The Paper Swan(75)

“I love him, Dad,” I said.

“You think you love him, but he’s a monster. Take my hand, Skye, and let the men look after it.”

Damian’s whole face changed with those three words.

Look after it, and MaMaLu had been taken away from him.

Look after it, and they would take me away, too.

No. This time Warren Sedgewick was not going to have his way. This time Damian was going to look after it. I could see it in the way his whole body tensed, the way it had before he chopped my finger off, the way it had when he thought I was going to jump off the boat.

Damian was blind to everything except the raw pain in his heart. The wound I had tried to heal with love was ripped open. Vengeance oozed from it, infecting everything sweet and kind and soft, obliterating the tender shoots that were starting to bud through. There was no more Skye, just darkness and dust and a plague of bitter, black memories.

Damian squeezed the trigger.

I moved at the same time.

You can either choose love or you can choose hate, because where one lives, the other will die.

“Skye!” I heard both men calling as the bullet ripped through me.

The room stopped tilting. Everything went still. No more fighting. No more tug of war. I held my breath.

Sweet, sweet silence.

Then I exhaled and lurched forward, as the blood spread like a red blot across my t-shirt.





IT WAS A HIGH PROFILE case. People go missing every day, but a kidnapped heiress who beats the odds and gets shot during a rescue mission has everyone buzzing. Damian could have told his side of the story. Reporters were hungry for it, but he was tight lipped through the proceedings. He had done what he had done and nothing was going to change it. It was almost a relief when the judge handed down his sentence, and the media got their pound of flesh.

On his first day in prison, Damian knew that he could walk in like a lamb or he could take the bull by the horns. Whatever he chose would set the tone for the rest of his incarceration. He kept his head down for most of the day, watching and learning. Survival was the name of the game, and his time in Caboras had served him well.

Most prisoners segregated themselves according to racial allegiance. There was power in numbers. If you were in a gang, you were protected. People thought twice about getting in your face, so you picked a camp and stuck with it. Damian made out three distinct groups in the yard: BMW. Black, Mexican, and White. There was always someone who didn’t fit, and some of them splintered into smaller factions. There were those who ran with God, mostly Christians and Muslims, those who were homosexuals and transgenders, and those who stood out as loners: lifers, career criminals, and roughened, toughened old men. No matter what group they belonged to, they were all men who had committed major felonies—murder, robbery, kidnapping, treason. There was another section, separate and removed, for prisoners who couldn’t be put in with the general population: the Sensitive Needs Yard. This was where they fenced off high notoriety inmates (ex-cops, celebrities, serial killers), sex offenders (rapists and pedophiles), and men with mental health issues.

The Robert Dailey Correctional Facility, east of San Diego, was not a place that housed white-collar criminals or those who committed minor misdemeanors. It was a desolate prison outpost, ringed by curtains of wire and thickets of dusty wildflowers, a stone’s throw from the colonias and maquilidoras of Tijuana. It was the place Damian had been sent to, to serve out his sentence.

When the bell for supper rang at 4 pm, Damian shuffled out in a single line with the other inmates in his housing unit. The chow hall was a cavernous rectangular room with a dozen stainless steel tables, each of which sat eight people. On both sides of the hall were armed guards, monitoring the prisoners from behind glass cubicles. A row of six convict kitchen workers moved trays along, assembly style, behind a cafeteria-like glass barrier. That day, they were serving chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes, gravy, a thin slice of cornbread, and Jell-O.

Damian got his tray, filled his state-issued plastic mug with cold water, and joined the gay prisoners. Monique, the six-foot-four burly, black inmate, raised a razor thin eyebrow when Damian took the seat across from him. For a moment, Damian wavered, wondering if Monique was his best option to establish a reputation. Monique was a lifer and the shot caller for the group, an ex-boxer with biceps as thick and corded as tree trunks. The correctional officers required a representative from every group. If there was trouble between different affiliations, the guards locked everyone down and got the shot callers together to resolve the situation. This allowed the prisoners to police themselves, and the system ran better for everyone. In return, the shot callers won favors or ‘juice cards’ from the guards. Monique obviously held a lot of those, from his purple lipstick to his black nail polish, to the New Orleans style beads around his neck. He was the biggest, most powerful, most flamboyant character in the room. So, when Damian reached across the table, speared Monique’s chicken patty and ripped off a big bite, everything came to a faltering halt. The kitchen staff stopped mid-ladle, gravy dripping from their spoons. Chatter ceased. All eyes focused on Monique and Damian.