Prison Princess

gasped in shock. A man. In the female ward! I slipped my gaze over his tall body, seeking the familiar guard uniform but finding nothing but black pants and a black shirt. He wasn’t a guard? What was going on? This never happened. Maybe he was an escapee?
He was tall, dark-haired, with a neatly cut beard on his strong jaw. His eyes were as black as his hair. They were intense, piercing and angry. Though he held me, there was a cockiness about him, as if he held the world in his hand and willed it to spin on his terms. His grip on me was cocksure and hard. A light shiver rocked my body as he stared at me. We exchanged a silent standoff. He challenged me with his eyes to fight—to scream for my life. And when he removed his hand from my mouth cautiously, questions immediately spewed from my lips.
“What are you…”
The stranger brought up his hand and slapped it against my lips once more, effectively stopping me from speaking. “Quiet.” His voice held command. He wasn’t a person used to being disobeyed. “You’re out of your cell. You’re not supposed to be right now.”
I struggled in his hold, effectively pushing him away. “You’re no guard,” I whispered while giving him a look up and down once more. He wasn’t wearing the traditional prisoner’s garb, either. “Who are you?”
I’d grown up in this prison, but I’d been relatively safe the whole time. The warden kept people away from me, almost as if the idea that I could be hurt was a problem for him. I lived with people who committed crimes, and mine seemed to be that I’d been born at all. I learned long ago that the punishment for asking questions wasn’t worth the blank stares that always answered me.
“Quit struggling. You’re Layne Montgomery, correct?”
I opened and closed my mouth in surprise. Layne Montgomery. Layne Montgomery. I rolled that name around my tongue, trying to feel a sense of familiarity within the syllables. Momentarily shocked by this information, I blurted out my answer. “Montgomery?” I asked in confusion. “I don’t know my last name. I’ve never had one. Who are you?” I looked up at him defiantly.
“But you are Layne, right?” he asked, this time with more intensity.
“Yes, but—”
“Good,” he cut me off, like what I said made him pleased. At the very least, some of the nasty intensity in his gaze lessened. “Your last name is Montgomery. You can call me Cypress. I’ve been sent here to get you.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who sent you?”
“Your parents.”
My what? “I don’t have parents. Get your hand off of me before I…”
He raised an eyebrow. “Before you what?”
Was that amusement in his tone? I stomped hard on his foot, but he didn’t even seem to notice. “Before I scream. How’s that? I can have every guard in here arriving in seconds. I don’t know who you are or what your game is, but you’ll get your hands off me immediately.”
He shook his head before speaking under his breath. “Doesn’t know who she is and still speaks with a tone of authority. Must be in her DNA.” I didn’t know what that meant, but he had me curious. “You’re not going to scream,” he then added while tightening his hold on my arm. “Because you’re out of your cell, and we both know the punishment for escaping isn’t worth it. Why are you out, anyway?”
He wasn’t wrong. If I was caught with Louisia’s key and out at night, they’d put me in solitary.
I didn’t owe this strange man—Cypress—any explanation, but the words conjured on my tongue against my will. Was he a witch? Did he have the ability to pull the truth out of me? “I wanted to touch the moon,” I sang in a dreamy voice before slapping my hand over my mouth and staring at him incredulously. Truth conjurer. I’d only heard of them, never seen them in person much less met one. “What do you want?” I asked with a cough.
Cypress looked me up and down as if trying to understand me. I waited with my breath trapped in my chest for his answer. “Go back to your cell. Tonight, you’re getting out of here with me. I have to wait until the witching hour to perform the spells. Don’t do anything stupid. I’d hate to have to knock you out, Princess.”
Princess? That didn’t sound like a compliment coming from his mouth. His threat stuck out in my mind as my mouth worked to form another question. But as quickly as he’d arrived, he vanished. My arm burned where he’d held me still, the only indication he’d been there at all and that I hadn’t made him up. As I oriented myself and processed what had just happened, my chest tightened. I stood there completely dumbfounded. I began my night risking my life for thirty minutes of freedom, and now a strange man offered me an eternity of it. Could I trust him? My throat closed up from the panic.
That internal clock I’d come to rely on ticked by without rhyme or reason, and I cursed this Cypress person for ruining my rhythm. I wasn’t sure how much time I had left or if I could even make it back to my cell before the next guard shift change. My breathing continued to constrict from the stress of it all as if barbed wire was wrapped around my chest. I couldn’t walk to the bathhouses, even if I wanted to, in this condition. “Fuck,” I rasped before scurrying back to my cell. The moment after I slammed the barred cell door and turned the lock, I collapsed on my ass in the middle of my concrete bedroom.
Tears filled my eyes as I looked around the windowless tomb. One of the guards had once taken pity on me and given me some charcoal to color on the walls. I’d never seen a flower but had heard about them