria’s mouth as she goes to continue with her bullshit alias. “Don’t make a fucking sound,” I warn her, my tone a low warning.
Her eyes are wide as I feel her breath against my hand, and as she holds my stare and nods, I watch a single tear roll down her delicate cheek before crashing against my fingers.
Trusting her to keep her mouth shut, I slowly release my hand from over her mouth, and she silently leans back against the wall, turning to face away from me as though just the sight of me beside her is shattering her heart into a million fractured pieces. Wouldn’t be the first time. I didn’t like making a habit of it then, and it still feels wrong even all these years later. The only difference is that she no longer deserves my sympathy.
As the minutes drag on, I intently listen to every noise around us—the raging alarm, the inmates, the guards, the heavy clanging of the doors echoing through the prison.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Aria asks after the silence has dragged on too long.
I nod. “I’ve been tracking the guards’ movements for years,” I finally tell her. “There are blind spots in their surveillance and timing. At exactly four past eleven tonight, there will be a minute-and-a-half window where we will be able to make a break for it. We’ll have to cut across the yard, climb over two separate barbed-wire fences, and then through a clearing before finding cover in the woods.”
She gapes at me. “There’s no fucking way. You couldn’t do that alone in that little time, let alone dragging me along with you. That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s possible. I’ve been training for it.”
“Yeah, possible for you, maybe. Me? No chance in hell.”
“When failing means having a sniper put a bullet through the back of your head, you’ll find a way to get your ass over those fucking fences and into the woods.”
She scoffs. “What does it matter anyway? I might as well just let the snipers take me out. It beats going through all this bullshit only to have you slice me up into tiny little pieces after torturing me for hours on end. Maybe the snipers won’t take a kill shot and get me in the leg instead. At least that way I can sue and make bank. Not to mention the workers’ compensation claim I can make against Pulse Media would set me up for life. All I have to do is make it out of here alive, and I’m good. Your lawyer reached out to me, so I think I could take him down, too. Either way, it’s in my best interest to live through this.”
I shake my head. “Since when do you care about the money?”
“I don’t. But rolling in cash seems like a better option than rolling in a goddamn grave,” she tells me. “Besides, you know your plan sucks, right? I studied the blueprints of this prison all week, preparing for this waste-of-time interview, and there are so many better options. Ones that even include not having to wait around until the middle of the night to get going. You could have already been in those fucking woods if you just told me your stupid plan long before you had me crawling through the ceiling.”
This fucking woman. I swear, my patience is quickly wearing thin.
My hands ball into fists, and I try to calm down, having way too many hours ahead of myself stuck in this crawlspace with her. “I’ve been working on this plan for two years. I have it down to the fucking second. I know what I’m doing.”
“Then by all means, risk getting your head blown off by the snipers. Doesn’t mean anything to me. I’ll still end up with a good story to write,” she muses. “Though you realize it’s only two in the afternoon, right? What am I supposed to do about bathroom breaks? Also, getting kinda hangry. Have you got any snackeroos in those pockets of yours?”
Fuck. It’s only two in the afternoon. Waiting here until eleven is going to kill me, especially when she’s running her damn mouth about bathroom breaks and fucking snackeroos. That much time with her under my skin will no doubt break me.
“Nine fucking hours,” I muse.
“Mm-hmm. What are the chances the guards gain control of C-block before then and realize you’re missing? There’s no chance of escape then. You’ll be screwed, not to mention, you’ll go down for the twenty-plus murders you committed today.”
I drag my hands down my face. There’s nothing I hate more than being proven wrong, especially by Aria fucking Ashford, not that Aria is even her real name, but hell, if that’s what she wants to go by now to put distance between us, then so be it. I’ll play along. But for the record, I’ve only killed about seventeen men today. Give or take, but definitely not more than twenty.
The point is, she’s right. With modern technology and a heavy SWAT team, it won’t be long before the canteen is hit with gas bombs or something, and the guards will reclaim control of the prison. When they do, my ass will be the first they notice missing. And considering Aria’s body isn’t among the conference-room wreckage, they’ll put the pieces together pretty quickly and send out a search party. My face will be splashed across the front of every news outlet with the word WARNING in capital letters. I won’t stand a fucking chance to put distance between me and the prison before someone spots me.
If today were any other day, my plan would have gone off without a hitch, but it’s not, and if I don’t find another way, then I might as well let her go and head back to my cell. All of this would have been for nothing.
