Chapter 6

I’m not miserable. I’m happy, and funny, and a good person to be around. Go fuck yourself.

-Ridley’s secret thoughts

Ridley

I couldn’t find my phone.

After the shakedown last night, and the fight that had broken out in the middle of it, I’d had it. Then this morning, after breakfast, I couldn’t find it.

At first I wasn’t too worried about it, thinking that maybe one of the guards confiscated it to protect me.

But I was wrong. So fucking wrong.

All it took was one single meeting with Tasty to know that he had it.

He was more open, feeding me line after line of information that I’d had to practically squeeze out of him the entire month prior to this day.

So no, I wasn’t stupid.

Far from it, actually.

“Your woman’s gonna try to come.”

My heart sank.

I’d told her not to come.

I’d even attempted to call her.

Or had tried. I’d had to have Wolf track down the number for me through the Sheriff’s Department since I’d never thought to memorize her fuckin’ number. I’d left a voicemail for her using the nurse’s phone that ran the infirmary with an iron fist of doom.

She hadn’t wanted to let me use it, and really wasn’t going to let me until Kelly had instructed her to allow me to do whatever the fuck I’d wanted.

Now, I realized my mistake.

I should’ve tried harder to reach her, kept calling her until she knew not to come.

One voicemail obviously hadn’t been enough.

“Tell her to leave if she shows,” I ordered, shaking my head. “But don’t let her come in here, no matter what.”

Today was the day we’d been intending to set up Tasty with the threat of his wife being in trouble, and she really had gotten in trouble.

Real trouble.

The kind that got her dead.

And today was the day that Tasty would be figuring it out.

And I’d get all the information I could out of him before I got free of this stupid cesspool of a place.

Tonight would be the night I was leaving, whether Kelly was ready for me to or not.

“You know what to do?” I asked Bull.

Bull nodded.

“Good,” I said. “I’ll see you later on. Gotta make this look good,” I mumbled, then walked out into the yard.

The first person to come up to me was the sick fuck, Jeffrey Steels, a man who was in for life for raping his niece, then killing her with his bare hands.

Why in the hell he wanted to talk to me, I didn’t know, but he did.

Every single time we got into the yard.

“Go away,” I said to him.

Jeffrey didn’t listen.

“So I heard that Rick-Rack is going to get shivved today, and that they’re going to target that big guard, you know the old one? When he comes to help,” Jeffrey said, sounding almost giddy about the possibility.

I didn’t act like his news affected me, only kept walking and keeping my eyes in the direction of the weight machines that I was walking to.

“Yeah?” I said. “That’s cool.”

It wasn’t.

When the time came, I’d make sure Bull knew to keep his eyes open.

Not that he’d really need to be told.

The man had been doing this for a good twenty years, and he wasn’t a green trainee. He knew to keep his eyes open, and also knew not to turn his back on potential danger.

This Rick-Rack, who happened to be another shithead who was in for rape, only this one being a child, rarely saw any time at all when he wasn’t hurt.

There was a rule in prison.

You didn’t rape, and you didn’t do anything to kids. Period.

That was the reason that Jeffrey thought this was so funny. For once, it wasn’t him getting the bad end of the stick.

“Yeah,” Jeffrey confirmed. “Supposed to happen at high noon.”

Then he was gone, spreading his cheer and love to the other inmates that hated him.

I gritted my teeth and walked to the lone open weight bench, loading it up with two more plates on each side before I sat down, leaned back, and did ten reps.

“Most people work up to three hundred and twenty pounds, and sometimes never attain that goal, you start at it. Why?” Tasty wondered, bringing my attention to him.

“Work out a lot,” I lied. “Gym rat.”

He snorted.

“You get all those scars working out in the gym, too?” he persisted.

I gritted my teeth, pumping a few more reps, and then replaced the bar.

My heart was pounding, not just because of the exertion, but because Tasty was near.

I wasn’t stupid.

The man was my size, so at least six foot four in height. He was built like a brick shithouse, and could easily bench exactly what I was benching.

He may be older, in his early fifties, but he wasn’t a slacker like some of the other older inmates.

No, this guy was just as jacked as the rest of them.

Meaning he was a bigger threat than most.

And the look in his eyes didn’t really bode well.

“Got the scars from having to fight for food when I was a kid,” I murmured, purposefully being evasive.

It wasn’t totally a lie, either.

I’d been the provider for my family since I was sixteen years of age and my grandmother finally passed from her fight with cancer.

It’d been just me, Connor, and Kitt for as long as I could remember.

With Kitt being three years younger than me, she hadn’t been able to do much more than watch herself.

Connor was just a dickhead who didn’t help because he couldn’t be bothered to.

That didn’t stop him from helping himself to whatever was available though, and damning everybody else in the meantime.

“Your brother, the cop,” Tasty said.

I loaded another ten-pound weight on the bar, then waved my hand in front of the bench.

Tasty shook his head, offering the bench back to me.

I took it, acting for all I was worth like a man who could give one less of a fuck as I went about with another full set of reps.

All the while, Tasty watched me.

“What about him?” I wondered between breaths.

“I saw he didn’t have any tattoos,” he started.

I shook my head, re-racking the weights, then laughed.

“My brother’s a stuck up, uptight asshole who’d never let the ink of a needle mar his skin,” I informed him. “He’s a pussy, plain and simple. Hates my tattoos, too.”

“Is he scared of ‘em?” he asked.

My brain started to whirl as I searched for the trap, but I didn’t see it until it was way too late.

“No,” I said, hoping that was the answer he was looking for.

“Good,” he said. “You wanna go get tattooed?”

Fuck.

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I looked over to where Tasty was pointing, and my heart almost beat out of my chest.

“You want me to get one of those…from him?” I asked, sounding slightly grossed out, but definitely not scared.

Good.

“T-low won’t hurt you…too bad,” he grinned. “This is what every man gets when they get into the big house. This is your first time in here, so I was just letting you know tradition.”

I could see where this would go if I didn’t do it.

Downhill.

So I did what I had to do.

“Fine,” I called his bluff. “Let’s do it.”

Luck was on my side, though, because the fight that Jeffrey told me about earlier suddenly broke out, leaving the area in chaos.

Thirty minutes later, Bull and I were both bleeding.

“Thanks,” Bull breathed heavily, taking a white towel that the nurse had handed him.

He placed it on his forehead, then we both watched as the nurse busied herself with the front of the room, cleaning up the mess she’d made when she’d treated both Bull and me.

“You’re welcome,” I waved him off. “Fuck, my face hurts.”

“You’re going to have about twenty new scars when you finally get out of here,” Bull observed.

I grimaced.

“I know,” I agreed, knowing it was true.

A brisk knock at the door had us both looking up just in time to see Jessup walking in like he’d been cattle prodded in the ass.

“What is it?” Bull asked him.

“Umm,” Jessup said. “Your woman. She’s causing a scene.”