Page 30 of To Catch A Rook

I unlocked the steel door with an eye scan and thumb print while Joey stood guard behind me. I had checked the site cameras before we’d left, and while I was confident Alec didn’t have the brains or the brawn to break out, Joey didn’t wastea second as the door swung open, moving around me to clear the perimeter before I could walk down the lightless hallway.

The building held five cells, each equipped with a shower head and toilet and a twin-sized bedroll in the corner. Painted white walls with a washable reflective coating, and bright LEDs flooded the space with bright light twenty-four-hours a day. Instead of metal bars, each room had a front facing wall of tempered bullet-proof glass, three layers thick.

An automated food dispenser released a protein bar and bottle of water three times a day, and my guests received a single roll of toilet paper expected to last them a week.

The rooms were soundproof, impact-proof, and designed for easy cleanup. A polished palace for torture.

A massive storage basement lay beneath the main level, containing a simple, windowless two-bedroom apartment hidden behind a wall of storage shelves. Until this point, I’d not had need of it, but I had only gotten this far in my activities through thorough preparation and patience.

Brilliant white light seared my eyes when Joey opened the next door. Into the prison wing.

Our body language shifted in tandem—we were now performers; good-cop, bad-cop interrogators from a bad nineties drama. Except my hatred wasn’t acting, and Joey’s thirst for violence wasn’t part of a script.

I stopped in front of the large glass window of Alec’s cell with Joey firmly planted on my right. Alec lay face-down on his bedroll, in an apparent attempt to shield his eyes long enough to fall asleep.

I pressed the blue button adjacent to the food dispenser unit. Shrill screams of a siren blared through the hollow interior of the sound-proofed booth and Alec bolted upright with a muted string of curses.

I killed the siren, then pressed another button. A small glass hatch opened on the wall in front of me.

“Fuck you, you stupid fucking cunt. I was sleeping!” Alec’s voice was gruff from lack of use, but the rough tone couldn’t cover the timbre of visceral hate.

“Fuck you, back,” I returned calmly, used to his raging barks after all this time.

I once gave in to his taunts, releasing the wrath that lived in my veins like an infectious parasite. I pounded my fists into his face and kidneys until he was unconscious. Joey had silently stood guard behind me. Beating him to near death had been cathartic—for a little while—until I realized I would likely slip one day; I would truly snap his spine or burst an organ, and death would release Alec from my torture.

I had sworn he would never get the luxury of leaving this world free from his sins in the nothingness of an afterlife. I then created an environment specifically for him, so that every day he would wish for death, and yet every day, I would not grant it.

I assessed his frail frame and frantic eyes, searching for any signs of his strength returning since my last visit a few months ago. It hadn’t. A year of 800 calories a day had not been kind.

When I had first been introduced to Alec Turner, he was handsome; pale, pearly skin with red lips and dark brown eyes, coal-black hair framed his face in tousled curls. He had been tall and lean, and powerful.

Now he was gaunt; greasy hair lay in matted clumps down his back, and his eyes held a half-crazed glaze from his time in captivity.

“I’m here with a few questions for you.” I folded my arms and leaned forward so my voice carried better into the small space. “Answer well, and I’ll up your food rations. Answer poorly, and I’ll take a meal away. Understood?”

Hetried to spit at the glass in protest, but the puny dribble of spittle didn’t even make it past his chin.

“Fuck you.”

When he loped to the side of his cot, I noticed for the first time his ankle was raw. I would check over the footage when I got home to see what he was up to.

“You said that already,” I replied dryly. “When you were a part of the network”—I steeled myself for the flood of memories sure to come—“who was the person running the girls in this state?”

“I don’t even know where the fuck we are, bitch.” Alec had laid back down, folding his scrawny arms over his eyes to shield them from the light.

When I had finally tracked him down in New York, my teams smuggled him across state lines in a transport truck with an IV drip filled with a sedative strong enough for an elephant. I filled his living hours with light and kept him in the dark on everything else.

“Sequoia. Who was running the delivery service?”

I was kicking myself for not asking this question sooner. I was used to knowing every part of my domain, down to the most minute details, but my concern at the time hadn’t been the West Coast; my focus had been honed in on the entire Eastern Seaboard in my vengeful search for justice.

That had been the birth of my crusade, the death of many perpetrators. Years later, here I stood.

My scouring search had been successful—it brought many to me before I finally found Alec, but my vengeful yearning remained. No amount of wrath-filled punishment on the scourge of our society ever took away the pain.

He remained mute. His sorry attempt at insubordination was a very unwise choice, given his position.

“Do you know why I haven’t killed you, Alec?”

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