Page 2 of So Silent

Remember, I will break you.

She would have believed it was just a delusion caused by his inability to accept defeat, but he hadn’t been defeated. He had been ready to kill her and Turk. The police wouldn’t have even come close to stopping him.

But he had left them alive. She knew he had done so intentionally. He had left her alive, and he had told her that he would break her.

How? What was he planning? What could he plan? As soon as they were done with their initial interrogation, he was going to be moved to Florence and held there in solitary confinement under twenty-four-hour armed guard until his trial. When he was moved, it would be under so many layers of security the Navy SEALs would have a hard time breaking him out.

So what did he mean?

"You don't have to," the detective said. "We can handle everything from here. You might not even need to testify in court. This is an open-and-shut case if I've ever seen one. You can probably submit a written statement and watch them throw the book at him from the comfort of your living room."

It took Faith a moment to remember that he had asked her if she wanted to speak to him. She took a breath and said, “No, that’s all right. I want to talk to him. Alone.”

He frowned. “Alone?”

“Yes, please.”

His frown deepened. “Well, I can have the guards wait outside of the room, but I can’t send them away. The jail’s policy is to keep flight risks like him under guard at all times.”

“That’s fine. I just want to be alone in the room with him.”

He shrugged. “All right. If you ins—” he stiffened and looked at her sideways. “Um… you’re not thinking of… I mean, I would understand if you were, but…”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “No, I’m not planning to take matters into my own hands. I just want to talk to him.”

“Oh. All right. Yeah, sure.”

He picked up his phone and said something to the guards in the room. They opened the door, and Faith walked through to the other side of the two-way mirror.

West maintained his neutral expression until the guards exited behind Faith and she took her seat across from him. Then he smiled. “Hello, Faith.”

“Hello, West.”

West looked behind Faith. “No Turk today? Or did you leave him behind the mirror with our friends?”

“No Turk,” she answered. She had left him with David for the day. She didn’t trust Turk to maintain his cool in West’s presence, and while she meant what she told the detective about not taking matters into her own hands, she didn’t trust herself to stop Turk if he decided to go a different way.

“Pity,” West said. “I like him.”

Her lip curled slightly. “So what’s the plan?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Plan? For me? Well, I’m sure you can get a better answer from the officers, but I believe I’ll be headed to ADX Florence after my initial interrogations. The police will talk to me, then I assume Desrouleaux and Chavez will want another crack at it. Then off to super jail I go.”

Desrouleaux and Chavez were the two FBI agents assigned to West’s case. They had met West at the precinct and spent fourteen hours grilling him to no avail before giving up and letting the police give it a shot. They were now five hours into the police investigation, and West had remained silent up until Faith walked into the room.

“I didn’t mean that. I mean for me. You said you would break me. How do you plan to do that?”

He laughed. “Come on, Faith. I can’t answer that question. If I do that, then you’ll just make sure to stop me, and where’s the fun in that? It’s better if I leave you without knowing, wondering what it is I have in store for you. Then, when you finally discover the answer, it will hurt more knowing that even with me in prison, you couldn’t stop it.”

“You could have killed me,” she said. “Turk too. You had us. You won. Again. So why am I still alive?”

He sighed. “We’ve been through this. I don’t want to kill you. I thought I might have to eventually, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal is to break you. The goal is to destroy you. That was Trammell’s true brilliance.”

He leaned forward as much as his bonds would allow, his eyes shining with excitement as they always did when discussing his mentor. “Anyone can kill people. Hell, children kill people. That’s—if you’ll forgive the pun—child’s play. What Trammell did was strip away everything that made a person human, everything that elevated them above the goats and chickens he slaughtered on his farm.” He leaned back, admiration filling his voice. “So simply too. He just cut people. He maximized pain and minimized damage and utterly broke them.”

Faith was displeased to find that West’s words didn’t bring the revulsion they used to. She had spent so much time around psychotic killers that even hearing such horrible things from the closest person to an archenemy she ever had did little to unsettle her anymore.

“So why didn’t you cut me? You had the chance several times. You could have tied me up and tortured me. Why didn’t you?”

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