Page 26 of Say You're Mine

I will crawl on my belly through perdition's flames, will pay any price, bear any scar.

For her.

For the promise of absolution, of grace, that flows through her veins and beats in her blessed womb.

I come back to myself in jagged pieces, a shattered mosaic resolving into a cohesive whole. Pain is the first thing to filter through the haze, a deep, grinding ache that settles into my bones like a cancer. Next, the stench of terror-sweat and despair, the sour reek of my own weakness.

But then, with a clarity sharp as winter starlight...

The rasp of paper on concrete. A whisper of salvation.

My eyes snap open, my battered body jackknifing upright on the thin, stained mattress. For a heartbeat, I'm suspended between nightmare and dream, phantom echoes of voltage crackling across my skin, the taste of blood sharp on my tongue. But then reality filters through the gauze of confusion, cold and vital as a slap.

There's something in my cell. A scrap of incongruity amid the piss-stained squalor and despair. I squint, my eyes gritty and raw, hardly daring to believe...

But no, it's there.

A slip of paper, crisp and white and shining like a fucking beacon in the dimness. My heart slams against my ribs, a wild, careening rhythm of desperate hope and wary dread.

Trap, my battered psyche whispers, a slither of self-preservation. Another of their games, their tests. Bait for the beast, to see how far they've brought you to heel.

But another part of me, the part that remembers the feel of Cara in my arms, the quicksilver dart of my child 'neath her flesh...that part knows, with a certainty lodged deep as marrow in bone:

This is different. This is deliverance.

I lurch to my feet, my muscles screaming a symphony of protest. Each step is agony, a trial of will over sinew, but I grit my teeth and soldier on. Failure is not an option, not now. Not with the taste of freedom, of her, so close I can almost roll it on my tongue.

I reach the note, my hands shaking so hard I nearly fumble it. The paper is heavy, expensive. A frisson of confusion, of unease, trips down my spine. But then I unfold it, and the world tilts, realigns on its axis with a nearly audible click.

Two words, bold and black as a death-head grin:

"Cell phone."

For a moment, I can only stare. Blink. Breathe through the sudden upwelling of emotion clogging my throat, my chest. Contact with the outside. A chance, however slim, to reach her. To hear her voice, the lilt and sway of it, warm as honey and twice as sweet.

But how?

And more importantly...who?

I flip the paper over, my eyes snagging on the crimson crest embossed in the corner. Familiar, hauntingly so, a throwback to a past I've tried so hard to outrun.

The Corleone sigil.

Questions buzz in my brain like hornets, stinging and insistent. Why now? What could they possibly want with me, caged and clipped and left to rot?

But in the end, it doesn't matter. None of it matters, save the gossamer thread of possibility clasped tight in my aching fist. They've thrown me a lifeline, and I mean to grab hold with both fucking hands.

They think they've broken me; think they've snuffed out the last embers of defiance. But they're wrong.

Dead wrong.

If they say I'm insane, I'll show them the true face of madness.

I'll rain hellfire down upon them until the very foundations of this twisted place crack and crumble. I'll reduce their vaunted power to ashes and dust, and from those ashes, I will rise.

Unbroken.

Unbowed.

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