Page 14 of Accidentally a Dragon Daddy

My reply was lost in the abrupt convulsing of my stomach and the following vomitus I spit into the stainless steel toilet, whose lip I was currently hanging over. The contents of my breakfast lined the interior.

“No idea,” I muttered to my cellmate, hoping the nausea would pass soon. “Must be something in the damn morning slop that doesn’t agree with me. Two days in a row now of this shit.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t sound convinced.

I glanced up at Shelly, the tiny, rat-faced woman with fading pink hair who’d been in my cell for the past month. She was sitting on the bottom bunk, watching me.

“You think the food’s good?”

“Nah,” she said, curling her legs to her chest so she could rest her head on her knees with hands wrapped around her shins. “I just know you th’only one who pukes it up. Ain’t nobody else sick. Just you. Means something’s wrong.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “If it keeps up, I’ll tell someone. I also threw up from dinner a few days ago.”

Shelly grunted, but before she could reply, a buzzer sounded.

“D Section,” the voice over the speaker said dully. “Outdoor time.”

There was a buzzer, and the cell doors started to open. Shelly was on her feet and gone, slipping through the opening the second she could. Not even a backward glance.

Wiping my mouth with the back of my arm, I struggled to get to my feet. The guards would insist on sending me to medical if they saw me being sick, and that would mean not seeing the sun for at least another day. I needed that outdoor time. It was the only time I felt like myself lately.

Shaking off the last of the fading nausea, I headed for the door, determined to make it outside.

Shoes clicked on the concrete floor, and a tall man appeared to block my path, gray-blue eyes staring down at me, a thin lip pulled back in what I figured had to be a perpetual sneer.

“Not you,” Edward Anderson said. “You’re staying put today.”

Outside my room, two other agents waited on either side of the door in case I thought I could slip past him.

“What the hell do you want?” I snarled at the DHS inspector who’d tossed me into the joint. “Are you here to finally give me my phone call or let me have a lawyer?”

I tried to not think about how worried my family must have been. I’d been in jail for … How long had it been? I didn’t know. The days were a blur. I’d stopped keeping track after a couple of weeks. It just didn’t seem to matter on the inside. But I knew everyone out there would have no idea what had happened to me. They had to be scared sick, thinking the worst.

Anderson, however, didn’t care. He laughed in my face. “You aren’t getting a phone call, traitor.”

“I’m not a fucking traitor. If you were any damn good at your job, you would have realized that by now.”

“Your DNA was found at the crime scene,” Edwards said. “That’s pretty conclusive evidence in my book. Combined with what else we know, it proves you’re a traitor and a murderer.”

I just stared at him. “I haven’t seen you since you tossed me in here,” I growled. “What happened to my rights? Why have you waited a month to come see me?”

Anderson’s pencil-thin eyebrows rose. “A month? Is that all you think it’s been?” he chuckled.

Searching his face, I tried to see if he was lying. Wasn’t that all it had been? I’d made a mental note to start keeping track. “How long?” I whispered.

“Over two months,” he said.

“Lovely,” I said tightly. “Are you just here to gloat, then? To prove you’re superior? If that’s the case, why don’t I get a public trial, like, oh, you know, everyone else?”

Edwards shook his head. “We’re at war, Davis,” he growled. “Martial law has been declared. We don’t have to do anything. We’re fighting for our very survival. Or should I say, we were fighting for our survival.”

It was my turn to lift my eyebrows skyward. “Did we lose?”

“No. A ceasefire has been declared, as a matter of fact.”

“Great. Now you can talk to them, and they can tell you I didn’t do whatever you think I did, and I can go free. Right?” I said, not expecting him to agree.

“No,” he said. “But then again, it doesn’t really matter.”

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