Redemption Read Online Free PDF

her world now. 6 feet long by 8 feet wide and 8 feet high – 384 cubic feet. One toilet. One sink. One worn-out mattress laid on the floor. No window. Bare brick walls (she had counted the number of bricks in each wall). A single dim bulb in the ceiling that dictated her night and day.
    The only change came when she was let out for twenty minutes each week to use the shower room. Always under armed guard, of course.
    The possibility of escape was non-existent. She knew, because she had spent every day for months brooding on the problem, to no avail. She couldn’t get out of her cell. The door was locked by a simple deadbolt on the other side, with a hatch set at eye level for observation or passing in food. The guards always came for her in groups of at least three, forcing her to stand back while they opened the door.
    The other inmates might have opportunities, brief moments when they weren’t being watched so strictly, but not her. Whenever she wasn’t locked in the cell, she had weapons trained on her. It was hopeless.
    More than once she had pondered the prospect of killing herself. It wouldn’t have been hard. She knew how.
    The simplest and most convenient way to die would be to make a run for it when they took her to the shower, allowing them to gun her down. Of course, there was always the chance that she wouldn’t be killed outright, but would instead lie maimed and bleeding. Gunshot wounds could take hours or even days to claim their victim, and she had little desire to go out like that.
    There were other options, though. The food, such as it was, was served on steel trays. Cheap, thin and flimsy things, battered and dented by years of use. A bit of bending and working would allow her to snap one in half, providing a rough edge she could use to slit her wrists. It would be hours before the guards made their rounds; plenty of time for her to bleed out.
    Or she could tear up the thin blanket for her bed and knot the strips into a crude rope, winding it around the light fixture overhead to make a noose. Of course, she’d also have to tie her wrists behind her back before throwing herself off the edge of the bed. No matter how strong her resolve, the moment that noose tightened around her neck, she knew she would fight it.
    And yet, she’d never done any of those things. Something had always stopped her. Perhaps it was sheer stubborn refusal to give in, as if she was somehow making a point by staying alive.
    Or perhaps the will to survive was too strong in her. She had spent so much of her life fighting to hold on to the life she had, it was too deeply ingrained in her nature to give it up now.
    So she waited.
    She waited. For what, she didn’t know.
    Nobody was coming for her.
    Nobody would help her.
    Nobody cared about her.
    She had accepted all of these facts long ago.
    She was starting to feel the cold now that she’d stopped moving. Taking a deep breath, Prisoner 62 knelt down on the floor to start her next fifty.

Chapter 5
    DRAKE TOOK A deep pull of his coffee while staring pensively at the photograph of Maras pinned to the whiteboard in front of him. For some reason he kept finding his gaze drawn to that picture.
    ‘She’s something, isn’t she?’ Franklin remarked, spotting the object of his preoccupation.
    That she was. But there was more to it than mere physical attractiveness. It was what was behind that face which intrigued him most; what secrets lay behind those piercing, icy blue eyes. What had she done to end up in a place like Khatyrgan?
    ‘Who is she, Dan?’ he asked now that they were alone. ‘Why is Cain willing to go through all this to get her?’
    Cain himself had long since left, sensing that his interference would be more of a hindrance than a help at this stage. In any case, his work was done – Drake was on board, and that was all he cared about.
    Although he made a point of learning as much as possible about a missing operative as part of his job, he rarely concerned himself