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My jailer smirked when Damien said that, and it sent a shiver down my spine. That means that they have something really bad planned.

I don’t know what my husband and his brothers do to the people they put in their cells. I don’t want to know.

But those guys never come out alive—I’m privy to that much.

I take a deep, silent breath and picture Carson in my mind. If I think about Charlie, I start to shake and lose it, and I just need to trust that he’s safe at home with his dad and Mildred and he’s not sick. He’s fine.

Charlie is safe.

However, maybe if I think about Carson, if I concentrate on him, on how he sounds when he breathes, and his warm skin, and how much I love him, maybe he’ll be able to feel me somehow.

Is that a bunch of woo-woo shit? Maybe, but frankly, I’ll use anything I can get right now. I don’t have a phone, so this is the only thing I have to work with.

I take another breath and think about his smile and how he doesn’t just give it out to everyone. He’s so stoic most of the time, more so now than he was all those years ago.

Next, I try to picture each of his tattoos.

He has two sunshines. One on his shoulder and a smaller one on his ring finger, instead of a wedding band.

And then it occurs to me that I don’t have a ring.

We never had time to exchange them before. We got married on the same day that he proposed because we were silly and in love and had no reason to wait.

Not to mention, my father would have had none of it if Carson had asked for my hand.

So we didn’t wait around, and that meant that we didn’t have rings. We said we’d look around for the perfect ones, but then I was taken and . . . well.

I’d like a ring. It could just be a gold band for all I care, but it would be nice to wear a piece of jewelry that shows the world that I belong to Carson St. James.

Back to the tattoos.

He has an hourglass on the other arm, and when I asked him what it was for, he changed the subject. There are snakes and roses. Wings on his neck. Barbed wire, of course.

The next time I’m lying naked in bed with him, I’m going to trace every line and ask him to tell me when he got each one and what it means.

I should have done that already.

I should have done a lot of things.

But I’m not going to dwell on that because we’re going to have plenty of time together. He’s probably almost here. The phones and whatever else was broken are fixed, and he’s on his way. I know it.

Please be on your way, babe.

I’m jolted awake with a bucket of ice water being poured over my head, and I come up screaming.

And then I remember where I am.

Despite it being a shitty way to wake up, the cold feels good because it’s still hot as fuck in here.

“If you’re making me sweat to lose some weight, it’s working. Can you just crack a window?”

Damien doesn’t reply. I see that someone wheeled in a tool bench, and I glance longingly at the now-empty bucket.

“I really need to pee.”

“I really don’t give a fuck,” Damien says without looking over at me. “Piss yourself for all I care.”

For some reason, that’s the thing that makes me want to cry. Not getting in a car accident that killed Ricky, a man I liked. Not being kidnapped and slapped around. Not even a night in a hotbox, freaking out about all the things that this asshole might do to me.