Burlap

30 - Born To Die

The scared guard couldn’t have shown how much more grateful he was to hand me off to the burly, bald orderly if he’d dropped to his knees and pledged his life in allegiance. It might have had something to do with my drastic change in demeanor after Power gave control back to me. From what he’d seen, I’d gone from psychotic, evil demon spawn to tearful submissive kitty cat in less than a heartbeat. No doubt, the poor man would go home to rethink his career choice. I know I would have, in his position.

What I hadn’t expected, though, was to meet warm, chocolate eyes the moment I stepped away from the office. John walked, just a few steps behind the guard, following us until the guard made the hand off to the orderly. A dark bruise spread across the top of his nose where he’d fallen on the gym floor earlier, and his eyes were filled with panic, though he said nothing until the orderly secured me by my cuffed wrists and began walking me toward the staircase.

“You can’t do this,” he told the orderly. The bald man shrugged, not even gracing him with a verbal answer. “She didn’t kill Ernie. What do you want? I have money. I’ll give you whatever you want if you just let her go,” he added, nearly tripping over his socked feet as he jogged to walk backwards in front of him, facing us.

“I’m employed by Dr. Shilling to follow orders, boy,” the orderly barked, his voice gravelly and deep. He shoved John away, but John was back in front of him in the blink of an eye, stopping in his tracks and forcing the orderly to stop also.

“She lied. She didn’t kill Ernie. I know because it was me. I killed him,” he tried, fisting the orderly’s collar in his hands, stepping forward, into his face. I saw the challenge in his bowed up posture, even as desperation laced his false confession. The way his eyes flicked nervously, and the lump in his throat that he swallowed with great difficulty gave him away.

“John, don’t,” I started, but he shot a silencing glare at me that had my mouth slamming shut as the tears in my eyes began to spill over.

“You did not kill Ernie. I won’t let you go down for it. I won’t let them take you,” he replied. His posture straightened even further, and his eyes regained the hard determination and confidence that had been lost from his defeated form for a while now. Slumped, drained, tired John was gone, replaced with the alpha male avenging angel who had everything under control I’d come to know him as before the recent events at Rosenton had stolen it from him.

“Go tell Shilling he’s wrong. She lied when she confessed,” he ordered, the words booming loudly around us, bouncing off the white walls of the stark dormitory hallway. An air of absolute authority radiated from him, and he seemed to grow taller and more intimidating. A spark of hope swelled in my chest. Maybe he could save me from my fate. Maybe all his and Robbie’s efforts wouldn’t be in vain.

The hope died out, slumping into crushed pieces, when the orderly, with barely a twitch of his lumberjack muscles, shrugged John off and kept walking, frog marching me closer and closer to the staircase. The commotion of my sudden attempts at release coupled with my own desperate begging must have alerted the other residents to the scene, because the sound of the heavy wooden doors to the lounge slammed open and several sets of footsteps raced toward us.

“John? What’s going on?” a voice asked from behind me. I recognized the Mexican lilt immediately. Esther. Who else had been in the lounge?

“They’re taking her to the thirteenth floor. She lied and confessed to killing Ernie,” he answered, his gaze not moving from the orderly’s face for a moment.

“They can’t do that. She didn’t do it!” Lottie cried out. In a moment of uncharacteristic bravery, she leaped into my peripheral vision, wrapping her stick thin arms around the orderly’s tree trunk bicep, and began trying to pull him back. “She’s innocent! You can’t let them take her, John!”