You’re crying. Trembling. Eyes on the road, officer. You're safe as long as you keep driving. Until we get there, I’ll give you the last of it. All of us corpses—we just need you listening today, okay? After that, do with us what you will, and if it’s a burial, I ask that you cremate us. Ashes on the wind. Little particles drifting and flying andbeing. It sounds nice. Doesn’t it?
?Arden?
WOMEN’S HIGH-SECURITY PRISON
When the footage dropped, it was one week after our intake. I was huddled in the corner of the common room, shackled to a plastic chair with chain linking my ankles, watching myself be raped on a television barely bigger than my head. I didn’t recognize her at first. The girl in the video.Me. The screams were the kind that still believed someone might listen. Around me, the room went quiet, the eyes of other inmates drifting back to where I sat as Buyers tore into an eighteen-year-old Doll, throwing me, pinning me, bleeding me, fucking me, breaking me. I watched her plead and sob, and then, when the fire finally took evil, when their screams filled Room 82 instead of mine, I smiled a little at the TV…before my entire body went rigid and helpless.
Because it wasn’t just me on that thumb drive; it wasthem. My everything. Creed. All of us dying slow, agonizing deaths as my family was forced to rape me. It was an event that I’d blocked out efficiently and precisely, but there it was—the loves of my lifepinned down on top of me, one at a time, sobbing, apologizing. Thorne was first:I’m s-sorryandPlease forgive meandI love you, little flame. I love you so much.All of them were injected with drugs to make them hard, Kane trying to rip his own dick off before the guards stopped him, cuffed his hands, and forced him inside me as he screamed.I’d never hurt you. I’dneverhurt you. I’d never h-hurt you, sweetheart. Never. NEVER. Please. Arden. No! I won’t hurt her. Stop it. STOP.
Those words did more damage than their hands ever could. They rewrote Creed in real time, took every vow we had ever made to protect one another and twisted it into something unrecognizable.I’d never hurt you—but they did. They had to. I told them to use me but watching it broke me.
Rafe’s was the worst. His silence and the way he fought the guards until he was forced with guns. Kane raged until his body betrayed him. Thorne broke openly like someone still hoping pain might count as resistance. Rafe did neither. He stopped looking at me. He stopped being present in his own body, and Iknewhe was doing what he did with his own Buyers. Watching him shut himself down like that because of me, the one person he should’veneverhad to disappear like that with, made me vomit all over myself, unable to leave my seat thanks to my chains. Inmates hollered for the guards, but it was too late.
I had been limp during their forced rape. Absolutely gone. That had been a miracle for me—not being there for it—but the video showed me everything I had purposefully blacked out. I retreated again. Just like after Thorne died. My mind…it continued to rape me too, leaving me numb no matter how much I wanted to escape captivity, resuscitate Halden from the dead, and watch his flesh melt again and again between my fingers. The guards at the prison had to carry me back to my cell, and for weeks after that, I don’t think I moved other than to idly chew on some bread. I just kept seeing them, all of them, hurtingme—the three people who vowed they never would—and more specifically, I saw Thorne. I saw him vomit on me in the middle of it, saw him shaking and begging, and I saw Halden’s soldiers dragging him out when it was done. It was all I could see. Over and over. Every good memory I had of Thorne just left me, just as he had, and the first year in prison remained like that. Halfway through the second, I was still like that. I’m ashamed that it took me so long to dig out of that hole.
It happened in little steps. Like a zombie, I traded my body around the prison until someone gave me matches. It was a consolation prize, really. I missed my lighter, and it was as close as I could get. But as I came alive again and started leaving my cell when allowed to read or workout or the few privileges I was able to take advantage of, searching for a way to escape and return to destruction, a certain guard took notice of me. It was my light, most likely. It was slowly flickering back on, and he wanted to put it back out. He started trapping me in corners of the library or sneaking into my cell, and I fought him. I sent that fucker to the hospital the first few times. Then he started drugging me, putting a sedative in my food rations, and there wasn’t much I could do…except what I did best.
I didn’t smile when I watched him burn alive, the flames taking my thin sheets and the cot of my cell too. If anything I was just relentlessly exhausted of having to burn anything at all.
They moved me to solitary after that, and again I had to be fucked to make the best of it, but that time it was at least sort-of by choice. I let my new guard have his fun and in exchange I got my hands on a cellphone. It took another year to get that number to the Ravens, but I still remember the sob that left me when that text came through. An unknown number and one word that meant nothing to me without Creed:
Arden?
Mick?
Yeah, bella, it’s me.
Are they safe?
Mickey didn’t respond at first. It took him long enough that I almost cracked the phone from squeezing it so hard. Then finally:
They’re alive.
It was enough. That wouldalwaysbe enough to me. I didn’t care what else Rafe and Kane were or had become in those three years it took me to get that phone. Seeing that text felt the same as seeing their blood trails at the compound. They were alive, and they weremine, and I wouldnotlet the world take them as it had taken Thorne.
I typed quickly.
Give me something. Anything I can use.
Well…
The first text came in. Then a few moments later.
How does billions sound?
Billions. Money.Mymoney. I was…a widow. Aloadedwidow. It was the first time it occurred to me that I had the same power of S.I.N., of the government, and it was one text away. Dollars always spoke louder than my screams as both Doll and Creed, and I wept then knowing that even dead, Alex had once again saved Creed.
I typed, my eyes blurring.
Great, Mick. It sounds really fucking great.
We’ve already started bribing those working on your case.
And?
And we need more time.
My hands shook.
