Chapter 10: The Unexpected Cellmate
The fluorescent lights in the hospital corridor seemed to pulse in time with the headache building behind Spencer’s eyes. The witness, Gloria Martinez, had provided nothing new. The paint flecks were peridot. He knew this. He had already known this.
His mind, a relentless engine, was stuck on a different problem.
Statistical anomaly.
Chemical composition of cheap hospital soap lingering on skin.
The exact pressure of fingernails digging into his back through cotton.
He was rounding the corner toward the elevators, file folder clenched, when two uniformed police officers stepped into his path. Their posture was rigid, official. Behind them, a detective in a wrinkled suit held up a badge.
“Dr. Spencer Reid?” the detective said, his voice flat.
“Yes. I’m with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. We’re consulting on the District—”
“We know who you are,” the detective interrupted. He glanced at the nurses’ station. “Is there an Emery Sullivan currently working here?”
Spencer’s blood went cold. A cascade of probabilities flashed, each one worse than the last. “She’s a certified nursing assistant. She was assisting me with a witness. Why?”
“We need to speak with her. Now.”
Spencer turned. Emery was emerging from a patient’s room, her smile still in place, warm and effortless. It froze when she saw the police. Her eyes met Spencer’s for a fractured second. In them, he didn’t see surprise. He saw a door slamming shut.
“Emery Sullivan?” the detective said.
“Yes.” Her voice was calm, clean.
“You need to come with us.”
“On what charge?” Spencer heard himself say, stepping forward.
The detective ignored him, his eyes on Emery. “Fraud. Conspiracy. Felony theft. You have the right to remain silent.”
The words were a physical blow. Spencer watched as the warmth drained from her face, not into fear, but into a hollow, practiced blankness. She held out her hands, wrists together, as the officer produced cuffs. The metallic click was deafening in the sterile hall.
“Spencer,” she said softly, as they led her away. She looked back at him, and for a second, the mask cracked. He saw sheer, undiluted terror. Then it was gone, replaced by the empty smile. “Tell them I like my coffee black.”
He stood rooted, his brilliant mind screeching to a halt, unable to compute the dissonance. The carefree girl chasing sunsets. The woman with her mouth around him in a supply closet. The blank-eyed stranger in cuffs.
The math was suddenly, horrifyingly, wrong.
The holding cell was a concrete box that stank of despair. Old sweat, stale coffee, the acidic tang of vomit baked into grimy linoleum. A single fluorescent light flickered overhead, buzzing like a dying hornet. The bunk beds were rusted sculptures, their thin mattresses stained with the ghosts of a hundred previous occupants.
Emery sat on the lower bunk, the coarse orange jumpsuit scratching her skin. The arrest had been a blur of mumbled legalese and shoving hands. They’d taken her fingerprints, her photograph, her scrubs. The charges were a grotesque parody. The studio in LA. The wire transfers. A producer with political connections. They’d built a RICO case.
The heavy steel door clanged open. A guard shoved another prisoner inside—a man, lean and coiled like a spring, with sharp eyes and a smirk that looked permanently etched.
He stopped short, his gaze raking over her. A low whistle escaped his teeth. “Well, fuck me.”
Emery said nothing. She stared at the wall.
“No. Wait. I know you.” He took a step closer, his boots scuffing on the floor. “Sullivan. Northside. Your daddy had that big house near the park. Drove a BMW.” He crouched down, bringing his face level with hers. His breath smelled of cigarettes and cheap mint. “What the hell is a Northside princess doing in an all-men’s tank dressed like a traffic cone?”
She finally looked at him. Recognition was a faint, useless bell. Southside. A face from a crowd at a long-ago high school football game she’d only attended for the chaos. A reputation for fights, for trouble.
“Mickey,” she said, the name emerging from some dusty file.
“Mickey Milkovich. You remember.” His smirk widened, but it didn’t touch his eyes. They were evaluating, calculating. “You’re a long fucking way from home, sweetheart. And you don’t look so… fancy anymore.”
He reached out, not fast, but deliberate. His calloused fingers brushed the collar of her jumpsuit. She didn’t flinch. She had learned the value of stillness.
“You scared?” he murmured, his voice a rough scrape. “You should be. This ain’t no country club.”
“I’m not scared,” she said, and it was almost true. The fear had been in the hallway with Spencer. Here, there was only the numbness, a familiar friend.
“Yeah?” His hand slid down from her collar, over the stiff fabric, coming to rest between her breasts. He could feel her heartbeat. It was steady. “What are you, then?”
“Bored.”
He barked a laugh, sharp and surprised. “Bored. I’ll fix that.”
In one violent motion, he fisted the front of her jumpsuit and yanked her to her feet. The material tore at the zipper with a sound like ripping cardboard. He shoved her back against the cold concrete wall, the impact knocking the air from her lungs. The torn flaps of fabric fell away, exposing her bare breasts to the flickering light.
He stared, his dark eyes hungry. “Not so bored now.”
He palmed a breast, his thumb roughly circling her nipple until it hardened. He squeezed, not enough to truly hurt, but enough to claim. She watched him, her expression detached, as if observing an experiment. Her passivity seemed to ignite something in him—a need to provoke a reaction, any reaction.
He dropped to his knees. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her jumpsuit pants and underwear and dragged them down to her ankles in one brutal pull. The air was cold on her exposed skin.
“Look at that,” he muttered, his gaze fixed between her legs. “All clean and pretty. Won’t last.”
He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t touch her with anything resembling tenderness. He simply leaned forward and put his mouth on her.
His tongue was flat and demanding, licking a broad, wet stripe up her cleft. She jolted, a minor electrical shock. He laughed against her, the vibration weirdly intimate. “There it is.”
He sealed his mouth over her, his tongue spearing inside her, fucking her with it. It was coarse, obscene. He found her clit and sucked, hard, his stubble scratching the soft skin of her inner thighs. One of his hands came up to press against her lower belly, holding her in place against the wall. The other hand shoved two fingers into her mouth.
“Suck,” he ordered, his voice muffled by her flesh.
She did. She hollowed her cheeks, running her tongue over his rough, dirty knuckles. The taste of salt, of metal, of something unidentifiable.
He pulled his wet fingers from her mouth and plunged them into her cunt alongside his tongue. The stretch was sudden, rough. He crooked them, searching, and rubbed a spot deep inside that made her knees buckle. A sharp, unwanted gasp escaped her.
“Knew it,” he growled, pulling back. His chin glistened with her wetness. “You’re a slick little bitch for it, ain’t you? All that Northside polish, and you just want to be used.”
He stood, unbuckling his own pants. His cock sprang free, thick and already fully hard, the head dark and flushed. He didn’t guide it. He just positioned himself and, with a grunt, shoved into her in one deep, punishing thrust.
The fullness was a shock, a violation that shattered the numbness. She cried out, a short, sharp sound that echoed in the concrete box.
He clamped a hand over her mouth, his fingers digging into her cheeks. “Quiet,” he hissed, beginning to move. His hips pistoned, driving him into her with a brutal, rhythmic force. The bunk bed rattled against the wall with each impact.
His face was close to hers, his eyes locked on hers. “This what you wanted? Huh? Slumming it with Southside trash? You get off on this? On being some rich bitch who gets fucked in a jail cell?”
He was trying to humiliate her. She let him. She turned the cry in her throat into a moan, let her hips tilt to take him deeper. She saw the confusion flicker in his eyes. He wanted a struggle. He got compliance. He wanted degradation. She gave him a performance.
“Fuck,” he muttered, his rhythm faltering for a second. Her act was disarming him. He slammed into her harder, as if to reassert control. “You’re gonna come for me. You’re gonna come on this trash’s dick.”
She closed her eyes. She didn’t think of the cell. She thought of Spencer’s face, the shattered wonder in it. She thought of the sterile supply closet, the genuine heat. The memory, bright and sharp, provided a perverse kind of friction. A tremor started deep in her belly, unrelated to the man pounding into her.
He felt it. “Yeah. That’s it.”
His own control was fraying. His thrusts became erratic, deeper, harder. The hand over her mouth slipped to her throat, not squeezing, just holding. His orgasm hit him like a seizure. He stiffened, a raw, guttural sound tearing from his chest as he pulsed inside her, flooding her with wet heat. He collapsed against her, his weight pinning her to the wall, his breath hot and ragged in her ear.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their breathing and the incessant buzz of the light.
Slowly, he softened and slipped out of her. He stepped back, fastening his pants, not looking at her. The smirk was gone. He looked almost unsettled.
Emery pushed herself away from the wall. She pulled up her underwear and the torn jumpsuit, covering herself as best she could. She walked unsteadily to the bunk and sat down. The sticky wetness between her legs was already going cold.
Mickey lit a cigarette he’d pulled from a hidden seam in his own clothes. He offered her one. She shook her head.
“You’re a weird fucking chick, Sullivan,” he said finally, exhaling smoke toward the flickering light.
She didn’t answer. She was listening. To the distant sirens, to the echo of a cell door slamming somewhere else. To the silent, screaming calculation in her own mind. Spencer would be working the problem right now. The genius, with his files and his facts. He would be trying to solve her.
He had no idea where the evidence would lead. She barely did herself. The game had changed. The performance was over. Now it was about survival. And the only script left was the one she’d been running from her whole life.