Page 7 of Cast Stones
“What am I, a confessional?” I turn to glare at him again, my dark green eyes narrowing at his tepid gray ones.Dark green, like the churned-up ground after all the battles I’ve fought and survived.
Except withhim.
I never survivedhim.
“What happened to the victim we know about?” I add swiftly.“Him” belongs in a locked box in my mind that never gets opened.
“The priest?” Redwick sucks in a breath through his crooked front teeth. “They slit his throat and ripped his eyes out. Left him in a shallow grave with a number carved into his chest…” He flicks his eyes to the ceiling, as if trying to recall which one.
“Twelve,” I blurt out, filling the stale air with my certainty.
“Close, ten,” he confirms with a narrowed eye. “So youdoknow something about this case?”
“It was a guess,” I mutter.A guess that rose up from the dead, soaked in black and crimson and chanting sin.
My lungs stop working suddenly. I can’t seem to draw breath. I stumble backward in a panic, clawing at my chest.
It hurts.
It burns.
Help me, Luca.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Redwick’s thin lips curl into a sneer as he looks me up and down again. “Careful, Miss Bailey. Your bitch face is in danger of melting.”
That’s when I hear his voice:“The mask is a gift of many, cara mia. It’s your greatest weapon. Never take it off for anyone.”
And never for men like Brian Redwick and Trent Anderson.
“Emotion is just another door, cara mia. Shut it and bolt it.”
“Do you always talk to women like this?” Smoothing down my shirt, I meet his derision head on.
He shrugs. “My jail. My rules.”
“What makes the cops so convinced that Vincent even knows where these other nine bodies are buried?” I say, plastering a smile across my face. “How do you know he isn’t feeding you all a line to buy himself time before he stands trial himself? I know the DA has every intention of seeking the death penalty on his conviction.”
Redwick just shrugs again. The light above us switches to green, and we’re clear to enter a new section of J-Wing. There’s an open door up ahead, flooding darkness into the strip-lit corridor.
Surely, that’s the wrong way around.
“Believe me, Miss Bailey, I share your frustrations.” Redwick runs his hand through his thinning gray hair a couple of times, as if to prove his point. “I want the cops out of here as soon as Vincent sings like a caged bird. There’s nothing I hate more than having a bunch of faceless fucks dictating the rules to me in my own facility.”
“I’ll find out for both of us, then.”
He scowls at my sarcasm, but I’m done with this conversation.
“Be my guest,” I hear him threaten as I brush past. “But watch yourself, queenie. Vincent may not have the most blood on his hands, but he’s one of the most dangerous men in here.”
“And the most mysterious, by all accounts.”
Three guards block the doorway, but I’m not interested in their wall of silence. I want the answer to this riddle—to finally reveal the criminal who has demanded my time in exchange for his blood-soaked confession.
A beat later, my curiosity is the second killer in the room.
It can’t be…
The man sitting behind a metal table with heavy chains around his wrists isn’t Enzo Vincent. I know him by another name. I call him my past. My depravity. He’s as familiar to me as my bleeding heart.
