Everyone froze in shock. Then Jonathan’s voice rang out, suddenly changing his orders.
“No–move these containers aside, now! Hurry!”
The thunderstorm only grew fiercer. The sky darkened so quickly it seemed as if daylight might never return.
Niamh had always been afraid of the dark. She hated the sound of doors slamming shut–even the slightest bang could leave her trembling from head to toe.
At thirteen, she’d been branded with the charge of “assault” and sent straight to Aldenville Juvenile Rehabilitation Center–no trial, no questions asked.
Within her first week at Aldenville, she mouthed off to an instructor and got thrown into solitary.
Solitary was nothing like the other classrooms. It wasn’t even in the same building.
To this day, Niamh remembered the cell: a cramped, triangular closet of a room, with a single vent you couldn’t even reach your hand through.
A bulb dangled from the ceiling, but it had never worked. The walls were streaked with peeling paint and patches of mold. There were stains of
god–knows–what–vomit or worse.
There was nowhere to rest in that cell. Forget a bed–even a stool was too much to hope for. A plastic bucket in the corner served as a toilet.
It was the dead of winter, and the room had no heat. Niamh curled up as tightly as she could, her hands and feet numb from the cold.
But the cold wasn’t the worst of it.
Hours–maybe days–passed in pitch blackness, the air thick and unmoving. She could hear nothing but her own frantic heartbeat, pounding like a drum in her ears. Nausea and dizziness rolled over her in waves, and more than once she thought she might be sick.
Time lost all meaning. She couldn’t tell day from night. Trapped in that coffin–sized cell, Niamh sometimes wondered if she was already dead–dead and buried, and the only thing left was the faint echo of her own mind.
Maybe thinking was all she had left because she’d turned into some kind of ghost.
1/3
09:44
Suffocation. Panio, Despair.
Back in the present, Niamh hovered on the edge of consciousness by the heavy hron door of the abandoned electrical room. She felt herself slipping, as if she’d been transported right back to Aldenville.
Her face was bloodless, her lips tinged blue, breath coming in the faintest of whispers.
Even when she heard the harsh screech of metal against metal, she forced herself to believe it was just another hallucination. She’d heard it so many times before–hoping, just for a second, that someone had finally come to let her out, only to find crushing disappointment waiting on the other side.
Over and over, hope and despair.
Until, at last, warmth seeped into her frozen limbs.-
The warmth of another human being.
The rain had stopped. The clouds parted, and stars shone in the clear night sky.
Prescott stared, stunned, as Jonathan emerged from the basement, carrying Niamh
in his arms.
He was shocked not only to see Niamh here, but even more so to see Jonathan stripped to the waist, his suit jacket and shirt drenched and clinging to his skin.
He couldn’t use his soaked clothes to warm Niamh, so he’d peeled them off, pressing her to his bare chest, trying to share his body heat.
Niamh’s eyes stayed closed; her skin still ghostly pale, but astonishingly, she managed to regain a sliver of consciousness.
She felt the familiar presence holding her–the warmth and scent she knew so well. “Mr. Thomas!”
Prescott hurried to the car to fetch a spare suit jacket for Jonathan.
But Jonathan didn’t care in the slightest that he was half–naked. He strode toward his car, carrying Niamh, the headlights of his white Lexus illuminating their path.
“Nia!”
Elmer and Lana leapt out of their car the moment they spotted Niamh wrapped in Jonathan’s arms.
09:44
Elmer grabbed a blanket from the backseat, and together with Lana the
took Niamh from Jonathan, wrapping her up and settling her gently into the car
Jonathan could only watch as Elmer and Lana bundled Niamh into the backscat the white Lexus speeding off into the night.
