In a matter of minutes, I was back in my red uniform and walking through the empty dayroom. Up on the upper tier, at the end of the row of cells, the door to A8 slid open from an electronic command coming from the control tower. It was my destination, my focus, as I worked to ignore the harassment coming from the other inmates in the same block of solitary confinement.

The banging and insults that came my way as I walked to my cell were to be expected; they all knew I had been awaiting the verdict. What I was surprised about was that they already knew what it was. Apparently, the news had traveled to the dayroom quicker than I had. "Guilty!" A couple of females shouted at me from behind the cell doors. Another taunted, "I hope they roast you in the chair, punk ass bitch!" as I walked by her cell. I wanted to snap back and tell her that Colorado hadn’t killed anyone for decades. Instead, I kept my eyes focused on my cell, which had become a retreat for me. "Just wait until I meet you at prison... there won’t be any segregation to protect you there! I’m going to shank you the moment I see you. Right in the gut!"

My jaw was vibrating just as I stepped over the threshold of my cell. I breathed out a sigh of relief as my cell door slid shut. It was the only thing between me and the other inmates in this jail. While Galileo had trained me well enough that I could protect myself against assault, I didn’t want to tempt the odds. Shanks were just another knife, and knives were difficult to defend against.

I turned towards my cell window to peer out into the dayroom. The dayroom's television was on one of the news channels. The verdict fell under breaking news. There was footage of me walking out of the courtroom. The clip was short, and when it was done, it was replaced by a reporter and a very familiar face. Although he had visited me only once in these past four years, only to throw accusations around, and he had nothing to do with the massacre, his was a face that became extremely associated with my crime. The black label on the screen reminded viewers of his name: Xavier Palacios. Since the last time I had seen him, the edges around his tanned face had gained a sharpness. There had always been a determined, obsessive glint in his eye. This had only increased as he continued with an investigation of his own.

"The jury has declared Disraeli, your ex-girlfriend, guilty of all counts against her. What's your opinion of this?" the reporter asked him. They had Xavier sitting across from the reporter in an enclosed set. The reporter was clean cut and wearing a suit.

Xavier's lips twitched as one of his dark eyebrows lifted. "We've all seen the footage from that day. I think it is pretty clear she was behind the attack."

"Her defense team was working the insanity angle, while the prosecution believed she had ingested some unknown drug."

Xavier's lips formed a small, bitter smile. "Bria did like to say that she was fucked up in the head from time to time, unlovable and such. Threw out she was aromantic a couple of times, too. Her introversion limited her friend circle. Yet, I have never believed Bria suffered from a psychosis episode at the time of the incident, despite what the defense's expert witnesses testified to on the stand. As for the prosecution's theory about the drugs, besides alcohol socially and a sampling of edibles, Bria was never familiar with the drug scene. She hasn't even had a cigarette or cigar."

"Now you had access to the blood draw Judge McKenna ordered at the very beginning."

"I did. Someone from Bria's defense team approached me when they got the sample for discovery," Xavier confirmed. I crossed my arms and leaned against the door with my shoulder to take the weight off my feet. Skye had been the one who had contacted Xavi and requested him to run an analysis on the sample. She never thought it would backfire in our faces as it had. "I am a biochemist, so I had some basic knowledge on the forensic science part of what they were asking of me. I agreed because I was partly curious myself."

"You wanted to see if you had just proposed to a psychopath?" the reporter rephrased.

Xavier shrugged. "Bria was not a killer when I knew her. She'd suck up a spider with a vacuum hose if it was inside of her house, but she never harmed anyone or even fantasized about doing it. She couldn't care less about guns." I snorted over his lack of knowledge. I had given my fair share of bruises in fights while on missions for Galileo. "The fact that she just went out and killed all those people... it still boggles my mind."

"I can only imagine," the reporter sympathized. "As well as what you found out afterwards. That had to be difficult."

"That she was found naked in bed with someone I didn't know?" A darkened expression overwhelmed his features. "Yeah, Bria was keeping some secrets from me."

"It seems like you dodged a bullet."

"A tsunami, actually."

"So, what did you discover when you analyzed her blood?"

Xavier took a deep breath and refocused himself. "It's true that there is some unknown element to it that I haven't seen in other samples. The prosecution's scientists believed they were seeing the same kind of cellular reaction in Bria's blood as is seen when subjects take methamphetamine, fentanyl, or cocaine. However, when they did their toxicity tests on the blood sample, no known drug could be located."

"Thus, why they theorized it was a new drug. Perhaps one that is being produced on the black market?"

"I don't think they went deep enough; I think that their analysis was quite superficial. In my research, I went into the core of the cell. Whatever this unique element is, it's in her DNA. It's a part of her. But it isn't... human. Or human in the way we are familiar with."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm still working on that."

The reporter's disbelief was sketched across his face. This was the very reason Ava, Lucas, and Skye all ruled against putting Xavier on the witness stand. It was just too insane for the jury to fathom. It brought too many unnecessary questions into the courtroom. Yet, because Xavier was the man who proposed to the Union Station killer, and the only person connected to the case who would speak to the media, he was often on the screen. Xavier didn't care about the fame that he had received being the ex-boyfriend of the mass murderer. He wanted answers, and he wanted to talk to someone about his discoveries. Skye informed me that while Xavier had devoted his entire life to discovering what was going on with my blood, his social circle had capsized.

Rolling my eyes and no longer interested, I turned from the cell door and considered my cell. At twelve feet by six feet, it was by no means a suite. I had already come to terms that it was my fate I would be stuck in such a space for twenty-three hours a day until the day I died. At first, I reacted badly to the news, and ended up in a suicide gown more than once, chaired three times, and injected with ketamine several times. Four years had gone by, and I had lost the motivation to care.

While I had been at court, the officers had searched my cell. This, too, was to be expected. Whoever it was had been respectful, at least. There were some officers who left the cell as if a tornado had just rampaged through, and my clothes, commissary, and books would be scattered across the floor, with my sheets and blankets ripped from my mattress. This time, the disturbances were subtle. My commissary and book stacks were a little off-kilter. One book, an advanced physics one, was on the desk by itself and no longer in the stack. My folded clothes were a couple of inches away from where I had left them in the corner, and my trash can had been emptied. I didn’t have any concerns that they had located my stash of psych meds. They hadn’t in the past, nor would they ever.

I stood, staring at my picture wall. Sometimes, it was gut-wrenching to even glance at it. It reminded me of what I had lost. Skye's contribution was an old photo from when we had just graduated from high school. Our navy graduation robes and hats were sliding off our bodies while Skye pulled me into an enormous hug. Never mind that our hands were full of our diplomas and the flowers Skye's parents had purchased for both of us, and our minds filled with all our massive aspirations.

One picture was the only picture I had from the days my mother had been alive. For my eighth birthday, we had been in Berlin, and she had splurged on dinner at the Berliner Fernsehturm. Using my mother’s cell phone, our server had captured the moment before I blew out the candles on my chocolate cake. My posture was eagerly upright and leaning towards the cake. The chef had written, Happy Birthday, Bria! with chocolate sauce on the long plate it was on. The cake’s candles lit up the freckles on my elated face while illuminating the red velvet of my dress. Some of my curls had slipped forward and past my ears. My mother was angled behind me. Her long dark hair was secured in a long ponytail, and she had chosen a white sweater and black pants to wear to this special dinner. She had a half-smile. Her eyes revealed how distracted she was; her mind wasn’t at that dinner. By then, she was knee deep in her research against the monster. Half of her mind was still with her books and discoveries. Six months later, I would lose her to that monster.

My eyes drifted over to one of the other photographs Jay had salvaged after the district attorney decided that there was not enough evidence to charge Jay with conspiracy and abetting. He was released from custody, free to continue his life, to move on. This photograph was of the family I had gained after my mother died. It was a family by choice and circumstance, as only Galileo and Kit were tied together by blood. Before her death, Madeleine had confided to Galileo about the evil lurking in the shadows. Galileo took up the mantel of responsibility of protecting me from that evil when she died. He found it best to follow my mother’s pattern and never stay in one place for more than a week at a time. As a family of misfits, Jay, Galileo, Kit, and I traveled the world together for two years. It bonded us together, and the emotion in the photograph now hanging in my jail cell was genuine.

St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Adriatic Sea loomed behind the four of us in the background as we stood on the cathedral’s balcony. Galileo stood off to the side with a quirk in his lips and eyes squinting in amusement. To his left, Kit and I were posing back-to-back. Kit’s arms were crossed; despite his serious body language, there was a huge grin on his face. I relied on him to keep my balance as I had a knee lifted and my arms up before me as if I was rocking out. The jacket I had covering my arms to obey the church’s laws had slipped down to my elbows, revealing more of my white dress. Jay was before us, partly kneeling and holding up his hands in the horn signs.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I was sixteen in the picture, and now, it was difficult for me to accept that the moment had been captured six years ago. So much had changed. It might as well have been a completely different lifetime.

Unfortunately, the person who had salvaged my sanity and life was not Jay. In fact, I hadn’t seen him in over a year. I had always known—always wished—that Jay would move on, even if at the beginning it hadn’t seemed like he would. He was there the moment I returned from Colorado Mental Health Institute of Pueblo with psych prescriptions and the diagnosis of competency to stand trial after sessions upon sessions with several psychologists. I had been in Pueblo for several months, and during that time, Jay had written me several letters. Somehow, he had learned that I had been transferred down there, and in his letters, he ordered me to write him back the moment I returned to the jail. His second and final order was that I put him on my visitor list. I did both within a day. There wasn’t much more to his letters.

Thus, I was not too surprised when I was called out of my cell days later for a personal visit. Sitting down at the computer monitor, I could see Jay on the other side. Excitement over seeing a friendly face erupted in me, and in my rush to pick up the phone, I fumbled with the receiver a couple of times. His own eyes flooded with glee. Before even uttering a greeting, I pressed, "How did you get out? I thought you were being held as my accomplice!"

Jay grinned and shrugged. "They didn’t have enough evidence to hold me," he declared. "The DAs couldn’t prove I had any knowledge of what you did since I was unconscious when you went psycho crazy lady on everyone, and they couldn’t prove you had told me anything beforehand. They had to let me go. They are going to have to let you go, too. It wasn’t like what you did was intentional, Bria."

All my joy over seeing him disappeared when he brought up my dire situation. "I killed one hundred four people, Jay. They are not going to let me go."

"Hey, what was it that you always told me?" I stared at him blankly, refusing to answer the question, fearing the worse. Before everything, I had been the type to sprout off mindfulness quotes. Before everything, Jay was the pessimistic one, and I had been the buoyant one with a new inspirational quote in my pocket to throw out. Everything had changed, and I was reluctant to be hopeful for my future when I already knew what it held. "'You must have love in your heart and face the world with it. Only that way can you magnetize the positivity in the stars to change your life for the better.'" Jay quoted.

Grimacing, I glanced away from the monitor. My gaze landed on the communal shower in the dayroom before flicking over to where the first cell on the lower tier was. Its inmate was standing at her window, glaring at me. When she saw that she momentarily had my attention, she shouted, "Fuck you, cunt!" I rolled my eyes over the lack of originality. "After spending twenty-three hours a day in lockdown, you would have thought she would have more creative insults," I muttered. Then louder, I said, "I’m not getting out, Jay."

Jay leaned closer to his monitor, as if he could intimidate me into believing. "Don’t say that. You are. If only because I need you out here, Bria. I don’t have anyone else. First it was Kit who was taken away from me, and then Galileo. Death stole them from me. I might have thought Kit was annoying ninety-nine percent of the time, and Galileo was too overbearing, but I never wanted them to die. Now the law is stealing you from me. I can’t survive without you, Bria." I watched as Jay looked upward in the effort to control his emotion.

I wished I could have reached across the screen and touch his hand to comfort him. "Jay, you must move on. You have an entire life in front of you. It’s a completely blank slate, and with the skills Galileo taught you, your chances of succeeding are far greater than anyone else’s in your position. I want you to move on and never look back."

Jay laughed bitterly, shaking his head. "You don’t understand. You can’t. You don’t know anything."

"Know what?" I narrowed my eyes, tilting my head.

A rebellious light shone in Jay’s eyes for moments, and I thought he would tell me whatever it was he was hiding from me. Then that light faded, as if he had reconsidered crossing that line. To my disappointment, he returned to the original conversation. "We have to get you out. I’ll get you the best defense attorney that I can find. You’ll get out, I promise."

"Jay, don’t promise anything you can’t guarantee," I whispered with a sad smile. I tilted my head. "Do you even know what kind of weapons I used?"

A shield crashed down in Jay’s eyes. All his earnest emotion dissipated until I was met with a stone face. "No one knows."

"But you do," I accused, straightening from the realization. "It's obvious from the way you're acting."

"No. I don’t."

"I don’t need an attorney," I declared forcibly, the muscle in my jaw twitching with bitterness. "I already have one. You should go back to Phoenix, Jay. Or somewhere else. You need to settle down. Pick up the pieces again, create a life for yourself."

Jay's mouth made a solid line in his stubbornness. "I'm staying here."

Our visits were timed and ended after thirty minutes. There wasn't much more to the first visit. Jay wanted to keep to meaningless, and quite irritating, small talk. Our succeeding visits were similar. For some time, they were once a week, while his letters were consistent, and I could expect them every other couple of days. Like our visits, the letters were monitored, and we had to be careful of what we said. Sometimes, our words were veiled, and I was both bitter and frustrated that I couldn’t talk freely with Jay as I used to.

During this time, Jay got a regular job working at KFC. He rented out a room at a nearby apartment so he could visit me regularly. "I want to feel like you are near," he expressed. I was critical of his choices; his life was becoming too routine. Jay could only handle routine for a little while before he threw a grenade at all his progress. He rebelled against management and structure. I knew there was no way he could sustain this lifestyle. I tried to talk to him about it, and he refused to listen. He tried to placate me by putting unwanted money on my books, saying, "You can now buy yourself some better food. I know that the shit they serve on those trays is garbage.”

"Jay, you need to save that money so you can build a better life for yourself." I protested. I was wasting my breath.

His welfare became a constant stream of anxiety for me to fight through alone in my cell. I felt trapped, especially at night when I was separated from him by bars and steel. He may have been only streets away, but we might as well have been on different continents when the jail entered its graveyard lockdown hours. I worried about his wellbeing, especially when he came to our weekly visits looking strung out. At first, I thought it was due to working overtime at his job and pleaded with him to take care of himself. As time went on, I discovered Jay was coping with our circumstances in his own way: he had discovered the underworld of illegal drugs.

This discovery only occurred because he missed one of our weekly visits and one of my court appearances, which he strived to be at. I later learnt that it was because he had been arrested for possession of meth. He faced me on the other side of the monitor at the visit after he was released on bond and admitted that he had turned to fentanyl and meth to get through the grind. He hated his job, his boss, the loneliness, and life in general. We both broke down during that visit. I despised myself for not seeing the signs earlier. I had been trained to see details in the world, and yet, I had failed to recognize that Jay was not in the right state of mind, that he had blended a stimulant and opiate together. I should have noticed his odd pupils; odd, erratic behavior; and euphoric mindset that came through the monitor and his writing. I despised myself for not being there for him. Jay promised he would get clean again, and never allow himself to be weakened by his struggles again.

He would promise this repeatedly. His promises just became hollow words. Lies. I would wonder if he was saying them just because he thought it was what I wanted to hear. He filled the void within him with the people he met along the illegal substances circuit. I lost track of the number of times he would fill me in on his sexual escapades, each one with a different woman than the time before—as much as I didn’t want to hear it.

Jail just became a revolving door for him. The judge got as frustrated as I did with him and declared that probation was no longer working. Jay’s probation was revoked, and he had to serve time in county jail, working as a kitchen worker, for several months. I had hoped that this time away from meth and heroin would thrust Jay into sobriety. I tried to refer Jay to the jail psychiatrist. Unfortunately, they couldn't do anything until Jay reached out to them first. My letters during this time were filled with pages begging him to get help for his underlying issues. He ignored my begging and never enrolled in the several programs the jail offered.

Over the course of a year and a half, Jay rode this tedious rollercoaster. He was released from jail, his mouth foaming from all the promises of actually living and accepting his new life. If his previous roommates would take him back, Jay returned to wherever he was living before incarceration. The same went for his employment. If no one wanted him back, he had to find accommodations and employment all over again. Jay was usually on the straight and narrow for several weeks until he couldn’t ignore the temptation of that intense high and fell into his old habits. When he showed up to our visits, either high or strung out, I knew it was only a matter of time before he was back in here with me.

Before the last time I ever saw Jay, the judge informed him that if he ever stood before him again in his courtroom as a defendant, he would give Jay a direct ticket to prison. At that time, Jay just got a longer sentence in jail—after the judge berated him about being hardheaded and not allowing the substance abuse classes to work. The judge’s patience and compassion had expired.

Two years into my incarceration, Jay appeared at one of our visits. He looked less hungover than I had seen him recently. His shoulder length hair was clean and combed. A pensive expression dominated his face. He was fumbling around with a small business card. It took a little needling to get him to tell me why he was so distracted and fidgety.

Once he started, he couldn’t stop. "I was approached on the street the other day. I was trying to get more crank, and these two random guys came to me. At first, I thought they were undercovers, until they preached about how the world was fucked up. You know how passionate I get about that stuff. Turns out they were recruiters for this new world order shit. They want me to join their cause and go clean. They gave me a sample of something that they said was completely organic, but just as potent, and wouldn’t have the harmful effects as the other shit does."

Concern flared within me. I locked eyes with Jay and said, "You didn’t agree to join their cause, did you? Or take whatever they gave you, right?"

Jay shook his head slowly. His eyes flickered down at the business card in his hand. "No, I just told them I would think about it."

"Good. Because they sound like a cult."

"Really? You don’t think this could be what I need to change my life? A purpose?"

I clutched the phone receiver tighter. "No! Jay, please tell me you won’t join their cause." My heartbeat was fierce against my chest. It was imperative that I got him to agree to throw the business card away. I felt emotion bleeding out of my eyes as I said, "Jay, please tell me you won’t do anything rash." Needing more than a verbal confirmation, I brought my hand up to the screen. My eyes implored his to listen to reason.

Jay’s expression spun through several conflicted emotions. He gripped the business card in his hand and shoved it into his jean pocket. His other hand rose to meet mine on the monitor. "I won’t leave you," Jay promised through a strain in his voice. "I’ll stay here."

I should have known better. Jay's promises were as fragile as ash. He disappeared completely. Eight days after his visit, he had written me a letter with only one sentence.

I’m going to go with them.

Just like that, Jay was gone.