Fractured Freedom: A Brother’s Best Friend Second Chance Romance (Tarnished Empire)

Delilah

“Don’t say anything. I’m sorry, okay? Just don’t say anything. I’ll take the blame. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” Izzy whispered.

When you see your own face mirrored back at you in complete fear, it’s devastating. The hazel eyes that looked so much like mine were swimming with tears. My sister’s dark wavy hair framed the frown on her heart shaped face and then my heart dropped as they separated my twin sister from me. Tears sprang to my own eyes when she turned away.

We were on our own now and my brain wasn’t processing what the TSA officer was saying. I saw his mouth moving, the way he took a breath and the gold badge on his shirt rose with his chest, and how he continued talking like he didn’t really want an answer from me.

He’d made up his mind. I think I remember them telling us in Psych class that eight times out of ten if someone comes to a conclusion or opinion about something, they’ll find a way to justify it even when they know they’re wrong.

This must have been how my sister felt every time she admitted she’d been to juvie. Or that she was a recovering addict.

My blood boiled for her. And then it felt like it stopped moving through my veins all together when my eyes darted around the room. Whatever she’d done, it was bad.

If she was going to jail, it wouldn’t be like juvie. This would be worse.

This was real crime. At an airport, nonetheless.

I couldn’t have her go alone. This was different than before. I saw her fear, I saw my baby sister try to take all the blame as they steered her away from me.

I glared over at the TSA officer. I made a decision right then and there. “Yes, it’s my suitcase. And my sister doesn’t know anything. I packed all of it.”

If we both took the blame, maybe our sentences would be cut in half, right?

A better officer would have asked how many kilos, what drugs did you pack, and who asked you to do this. Right? They would have investigated further.

Did I know what it was that I packed? No. I knew my sister had a track record in our family of getting into trouble. She’d supposedly cleaned up. I’d backed her over and over again, even when my mom called and said she didn’t think it was a good idea for Izzy to visit me in Puerto Rico.

“Too many temptations and freedom when she’s not home, Delilah.” My mother’s accent still carried through the phone after all these years. She’d slip back into Greek sometimes, and my father would chuckle because we all only understood about a third of what she was saying. We just knew we were in trouble when her native language flew out. “Haven’t I taught you anything? You graduate from that university and you immediately keep disobeying me. You should be in medical school, not traveling around nursing. You could be a doctor.”

Reassuring my mother that I knew how to deal with my twin sister would have fallen on deaf ears. I finally cut her off and told her this was my life. Plus I missed Izzy, and she was coming.

And now me taking the blame may have been my way of avoiding the truth, that mom was right and that my twin sister really did just screw us over.

She’d come for a weekend to visit me at my new nursing job. I’d only been there for two months, but I was trying my best to acclimate to a bilingual workplace and had just written up my ultimate bucket list. All on my own.

I was all on my own and embracing my very own life. Yet, she begged me to fly back to Springfield, our little town, with her for a couple days to visit family.

My baby twin sister had a knack for finding my weakness. “The family misses you, Lilah. You went from UCLA straight off to nursing and you never visit. Mom cried the other night, I swear.”

Was any of that even true?

“You want to admit to anything else?” He smiled wide, and I knew he’d probably pat himself on the back as he walked out of the interrogation room.

“I think I’ll want to talk with a lawyer before I say anything else.”

He sneered at me. “You’re going to be in jail a long time, young lady.”

I cleared my throat, trying not to panic. “I get to make a phone call, right?”

Like I had anyone to call other than my mom and dad. If I called them, they’d probably panic too. I needed a plan of action. My mom watched court TV and my dad worked most days marketing beer, but that was about all the knowledge I was going to get from them.

The TSA officer leaned forward and put his hands on the table so he could look down at me sitting there, like I was the scum on the bottom of his shoe. “You’re under arrest for the possession of cocaine and smuggling. It’s a felony. You don’t get your phone call yet. Now, hands behind your back.”

Two other officers came in, like I was going to fight them.

Me. Delilah Hardy. Valedictorian of my high school class. I’d graduated summa cum laude from UCLA, for crying out loud. I’d never even so much as served a single detention in my entire academic career.

He read me my rights as I tried to suck in air and breathe it out slowly, methodically, and in the same rhythm.

The only person I knew to be calm in a terrible situation like this was a man I tried not to think about anymore. He was the reason I avoided going home. And yet every second I needed to take a relaxing breath, I thought of him. Dante.

He’d been sixteen when I was eleven and had locked myself in the dark basement of the neighbor’s house.

“Let’s count to seven, one breath out and one breath in, huh?” he’d said as he jiggled the lock. My brothers had left me, and Dante had found me ten minutes later, probably by hearing me hyperventilating.

We counted together. I heard the soft numbers rolling from his mouth, and by seven the door had opened for me to jump into his arms.

Seven was my number with him from then on. When they sent Izzy to juvenile hall for being high and stealing from a store while I was still in it, Dante and my brother Dom had been there to pick me up while my parents went to the station. We counted to seven. That time, I made him do it with me seven times.

I was probably going to have to count to seven, seven hundred times to feel better about this one.

Jesus. I was going to jail.

I wasn’t ready for that. I’d taken this job after college had delivered next to nothing of an experience. I found myself unfulfilled and completely scared that I would care about nothing my whole life, that I’d do nothing in it that would warrant someone looking twice at me.

I’ll admit to having smoked weed once with my sister in the woods. And it had been through a freaking apple because we didn’t have a pipe. We used a pencil to carve out a makeshift tube and bowl area to stuff the tiny bit of weed into. Honestly, my sister had done most of the work. I had sat there wide-eyed the whole time.

She’d graduated, obviously, to smuggling drugs and using me as a distraction since then. I’d graduated from nursing school. I was only trying to smuggle a good time out of my nurse gig.

I didn’t know whether to feed my rage or my panic at that moment.

I was going to jail.

And I hadn’t even done the goddamn crime.

“Bend over and cough.”

Why did I want to cry right now? It wasn’t like the woman was doing anything outside her job. Still, standing there naked and having to cough to see if I’d stuffed you-know-what you-know-where was degrading to say the least. I wanted to scream at the officer that this was a violation of my rights or my freedoms or my privacy or something.

I knew I’d be wrong, though. To them, I was a felon.

And they really believed I could have done it. I’d said as much with my own mouth. I’d claimed the bags as mine, never denying the smuggled drugs shoved in shampoo bottles—lots of them. I wasn’t sure what kind or exactly how much, but I was going to jail for it.

I didn’t know when I would get to make a call or if I would find my sister in here with me. Had they let her go? Would she come for me?

My mind raced as I was handed a grayish-white sheet and a pillow. “Hold on to those if you want to keep them.”

The clothing I put on was scratchy against my damp skin.

It was nothing like the movies. There were no calls allowed, no people I could talk to. I was sent to my cell, just given the number and pointed in that direction. A few women rolled their eyes at me and turned the other way when I nodded to them. Instead of engaging, I tried to keep calm and told myself, “One foot in front of the other.”

I’d figure everything out once I knew where my new home would be. Tears sprang to my eyes at the thought. As I got to my cell, the white bars of the door were a stark indicator that this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.

To think I’d cried over things in my life before being here seemed trivial. All those tears seemed spoiled now. Is this how Izzy had felt all that time in juvie?

Helpless.

Alone.

Scared.

I was older, but the feelings were still there.

I sighed as I saw the empty mattress on the bottom of a bunk.

“If you’re taking that bed, you better not snore,” came a scratchy voice from above.

“I don’t snore,” I quietly replied, not sure I should introduce myself or just make clear what my cellmate wanted to know. I was a quiet sleeper. None of my siblings ever complained about sleepwalking or anything like that with me.

“Good.” Her scrawny legs hung over the top bunk, and she swung them back and forth as she eyed me up. “Last girl here was loud as shit. Happy her boy got her out quickly. What you in for?”

I cleared my throat. “Um … possession of drugs. I need to make a few phone calls.”

“Good luck. Our bitch of an officer hasn’t given us call time all day.”

That’s when I heard a laugh that sounded just like mine. I threw my stuff on the bunk and hauled ass out of my cell.

I rounded a corner and found her talking to another inmate. She laughed at a joke and seemed completely relaxed, her dark hair braided and hanging over her shoulder.

Izzy fit in everywhere, and here was no different. Somehow, she was gorgeous in the orange jumpsuit and happy to be the center of attention.

Her smile dropped off as soon as she saw me, though. “Delilah? What the fuck? Why are you in here?”

“What the fuck? What do you mean, what the fuck?!” My voice came out like a shrill bird squawking at something. She should have been happy to see me. I’d agonized over her being in here alone and probably sacrificed the next few years of my life for her. For family. And on the flip side, she’d put me here by her actions.

My turmoil whiplashed into anger fast. “Why am I here? How about why are we here?! Should we start with that?”

“I vouched for your innocence in the TSA office.”

“Well.” I cleared my throat. “I vouched for yours.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She dragged a hand down her face. “Oh my God.”

“Um, you’re welcome.” My eyes bulged at her irritation.

“Welcome for what? I’m still here. What you said obviously didn’t work,” she scoffed.

“You!” I pointed a finger at her and took a step in her direction. A few women’s eyebrows rose, and one even mumbled something about a catfight waiting to happen. I took a breath, trying to calm down. “You tricked me into coming back with you, and you were doing this.”

“It’s not a big deal. I’ll get out in a few months. You need to get a lawyer to get you out sooner. Jesus, you won’t last in here.”

“Oh, this is a competition now? Who’s the bigger and badder sister? You’re so immature, Izzy. This isn’t what life should look like.” I sounded like my parents, but I didn’t care.

She stared at me, her dark eyes hard. “I’m sorry I’m not good enough for you.”

“This isn’t ‘good enough’ for anybody. You smuggled drugs!”

“It was a one-time thing.” She glanced around and then took my arm to hurry me into her cell across the way. “I’m done doing that stuff. I just got to get this one deal done. It’s a long story, okay?”

“You said you’d cleaned yourself up,” I whispered and shut my eyes in pain. She’d promised us all years ago. I thought she was doing better. Sure, she still hung out with people that weren’t the greatest crowd, but who was I to judge?

“You don’t understand. I’m clean. It’s just—”

“You call this clean? You realize we all hurt when you do this, right? You realize Mom about died when she had to send you to juvie. You couldn’t stand, Izzy! You passed out on the damn sidewalk in broad daylight.”

“That was years ago,” she said quietly and looked away.

“And here we are today, smuggling drugs. Smuggling drugs, Izzy! You mean to tell me you’re doing that clean?” I scoffed. “I vouched for you with the family. Mom even said she didn’t want you to visit me here. You know that?”

“Well, Mom will never trust me.”

“Rightfully so, I guess.”

I saw the pain shine in her eyes, but then she covered it up with a couple blinks.

“I shouldn’t have trusted you. I shouldn’t have thought, ‘Hey, we’re sisters, we’ve been through it, and we got over it.’ Screw that. You’re an addict, and you’ve ruined this chance I got here. How am I going to fucking explain this to my boss? I’m going to be fired and …”

The idea of it all was completely and utterly ridiculous, completely out of this world. I was in a jail cell, not even sure when I was going to be free again.

I leaned against a white brick wall for support and glanced around me. What if Mom and Dad couldn’t get us out? We technically were guilty. I took another breath. No air came in.

Another.

No air.

I grabbed the metal railing of the bed to try to steady myself.

My sister jumped in front of me. “Breathe, Delilah. Breathe. In like this.” She formed an O with her lips and sucked in, eyes wide on me like I should do the same.

I did.

Over and over again, we took one very big breath in and let it out as my heart and mind raced over every scenario. “I can’t believe this.”

“It’s okay,” Izzy murmured. “I have calls to make. Everything is going to be fine. Believe me. It’s all going to be fine. Just go grab your pillow and stuff. Bring it to my cell. You can trade with my cellmate. She won’t care.”

I nodded and tried to will myself to move.

The tremor in my chin showed Izzy all she needed to know. “Okay, you know what? You stay here. Close the door behind me. I’ll go get your stuff. What number are you?”

“Will that be what I’m reduced to here?”

“No. We’re not going to be here long, okay? I just have to call Mom and Dad.”

“Izzy, our bail hasn’t been set. Our parents don’t have money to fight this in court. You realize we could be here for years.”

Yeah, she laughed like that would be insane.