“Doesn’t he have a family?” I ask.
“No one’s gonna be looking for him. It’ll be fine. Make sure to weigh it down.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, turning to go.
“Reed, I wasn’t done.”
I stop and pivot slowly. “What?”
Byron sneers. “When you’re finished with Corbin, you need to deal with Quinn.”
Maintaining my best poker face, I ask, “What do you have in mind?” If he’s ordering me to kill Quinn, he’s going to have to spell it out.
“I want her in so much pain, she begs for death.”
“Pain?” I snap, hiding my relief. “If you haven’t noticed, she can handle a fucking lot of it. You really think that’s the answer here?”
Throwing his hands up in the air, Byron looks to the heavens. “I don’t know! You’re the goddamn expert. Figure it out!”
Nodding, I say, “I will.” What that means exactly, I have no idea.
Byron doesn’t add anything else, so now I leave. As the encounter ends, so does the adrenaline rush. My stomach lurches in my chest. I force it back down.
This is unreal. I can’t believe that’s Byron’s answer. Just get rid of it. He’s a good man. This isn’t the way you treat a person, even someone like Corbin. We’ve known him for years. I wouldn’t have called him a friend socially, and he could be a pain, but he was a part of Walker just like me. But if its parts can just be discarded like rusted cogs, what does that say about Walker? Am I replaceable too? Are all the events of the past week making Byron rash and callous, or is this who he really is? He’s crossed a line. But what else can I do? If I don’t do what he says, any shot I have of helping Quinn is gone.
I make my way to a storage room and get one of the hand trucks we use for moving supplies in and boxes of finished shirts out. Its wheels squeak as I roll it back to the dungeon. I let the sound fill my head until there’s nothing else; I’d rather listen to it than contemplate what I’m about to do.
Quinn’s slumping in her bonds when I arrive, but she perks up when she hears the door. “Hey, can you either take out the vibrator or turn it back on?” she asks, looking down at her pussy.
“Are you fucking joking?” I snarl, locking the cart’s wheels. “You have any idea how serious this is?”
Stepping through the puddled blood, I reach Corbin and pick up his wrists. I can bench press quite a lot, but I can’t hoist into the air a three-hundred-pound body — especially while standing on a surface soaked in bodily fluid. Forced to drag the dead weight, I work as fast as I can, wanting to get the hell out of here.
“Reed,” Quinn says once I’ve gotten the body onto the cart. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you. You stopped Corbin from hurting me.”
“You’re welcome,” I grunt. “Maybe next time if you want to thank me, don’t kill anyone?”
She laughs, but I meant it. When I don’t say anything, she says, “I had to do it.”
“No, you wanted to do it. You saw I had him beat. You saw your opportunity.”
She glowers at me. “To kill my would-be rapist? Yeah, I did. I have no regrets, Reed.”
Holding the dungeon door open with one arm. I push Corbin out with the other. “Just wait. That’ll change.”
“What’s that mean?” she yells after me.
Good. Let her stew on that. When I know the answer, I’ll be sure to tell her.
—
Blood drips from Corbin’s body every second or so, leaving a trail along our way from the dungeon. I make a quick stop at the workshop and grab Amber.
Releasing her from her sewing station, I tell her to get the mop and bucket. I cuff her hands to a chain around her hips and walk her to the maintenance closet. “There’s a mess to clean.”
“Where?” she asks, eyes widening fearfully.
“You’ll see,” I mutter, already on my way out. If the rest of the prison doesn’t already know what’s going on, they’re about to find out. I’d give the cleaning job to Edwin or Hunter normally, but they’ve got enough work to do watching the workshop. As much as I hate to think about it, Byron’s got Amber well-trained enough to get the job done and not cause trouble.