Cracking my neck, I rubbed the raw spot on the back of my shaved head where his knuckles had pressed and eyed him. I was giving him ample opportunity to turn tail and leave. I didn’t know this new kid, but I knew he was at least a foot shorter than I was and had never lifted a weight in his life. I could tell by his puny arms.
Many of the inmates lifted weights in the prison, but they did it to bulk up… to better be able to protect themselves. Not me. Lifting was my only escape inside. I didn’t lift weights to build muscle or to be the biggest motherfucker on the block. I did it to relieve tension. To press away all the bad memories.
His nostrils flared and he held his arms out at his sides, his hands opening and closing into tiny fists. He was scared, looking for acceptance. I didn’t blame him. Prison was a scary place.
I looked him in the eye, taking notice of the fear that swam in his. His rapid heartbeat tapped against the side of his neck, and sweat glistened on the top of his brow. He was having second thoughts. Good. I didn’t want to fight this kid, but if he wanted to go at it, I was going to protect myself.
I didn’t speak often, so instead of talking to him, I lifted a brow, asking him if he seriously wanted to do this.
His expression shifted, and briefly, I thought he would be smart and walk away. But then he reached behind him, taking a paper blade from one of the gang members egging him on.
“Cut his heart out, bro. Earn your fucking spot,” Carlos pushed.
Carlos was a real fucked-up piece of work—had been since the day he stepped foot on the block. He was the leader of the Mexican Mafia, but he didn’t speak a drop of Spanish. Go figure. Somehow, though, he still managed to run shit. It never made any sense to me why a group of men would follow someone who couldn’t even understand half of them.
Again, the newbie held up his paper blade, taking my attention away from Carlos and the guys behind him.
A fucking paper blade? Seriously? They were practically setting him up to fail.
I’d had a lot of weapons pulled on me over the years. From toothbrush shanks to peeled paint balled up into hard paintballs to soda cans—inmates came up with all kinds of crazy shit to use. Being on the block meant becoming inventive. These boys pulled out some serious smarts when it came to making weapons.
It might sound crazy, but a whittled-down, sharpened toothbrush could do a lot of damage. Shit, I would know. I spent two days in the infirmary thanks to one of those bitches. The nasty scar it left behind was a constant reminder to never turn my back on another inmate.
And when it came to the fist-sized paintballs, those motherfuckers hurt like hell. Inmates put them in socks and slung them against your head. I’d felt a beating from one of those bitches. It was like getting socked by a cinderblock. I woke up a few hours later with a knot the size of my fist on the side of my head.
I had scars from some of the most ridiculous shit. Shivs. Shanks. Any weapon these assholes could manage, but paper blades were the dumbest. This small guy needed a big weapon, and I almost smiled at how ridiculous he looked holding the tiny, sharpened roll of papers. It was probably thirty pages from a National Geographic in the library.
Death by a research and science magazine. Yeah, fucking right.
Newbies favored the paper blade because they were easy to make, nothing more than rolling the paper up extremely tight, soaping it down, and salting it. It made the paper hard enough to punch through skin like metal. The main advantage to the paper blade was it could be unrolled and destroyed simply by flushing it down the john. That shit came in handy when the COs started to toss the cells.
Still, the blade was small, which meant for it to be effective, he needed to get close to me. Once I had my hands on him, it wouldn’t matter what he was packing.
I stood there, unflinching, and waited for him to attack. And then he did. He moved quickly. His small stature gave him the advantage of speed, but he ran right into me, giving me the chance to yank him up before he could even swipe the blade my way.
The gang members covered their smiles behind their palms. They had obviously set him up to fail. These men were bored and watching some kid get his ass whipped was considered entertainment.
Fuck that.
I wasn’t a dancing monkey.
Scooping the newbie up and pressing him against the wall with one hand, I yanked the paper blade from him and tossed him to the side like a sack of laundry. He scrambled back on his hands and knees, running into the group of watchers, all dying for some form of excitement.
Their smiles disappeared, and they peered angrily at me for not snapping on the dude and beating him within an inch of his life. That wasn’t my thing.
I knew what was coming, but it didn’t matter. As I held the paper blade in my hand, seven of the gang members surrounded me, pissed that I wasn’t playing their game. Their tattoos were shiny from sweat, and their black hair was slicked back with oil. Dark brown eyes took in my stance, sizing me up for their attack.
My eyes skimmed over them as I tried to figure out which one would pounce first, but they surprised me when all seven jumped on me at once.
As I fought back, my fists flew and made contact several times. I didn’t use the paper blade even if seven on one wasn’t a fair fight. I was old school, so fuck it. If I was going to go down, I was going down swinging, but I held my own. It wasn’t until one of them stuck me in the leg with a blade that I went down completely.
Officers filled the room at that moment, pulling the fight apart and ripping the paper blade from my fist without even noticing the other guy with his blade. As usual, they ignored everyone else who brandished a weapon. I was on their shit list and didn’t have any of them in my pocket, which meant I was the one who always got the short straw.
No one ever said the COs were fair. Money and drugs were the only language they understood.
Before long, I was being cuffed and shuffled off to the infirmary. The smell of my blood filled my senses and sent my memories reeling. The gang members who jumped me laughed as I was hauled off, spitting onto the cold concrete at my feet.
My leg ached where the blade had entered, and my khakis were slowly turning rusty red. I walked to the infirmary without a limp and with my head held high. I wouldn’t let those fuckers know how badly my leg hurt.
While three of us, Carlos included, went to the infirmary, the rest of them went back to their cells. A few of them, including the newbie, had run at the first sight of custody moving in. I smirked to myself, knowing that I’d at least gotten a piece of Carlos and some other asshole. I knew for sure that Carlos would need stitches. I’d felt his skin rip when I hit him.
Officer Reeves roughed me up on the way to the infirmary. He was a dirty bastard who thrived off excessive force. He had eyed me the first day I entered the block. I’d seen the way his eyes took me in, and I wondered if maybe he was thinking of trying to make me his bitch. Honestly, the way he’d looked me over was one of the main reasons I’d started lifting weights.
He kept his eyes on me for weeks until he finally approached me. Believe it or not, the COs posed more of a risk than the inmates did. When he made contact with me, I found out that the COs spent thousands gambling. There was somewhat of an officer-sanctioned “fight club” for entertainment. They’d put inmate against inmate and paid the winner a percentage. In his eyes, I was a prized fighter.
The winning inmate was given more than a percentage, though. They were given special privileges and rewards that were not usually found in the prison. Things were expunged from their records. Contraband was overlooked and sometimes even given to them. Money. Drugs. Weapons. Protection. Women. There was a lot to gain in the fighting ring, but nothing I wanted or needed.
I’d turned him down then, and I’d continued to do so for the last ten years. The bastard hated me for that and made my life hell. In his mind, if he kept it up, he’d break me. He wanted to use me as his own fighter dog. He wanted me to rip apart the competition and earn him thousands.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Inmates were nothing to the COs. We were treated like dogs, fed and bred by the officers who had the money to invest in their animal. They rewarded and punished their asset just enough to make sure the big dogs stayed on top and the rest stayed exactly where they were meant to be.
It was lucrative, especially for a guy like me. Reeves wasn’t the only one who had tried a time or two to get me to fight. Going against the COs was almost as dangerous as fighting in their club. It made you a target, something to be beaten down and destroyed for not obeying and jumping through their hoops, but none of it mattered to me. I fought to survive. End of story. The ones who had everything to gain and nothing to lose hated me for that.
“Move your ass, X,” Officer Reeves said, pressing his baton into my back.
The bars clicked and clanked before banging into the open position. I followed Officer Reeves into the infirmary with my head down. The smell of the antiseptic in the room always made me feel nauseated.
I looked up, and there she was. The new nurse. She was wearing a pair of soft pink scrubs. There was nothing sexy about her clothes, but she looked so delicate and sweet. Honestly, she was the most beautiful creature I’d laid eyes on in my life.
I wasn’t sure if it was her angelic beauty casting off her porcelain skin or the sheer mystery she appeared to be, but all I could do was stand there, stunned. She was simply breathtaking.
A tiny batch of freckles was scattered across her pert nose, and even from where I stood, I could see the swirls of caramel brown in her green eyes. Her lips were pink and pouty as if she were pondering life’s greatest mysteries. Every now and again, she’d nibble the side of her lip as if she were unsure.
Most of her long, auburn hair was piled on top of her head, as if she’d run out of time when she was pulling it into a ponytail, and her baby pink scrubs hung from her tiny frame.
The muscle in my arm flexed beneath Officer Reeves’ fingers as he ushered me to a nearby bed, and I had to tear my eyes away from her.
She was too pretty. Looked too sweet for such a sour place. She didn’t belong there, and I was sure she knew that. If it was the last thing I did, I’d make sure she didn’t stay long.
Officer Reeves pushed me back onto the bed, smirking down at me. He knew there was nothing I could do to him, so he could be as rough as he wanted. Fucking power-hungry piece of shit.
Stepping to the side, he took his spot next to the door. I watched as he eye-fucked the new nurse while she made her way across the room to collect supplies.
I turned away. I couldn’t watch.
The bed he pushed me on was close to a window, which made me happy. I hadn’t had yard time in days, and my body craved the sun. Birds chirped in the distance, and I could hear them through the thin pane of glass separating me from the outside world.
Closing my eyes, I pretended I wasn’t stuck behind cinderblock walls and I was outside the barbed fencing. Ten years was a long time to be locked away. I was beginning to forget what it felt like to be free.
“It’s a nice day out,” a soft voice commented at my side.
Opening my eyes, I raked her face with my hard stare, connecting the fawn-colored freckles on her nose and cheeks. She swallowed hard. Looking away, she grabbed a pair of scissors to cut my khakis away from my wound.
I didn’t respond. Instead, I turned away and let her do her job.
After she cut away the fabric, revealing the deep stab wound in my leg, she used cotton to soak up the blood that was still seeping from it. Her fingers trembled, showing her fear and insecurities.
Good.
She should be afraid of me. Hopefully, I’d scare her off and she’d leave her position as soon as possible. The truth was that I knew these people. The officers. The inmates. And I knew they would eat her alive.
The inmates would visualize her naked. They’d think about all the graphic things they wanted to do to her body—sick, twisted, perverted things. It made my stomach turn. The rapists who roamed the halls would debate over how and when they would attack her.
The guards would be helpful for a while, but those bastards were just as dirty, if not dirtier, than the inmates were. Most of them weren’t married and had no life outside of the prison walls. They spent countless hours with the lowest form of scum this world had to offer—men with nothing to lose and more time to gain—men so disgusting you wondered if they were ever human.
The guards who had been there too long were, in a way, taught and trained by the inmates who would die there. They were deprived of a female’s sweet touch, so they, too, would plot ways to get her alone, rub up against her, and talk dirty to her until not even the hottest of showers could wash away the stench of their breath.
Anger began to swim behind my eyes. Fury toward any person who thought hiring her was a good idea. But then she laid her glove-covered fingers across my hard skin, and I looked into her eyes.
“This might sting a little, Mr. X.” She smiled sheepishly.
She was right. Her smile stung me somewhere deep. Some place I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge for a long time. One I couldn’t afford to retain. It was too soft—too sensitive for a place like prison.
I didn’t like it. She needed to go.
CHAPTER 3
LYLA
HE WAS HARD. His body was like granite and just as carved and beautiful as a Greek statue. Later, when I was home, alone and safe, I’d be ashamed of every lustful thought I had over the inmate in front of me, but in that moment, I couldn’t think logically. I tried to keep my hands from shaking, but it was like they had a mind of their own. All they could think about was the feel of his muscles beneath them.
Dr. Giles was across the room, patching up another inmate. He wasn’t paying me any attention, and I was deathly afraid I was going to do something wrong.
Taking this job wasn’t a great idea. The more X stared at me, obviously trying to rattle me, the more nervous and unsure I became. His emotionless eyes moved over my face without blinking. He could see my fear, or at least smell it. Predators could sense terror, and this man was the epitome of one.
I schooled my expression and silently begged my hands to settle. Shaky hands made my fear obvious, and we weren’t supposed to show we were afraid. Already, I was failing.
After cleaning his wound, I examined it. It was deep. Even though I knew he had to be in an immeasurable amount of pain, he didn’t flinch. Not even when I packed the wound tightly with gauze.
My eyes moved over his body, taking note of the many scrapes and scars that marred his skin. He was everything Dr. Giles said he was—an emotionless monster out for blood—out for death. His arms, chest, and sides were like a tribute to his violent tendencies. The tats running down his back and arms did little to hide the scars that graced his body.
It was obvious he was in a lot of fights, considering the marks on his body. Moving my eyes over his flesh, I counted over fifteen wounds, all healed over, and some more than once. My hands trembled again slightly. It wasn’t from fear, but out of curiosity. I wanted to run my fingers over his skin and feel the ridges and bumps of his scars. I wanted to know if I touched them, could I feel the pain behind them? Would he allow me to feel his pain?
It made me wonder how many fights he’d been in to have so many scars, and those were just the visible ones. It made me wonder why he’d been in so many and how he’d managed to stay alive each time. I thought about a lot of things I probably shouldn’t care about, but that didn’t seem to stop the questions from producing one after another.
“How’s that feel?” I asked, hoping to deter his attention.
His stare made me feel tiny and insignificant. As if I weren’t good enough to clean the blood from his wounds. Maybe I wasn’t. Perhaps I wasn’t yet good enough at this job, but I had to get better. I had to work so that I could live. Because of that, I wouldn’t give up. At least not yet.
He didn’t respond to my question. Instead, he nodded his head a
nd lowered his eyes, allowing me a brief reprieve from his heated stare. I took a deep breath while I could and continued to work.
He seethed from his seat, hate pouring off him in waves, as his eyes shifted around. They landed on another inmate across the room and they locked eyes, staring death and daggers at each other. If it weren’t for the two COs standing between them, they’d be killing each other instead of sitting there promising death with their expressions.
I stitched him up, my needle piercing his skin and closing the gaping wound. He sat stoic as if he were in no pain, and I was in awe of him in that moment. I couldn’t handle a paper cut, much less a stabbing. Yet, it was nothing for inmate X. He didn’t flinch or make a single noise. He sat as still as stone, glaring at the other inmate, and obviously plotting his death.
When I was done, I cleaned his wound once more and bandaged his leg. I noticed his thighs were almost as big as I was as I wrapped one tightly, making sure to apply lots of pressure. Moving to get the tape, I accidently brushed against his knee and he stiffened, scaring me and making me drop my supplies.
I kept my eyes on his as I leaned over and snatched the tape from the floor. The side of his mouth twitched like he was seconds away from laughing at me. The asshole was getting off on my fear, and it kind of pissed me off.
My brows pulled down in anger as I stood and finished securing the bandage. I was angry. My hands were no longer shaking and my pulse was rapid, but not because I was afraid. I was pissed off. Who did he think he was?
As I straightened my back, my green eyes locked with his royal blues. I refused to blink even though he stared at me intently without wavering. He obviously wanted to see my fear, but I wasn’t having it. Although I was freaking out on the inside, I had to prove to him I could handle this—that I could handle him.
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