The moment the door to my cell slams shut, I let the pages in my hands fall to the ground. Drawing my knees to my chest, I hug them and rock myself back and forth. My nerve endings are fried. My brain is working in overdrive, and I’d love nothing more than a jackhammer and enough time to dig my way out of this prison.

I need to get away from this hell.

It takes some serious concentration, but I eventually force my thoughts to quit spiralling. Before I found myself trapped in the chaos created by Amber’s past, I was known for my iron self-control and never back down attitude. Once I used it to calm a classroom full of twelve-year-old students who resented my presence, right now I need it to find a way out of this mess I’m in.

Preferably without blood on my hands.

“Righto,” I mutter to myself without an iota of embarrassment as I cross my legs in front of me on the cold floor. “Let’s see what I’m up against.”

Sorting the contents of the file into piles helps me settle a little more, and by the time I have three neat stacks in front of me, I’m ready to tackle the depravity that I know lays within.

First, I start with the more official looking documents. There’s labelled blueprints for the houses of each of the targets named on the front of the folder, a detailed brief of their schedule for the month, and the approval for the manufacture and distribution of Centrifuge by SG & R Biotech. St. George & Ray Biotech. As serious as the situation is, I have to roll my eyes when I realise that the narcissistic wankers have literally named their pharmaceutical company after themselves. The pair of greedy egomaniacs aren’t even bothering to hide their involvement with the dangerous, so-called dementia curing drug.

Filling my lungs with air until my cheeks puff out, I hold it in my chest for as long as I can before it rushes forth in a gale of confusion and doubt. There’s just too much to wrap my head around.

None of this makes sense.

Why does she want me to kill these people? Surely if she can afford to pay off the guards and whoever else she needs to spring me from here, she can just hire a professional hitman to take them all out?

How does a woman who’s supposed to be dead come back to life?

Why isn’t Jax on her hit list?

What the fuck does this all have to do with Centrifuge?

I snatch the next pile from the concrete and flip through the pages. My gut starts to churn, bile rising into my throat as I scan through the pages and discover the answers to some of my questions. There’s photo after photo of Jax and Ms. Blonde Bitch embracing while they’re out to dinner, walking around the hospital where he works, and dressed to the nines at events. Various newspaper articles talk about the “new power couple on the block”. And, then there’s the love letters from Jax outlining how much he adores her and how everything he’s doing is so they can be together forever without his parents interference.

This is a classic case of infatuation gone wrong. Good, ‘ole Jax is leading this chick around by the nose. Fuck me, I’ve seen more cases than I can count in the pre-teens I used to teach. Girl meets boy. Boy uses girl to satisfy his sociopathic tendencies—you know the drill.

Charlie St. George warned me about these two and I failed to take note.

The thought of Amber’s dead uncle—a death that I’m supposed to be responsible for—sets a lump growing in my throat. I swallow hard, pushing down the guilt I feel over his untimely demise with it, and continue on my fact-finding mission.

Up next are a bunch of photographs. It takes less than ten seconds of flicking through them to cause the empty space that lives in my chest to fill with hurt. Amber and her children look happy. In every picture, her eyes are filled with contentment and a blissful glow emanates from her face. It kills me. Each night that I’ve spent in here has been filled with dreams of rescuing her from the life she’s been drugged into accepting, yet looking at her carefree image has me reconsidering whether she even needs to be saved.

I taunt myself for a minute longer, lingering on the portrait of the four of them—Jax, Amber, and their two kids—until the pain becomes unbearable and I’m able to channel it into anger. The black-haired devil who poses with my fiancée needs to pay. He deserves to live a life filled with torment for stealing what was mine. The life he currently leads, the wealth he currently hoards, the woman he sticks his cancerous dick inside each night—it all should have been mine.

And, in this file there has to be a clue that provides a way for me to take back what I’ve lost.

The door to my cell clangs when the baton of the guard doing his rounds is smacked against it. It’s the half hour warning for dinner time, letting me know that I need to get down to business. How long I have to study this information before B comes back is unclear. I’m going to need every second of it to find what I’m looking for in this twisted parole offering.

The remainder of the photos are labelled with the names of the subjects and the dates and times that they were taken. I arrange them chronologically, starting from the earliest and study them with an intensity that makes my forehead tight with confusion. Before me unravels a series of weekly meetings between the patriarchs of the Ray and St. George families at an exclusive men’s club in the city. They go on for months until Jax joins them and the easy-going feel to the meetings appears to change. He seems angry in every image, constantly pointing fingers and getting in the face of the other men. The appearance of his brother, Seb, soothes the rabid beast and the photos go back to telling a tale of comradery and precise planning.

Then they come to an abrupt halt two days before Amber’s “accident” and don’t restart again until six months later. This time the four men are joined by Judge McManus and another male who doesn’t appear on the labels or anywhere else in the file. Three meetings happen in the week before my sentencing, then there’s nothing. No more photos for me to scrutinise, no more housing blueprints, no more schedules, nothing except a document title “Conditions of parole”.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I flip through the pages again, a desperate need for more information clawing at my throat. “There’s nothing useful here. Not. A. Fucking. Thing!”

I stuff everything but the parole agreement into the folder and toss it on my bed. The stark, black typeface on B’s agreement mocks me. I already know the supposed conditions—$3,000,000 to be set free from prison so I can kill seven adults and two children in order for a crazy bitch to run off into the sunset. It’s a death sentence for me—a death sentence for almost everyone involved, except for the two lovers.

With idle hands and a panicked mind, I let my morbid curiosity get the better of me. What if there’s something in my parole that holds the key to foiling this? A tiny speck of hope builds within me as I turn the first page and start reading.

It’s a more in-depth evaluation of the situation she so brazenly outlined on the handy little set of cliff notes stuck to the front cover of the folder. B is offering me the once in a lifetime opportunity to escape my life sentence in return for becoming her hired assassin. This came along with the promise of $3,000,000 for “expenses incurred in the process of fulfilling the outlined duties and the ability to start a new life away from the scene of my crimes”. Honestly, this bitch has crazy in spades. I can feel her snarky delight at my predicament coating every word I read.

The same theme continues on the following pages. A detailed list of the order in which I will dispatch of the people she views as hurdles, suggested places and times to undertake the deed, and one terse mention that I will need to provide photographic evidence of each kill before I am sanctioned to move onto the next. If I didn’t already feel tainted beyond redemption by my incarceration, this document would have done a number on me. I hold in my hand the manifesto that heralds the end of the deadly Centrifuge drug before it can make its way into vulnerable people’s lives—except it comes at the price of six not so innocent lives, three pure souls, and the promise that I let two of the main players disappear scot-free. My hands will be soiled, my honour disintegrated, a life sentence of a different kind placed on my head, and that’s if the psycho pulling the strings follows through on her promise to let me live after I’ve done her bidding.

A bell rings. It breaks the stranglehold the dark thoughts have on my harried mind. I flip to the final page and try to scan the words before my cell door is opened and I’m freed for dinner.

On the last page, I finally encounter the “methods of persuasion” B mentioned back in the visiting room. There’s three bullet points, each one more menacing than the next.

1. Foreclosure of the house mortgaged by Dexter and Maryann Barrett and the immediate ratification of all debt held under those names, including, but not limited to, all 401K holdings before subsequent forfeiture of their lives.
2. Ringside seats to the immediate and painful disposal of the woman currently known as Amber Ray.
3. The withdrawal of all parole rights and a transfer to Hindmarsh Correctional Facility where you will be held for life in circumstances that suit my pleasure.

The three penalties send shards of ice to my bloodstream. For a second, I wish that they would pierce my veins, so I could bleed out all over the damn floor to escape this madness. I was never under the illusion that B was playing around, but the consequences outlined are too much. Targeting the only four people I care about proves that she has done her homework—she knows my weaknesses.

And, because of this she knows how to turn me into a puppet that will dance to her tune.

First, she takes out my family and leaves my ten-year-old orphaned nephew penniless and alone in the world, then she has Amber killed, and locks me away for life in the worst prison in the state.

It seems like there is no escape for me. My death won’t stop Amber and her children from being hurt—of that I’m certain—while my participation can’t save them either. My eyes move like miracle-seeking missiles over the words, re-reading them over and over in the hope that somehow, they will change.

I can’t seem to catch my breath. My chest is too tight to expand. A jackhammering sensation pounds through my skull. I think I’m on the verge of having a panic attack until five words toward the top of the page pull me out of my meltdown.

And, bingo, there it is.

The chink in B’s armour.

The key to my victory.

My cell door is opened, and a guard fills the void.

“Move your ass, Barrett.”

My legs feel like jelly when I stand, yet there’s also a spring in my step as I exit my cell. I lift a questioning hand to my nose and wince after the guard raises a querying eyebrow at my busted face. In my determination to find an answer to my predicament, I’d forgotten about my injuries.

Here’s hoping I can channel that willpower into the fortitude needed to defeat my brand-new “parole officer”.