“Mitchell Davis, Lucy’s friend?” Carla choked out, and I realized whom she was talking about.
“Maybe. He is my mate. That’s how I ended up here. Alpha Jamie killed my parents and took me,” she said, her lip trembling. She looked around seventeen but was in better shape than the rest of the prisoners. But her question made me look at Aliza, wondering what she did to end up here.
“It’s okay, Taylor. I am sure he is fine,” Aliza tried to comfort her.
“Emily looks like you,” I told Aliza, and she smiled. Her blue eyes filled with tears; she was skin and bones beside her fake boobs that now looked too big for her tiny frame. Her foiled blonde hair sat in the middle of her back, and her mousy brown hair had grown right out.
“How long has he had you in here?” I asked her.
“Since just after Emily’s first birthday. I haven’t seen her since. She probably thinks I abandoned her,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her head on the wall behind her.Has she been here for three years?I gasped in horror that Jamie would do that to his own mate.
“After he found out what I did, he lost it. I was planning on leaving after I sent an anonymous letter to King Ryker about his dealings and the airport.”
“You got the airport shut down?” I asked her. She nodded.
“His Beta caught me packing and told him,” she said.
“I was planning on taking Emily and fleeing the country. He would never allow me to take her. He said I couldn’t leave until I gave him a son, but Emily wasn’t leaving. When he found out what I did, he put me in here.” She chuckled.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“I had myself sterilized. I knew I was a breeding machine to him. After Emily, I refused to have any more. I wanted out, and I knew it would be harder to leave with more than one child, so I went to Avalon City and met a surgeon there, had them take everything out. When I told him this, he threw me in here and said I could rot in hell,” she said, shaking her head.
Chapter sixty-seven
Suddenly,Iheardthevents shake, and everyone started whimpering, trying to get under the thin sheets.
“What is it?” I asked, and Aliza pointed to the vents. A second later, it hit me when I turned to look and sucked in a breath. Wolfsbane was being pumped into the vents. I coughed, covering my mouth, and Aliza offered me a piece of her sheet. I covered my mouth and nose. My eyes burned and watered, and my skin blistered and burned, but it didn’t last long, and the vents stopped shuddering and groaning. It wasn’t enough to kill anyone but enough to keep them weak. We needed to get out of here. I looked at the vents running along the roof, and they were pretty big, big enough to crawl through, but they were also pretty high up the roof.
I waited for my body to stop retching and hacking up on the wolfsbane. My breathing wheezed and burned each breath I took, and I used the wall to push myself upright, staggering as I looked for a join in the vents and at the brackets.
“What are you doing?” Carla asked.
“Do you know where the vents lead?” I asked her, and she shook her head.
“The laundry room in the packhouse. They are set on a timer. Every hour, they open the vents. You can’t use them. Those vents are coated in wolfsbane. You would die trying to get out of them,” Aliza said, and I shook my head.
“I need to get in those vents to get help,” I told her.
“Did you not hear what I said? They are coated in wolfsbane, and if the vents turn on while you are in there—” She didn’t finish and started coughing instead.
“It may kill you, Aliza, but I am not just a werewolf. I am a mutation. Wolfsbane affects me, but it would take a lot to kill me,” I told her while looking around the cell. The cells were bare except for the steel sinks and toilets in each one. Looking around the other cells, I noticed a piece of bent rebar sticking out of the wall in Carla’s cell.
“Carla, can you break that bar off?”
She shook her head. “I tried it won’t budge,” she said, and I nodded, looking back at the ceiling.
The cells were barred but painted red with wolfsbane. I gritted my teeth before walking to the corner of the cell where our cell met the other. I tugged off my jeans, leaving me in only my pink panties. If I could just get my jeans around the sprinkler system, it might hold my weight to get close enough to the vent. I could break the bracket where they joined, but would the vent hold my weight?
Gripping the bars, I lifted my leg onto the bar that ran crossways before pulling myself up. I tried to reach the sprinkler system, but it was too high, and my thighs were too wide to fit through the bars to climb them.
“Pass my jeans,” I told Aliza. She staggered over, coughing, and handed them to me. Holding one leg, I tried to toss them over the sprinkler system. It took multiple attempts trying to hang onto the bar with one hand while tossing the denim jeans over it. As the gap was so small, they would fall each time I hit the roof, missing the bar, but eventually, I managed it.
I was eating up the hour already, and I didn’t want to be stuck in those vents when the timer went off. I carefully jiggled my jeans, so the other leg would fall through the other side. Once it was through enough to grab, I looped my arm through the bars while I reached out for the other before grabbing both in one hand. I tugged on the jeans, and they held; the bolts holding the sprinkler system didn’t budge. I tested my weight on it.
“Now what?” Carla asked, looking up at me curiously.
“Now I need to break the vent bracket at the joint,” I told her, trying to think of how exactly I would do that. The brackets were not very big, but they were held with two bolts on each side. Leaning back with the pant legs clutched in one hand, I now had to try to swing over and hope it would hold my swinging weight.