Sever - A Wattpad Featured Story

Blue - Chapter 18 - Now

I leave Jade sleeping in my quarters in the residential wing as fired up as a bat in biscuit tin. My mind is jumping hoops and bouncing off walls. How did I get Jade caught up in my mess? She thinks I'm a monster. Although she has every right to, it's not fair. I cannot acquit myself in front of a judge, but I sure as hell should be able to in front of Jade. Though she won't even listen to a worthless piece of shit like me. Not anymore.

It's Dr Jenkins' fault. She's the reason I'm embroiled in any of this. I had to give her what she needed in order to get what I needed from her. She'll hold true to it, she's given me her word, and right now hers is the only word I trust.

I turn back and double check the keypad and the magnetic clasp on the front door to the residential wing. It's locked tight.

Good.

This room is a 5* hotel in comparison to what I'm used to; not even the faintest smell of mould, and watertight. Though the disgust contorting Jade's expression when she saw the room tells me how far I've fallen to find comfort in metal railings around the windows and a chipped iron bath tub.

Crossing the road, I follow an icy path through sets of hedges that are both sparse and overgrown at the same time, with tendrils of leaves that brush at my jeans and whole pockets of nothing that expose the frozen tundra beneath. Anorexic plants. Seems even the vegetation in this damn country can't keep itself going.

Funny how Fertility became the answer we all needed to problems we didn't even know we had. I don't care about the next generation. I can't even keep the here and now together so what chance have I got in the future?

Jade on the other hand could change things. She can give life.

In her sharp words lie a resilience I never recognised before, and I want to break through it. Why would she soften to me now, after what I've done?

When I reach the car park at the back of the compound, I check on the Honda, scrubbing loose snow from the windows before heading for the rear door; the one Jade was brought in through earlier today.

Shit. What am I doing? What am I doing in this mess?!

What will I say to Detective Pike this time? 'Kidnapping her was a mistake. I'm super sorry.' She saw us at Westmore that day. She'll drag Jade in to Dover. I could trying explaining how Jade is my ex-girlfriend and I didn't mean to kidnap her. But explaining why I was caught running from the explosion in Dover with a gun in my hand and a matching bullet in my father's chest didn't work so well for me so I doubt this one would fare any better.

I kick at the first of a dozen metal garage shutters as I walk by and curse some more. What am I doing?

It doesn't escape me that there are two other girls in those freezing cold garages that Freedom are using as makeshift cells. Two more reasons to send me back to prison. I don't want to, but I open their rooms up, one at a time, and rig up the heaters from Jade's garage to see them through the night. The black girl whimpers uncontrollably like a lost puppy. Belinda just scowls.

Belinda's old enough to know better, but incapable of trying. In her naivety, she flagged on just about every radar, parading her ever-growing bump around Prosper birthing courses in plain sight. Foolish Belinda. What am I going to do with her now?

What am I going to do?

After locking them back up and scraping my nails along the icy metal sheeting, I pull at the far shutter —an empty one— yanking it up overhead before entering the pitch black garage. In this godforsaken place there's only the outpatients building and the residential wing that we've managed to link up the electricity to. This storage area is the equivalent of a black hole. Somewhere I can be sucked into and pretend to disappear.