The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(26)

This situation could use about fifteen more of him, she thought.

“How can I help you?” he asked in a calm, level tone.

In contrast to his speech, hers was rushed. Rough.

“I’m looking for my sister. Her name is Janelle. She was falsely accused of murder and got two hundred and fifty years.” By their grandfather, for godsakes. “She’s been down here since nineteen sixty-seven. June second, nineteen sixty-seven. I’ll tell you anything you need to know about her.”

“Everyone’s falsely accused of something in this prison,” Lucan, the one she’d almost turned into a Lynette, muttered.

Kane lowered his eyes for a brief moment. “May I ask, what do you think you will do if you find her?”

“When I find her. And I’m going to get her out.”

“How will you do that?”

“I know how I came in. I’ll backtrack there and take her home.”

“And you think they will not come after you?” He lifted a hand and gestured around. “The guards here have a job and they are accountable for it. The head count must register properly for the work shifts. If it does not, those males are beaten—or worse. They will choose themselves over you and your family, I assure you.”

“I’ll be gone before they know I’m here.”

As the other males looked at each other and shook their heads, Kane said, “Do you live with anyone you care about? Because they’ll slaughter everything around them if they must reclaim a prisoner from hiding, and they will bring the bodies back here to show their duty is done. Life and death is not only for the prisoners herein. It is for everybody the Command administers and all who seek to disorder the order. In this, the guards are no different than we prisoners.”

“My sister is innocent.”

“In your mind, perhaps. But that is not a defense if you help her escape.”

Part of Nyx wanted to argue that her situation was different, that however many people here needed to be imprisoned, Janelle was not one of them. But then she thought about that guard in the crypt. She’d never killed before, yet it was the work of a moment to choose her own survival over a threat to it.

“I’ll take Janelle far away,” she said. “No one will find us.”

Kane reached up and pulled open the front of his loose shirting. Around the base of his throat was an inch-thick band that he had evidently worn for so long, it had discolored and dug into his skin.

“Yes, they will.” He shifted the thing around so that a subtle blinking dot showed. “They will absolutely find you. And her. These track collars are our leashes.”

“I could take it off her—”

“No, you can’t.”

Her male with the brilliant blue eyes spoke up. “They’re explosive collars. If the connection is broken at the back, the charge instantly detonates. There’s no surviving it. They’re also rimmed with steel on the inside so there is no dematerializing.”

Okay, first of all, this male was not “hers,” she reminded herself. And secondly . . .

“So that’s why the cell doors are all open.” She glanced at the three prisoners. “That’s why no one leaves. But don’t the batteries eventually wear out?”

“When the light changes to orange,” Kane said, “you have twenty-four hours to replace them. If the power gets lower than that, it explodes.”

Lucan spoke up. “It’s a hell of an incentive to check in, lemme tell you.”

“That’s how they register the count for the shifts.” The male beside her rubbed his face like his head hurt. “There’s a radio receiver in each one that confirms the location of the band.”

“But this passageway is hidden, right?” she said. “Why don’t they know where you are now?”

Kane closed his shirt collar as if he were hiding nakedness, as if he were ashamed. “It’s not that precise. But the system is more than sufficient when it comes to the boundaries of the prison. If we try to go above-ground, it will notify instantly our location and track us.”

Nyx slowly shook her head. “There has to be a way to beat it. There just has to be.”

“Kane, why don’t you tell the nice female how long you’ve been down here,” the male beside her said.

Kane’s eyes drifted to the fire pit, with its cold ashes and sooted remnants of logs. “What is the precise date.”

When Nyx told him, his shoulders slumped, and there was very little pause on the math. “Two hundred seventy-three years, eleven months, six days.”

Nyx’s breath left her lungs. “I can’t imagine.”

It was a moment before Kane seemed to refocus. “Neither can I. And the point is, there are many people down here trying to figure a way out. Determination and a fresh set of eyes on this problem are not going to change our reality, and I am sorry to have to tell you this. Getting your sister free is impossible.”

That steady stare was full of compassion, and Nyx’s heart answered the call to unburden her struggles. As tears came to her eyes, she hid them by looking at her hands.

“There has to be a way,” she said with a voice that cracked. “There just has to be.”



The female was so strong, the Jackal thought as he watched her fight to maintain composure. And the fact that he was moved by her, that he wanted to reach out and offer her support, was an unfamiliar impulse.