C.J. Thorpe had been in Death Row for weeks.
Or maybe months.
Time didn’t matter here.
It felt like the walls were closing in on him, like the air was thicker down here. He knew the reason they’d sent him—rescuing that girl from the slave trade, disrupting the corrupt system that ran through Arcadia like an infection. But that didn’t matter anymore.
Not down here.
Here, there were no rules. No hope.
He sat on the edge of his cot, and in the silence, he heard it again.
The whisper.
It wasn’t clear at first—just a faint murmur, like the wind passing through the cracks. But then it grew louder. It wasn’t coming from the hall.
It was coming from inside his cell.
“C.J.”
He stood up, his pulse quickening.
No one.
But he wasn’t crazy—he knew that. He hadn’t cracked.
Not yet.
He took a deep breath, shaking off the fear, but the voice came again, clearer this time.
“C.J… you remember, don’t you?”
His stomach lurched.
That voice—he did recognize it.
A memory clawed at the back of his mind. He pressed his hands to his temples, trying to will it away, but the whisper persisted, soft and menacing.
“Remember what you did.”
C.J. staggered back.
The room was spinning now, the walls pressing in.
“Why do you think you’re here, C.J.?”
He sank to the floor, hands trembling.
“I never asked for your help.”
Those words hit him like a punch to the gut. His vision blurred, the dim light flickering overhead.
“You think you’re a savior? You think you’re innocent?” The voice hissed, so clear it felt like she was standing right next to him. “You used me.”
Memories started to warp, unravel, and twist.
Moments he thought he’d understood began to darken.
She hadn’t wanted him to save her. She’d begged him not to get involved.
But he hadn’t listened.
He remembered now. The fear in her eyes wasn’t just for the men chasing her.
It was for him.
“No,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head violently. “No, I didn’t—”
“You did.” The voice was cold, brutal. “And they left you here because they know what you are.”
Reality itself seemed to buckle under the weight of the accusation. C.J. pressed his hands to his head, trying to drown out the truth clawing its way to the surface.
He hadn’t saved her.
He’d taken her.
The memory hit him like a truck—her tear-streaked face, the way she had recoiled from his touch.
He had thought he was different from the men who had trafficked her, that he was giving her a chance to escape.
But all he had done was trap her in a different kind of hell.
And now, she was gone.
And he was here.
“You’re not a hero, C.J. You never were.”
The lights flickered again, and as they blinked out, C.J. was left alone in the dark.
And in the suffocating silence, he realized the worst truth of all:
He had forgotten.
But Death Row never did.