Chapter3

The corridor lights were cold and pale. I was on my hands and knees, my stomach heaving.

The nausea hadn't passed. Cold sweat ran into my eyes, burning and blurring.

"Stop playing dead. Get up."

A boot connected with my ribs. The guard's impatience yanked me back to the surface. Marcus's face from the visiting room—that performance of composure and contempt—blurred with the memory of that bloody night three months ago.

"Let go!" My voice came out high and jagged. "I need to see a doctor!"

The noise wore the guard down. He made an irritated gesture. "Fine, fine. Take her to the infirmary. I don't want to hear this racket."

Two guards half-carried me into the small room that smelled entirely of antiseptic.

A female doctor sat behind a desk, face drawn with exhaustion, not looking up. "What is it?"

"She says she's dying," the guard on my left said with a smirk.

I fixed my eyes on the doctor and pressed my hand flat over my stomach. "I'm pregnant."

The doctor looked up at last, the expression of someone regarding a person who has said something absurd. She waved a hand. "Come lie down."

Cold instruments against cold skin. I shivered through it.

A few minutes later the doctor snapped off her gloves and delivered her verdict to the wall.

"Congratulations. You're pregnant. Though I wouldn't count on keeping it in a place like this."

My heartbeat stuttered.

Pregnant.

I was actually pregnant.

Marcus's child.

I laid my hand slowly over my stomach. Nothing moved. No sign of anything. And yet I could feel it—something taking root, something beginning.

Fear rose in me like a tide.

And then, somewhere in the deepest part of that fear, a small light came on.

This was the only blood I had in this world. Proof that I existed. The reason I could not die.

I had to survive.

For this child, and for myself.

The days that followed were indistinguishable from hell.

The women who ran the block decided I was easy prey. They made it a daily project. My food was taken. My bunk was soaked with filth. I had nowhere to go but the corner, where I endured the pain in my body and the relentless misery of morning sickness.

I never made a sound.

I was waiting. Waiting for the right moment.

The storm came on a night without warning.

The power went out. Alarms screamed. Inmates seized the chaos and turned the whole block into a riot.

I stayed in my corner, one hand wrapped around the shard of glass I'd kept hidden in my shoe sole.

Then the moment arrived.

A guard came for me, mouth full of obscenities. I came up off the floor fast, slipped the grab, and drew the glass across his throat in one clean motion.

Warm blood hit my face.

His eyes went wide. His hands came up and found nothing to hold. He made a sound deep in his throat and went down.

I stepped over him, folded into the stream of running bodies, and moved through the smoke and firelight toward the iron door that led outside.

Behind me: screaming, gunshots, the crackle of fire.

I didn't look back.

When I cleared the prison walls, I saw the river—turbulent and brown, churning toward something I couldn't see yet.

I jumped.

The cold swallowed me instantly. I clawed through the current, lungs burning, arms failing, but I kept my body curved around my stomach.

Marcus, I said inside the roar of the water. Everything you took from me, I'm coming to take back.

Blood for blood.

Wait for me.