Prisoner Read online

  PRISONER

  Annika Martin & Skye Warren

  PRISONER

  He seethes with raw power the first time I see him—pure menace and rippling muscles in shackles. He’s dangerous. He’s wild. He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

  So I hide behind my prim glasses and my book like I always do, because I have secrets too. Then he shows up in the prison writing class I have to teach, and he blows me away with his honesty. He tells me secrets in his stories, and it’s getting harder to hide mine. I shiver when he gets too close, with only the cuffs and the bars and the guards holding him back. At night I can’t stop thinking about him in his cell.

  But that’s the thing about an animal in a cage—you never know when he’ll bite. He might use you to escape. He might even pull you into a forest and hold a hand over your mouth so you can’t call for the cops. He might make you come so hard, you can’t think.

  And you might crave him more than your next breath.

  “Sexy, dark, and thrilling. I loved every second of it!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Katie Reus

  “Dark, sexy, and intense, Prisoner is an emotional ride that does not let go until the end. I loved it!”

  —USA Today bestselling author Kristen Callihan

  Chapter One

  ~Abigail~

  Heavy bars close behind me with a clang. I feel the sound in my bones. A series of mechanical clicks hint at an elaborate security mechanism beneath the black iron plating. I knew this would happen—had anticipated and dreaded it—but my breathing quickens with the knowledge that I am well and truly trapped.

  “Can I help you?”

  I whirl to face the administrative window where a heavyset woman in a security guard uniform stares at her screen.

  “Hi,” I say, pasting on a smile. “My name is Abigail Winslow, and I’m here to—”

  “Two forms of identification.”

  “Oh, well, I already filled out the paperwork at the front desk. And showed them my IDs.”

  “This isn’t the front desk, Ms. Winslow. This is the east-wing desk, and I need to see two forms of identification.”

  “Right.” I dig through my bag for my driver’s license and passport.

  She accepts them without looking up, then hands me a clipboard with a stack of papers just like the ones I already filled out.

  I’ve been dreading this day for weeks, wishing I’d been assigned any other project but this one. You’d think I was being sent here for a crime. My professor—the one who’d forced me into this—warned me that prisoners were not always receptive to outsiders. Apparently nobody here is.

  I complete each form, arrange the pages neatly on the clipboard, and bring them back up to the window. The guard accepts them and gives back my IDs…still without looking at me.

  My hands clench and unclench, clench and unclench while the guard eyes my paperwork.

  Seconds pass. Or are they minutes? The damp chill of the place seeps in through my cardigan and leaves me shivering.

  Leaning forward, I read the name tag of the guard. “Ms. Breck. Do you know what the next steps are?”

  “You can have a seat. I have work to do now, and then I’ll escort you back.”

  “Oh, okay.” I glance at the bars I just came through, then the open hallway opposite. “Actually, if you just point me in the direction of the library, I’m sure I can—”

  Thunk. The woman’s hand hits the desk. I jump. Her dark eyes are faintly accusing, and I wish we could go back to no eye contact. How did I manage to make an enemy in two minutes?

  “Ms. Winslow,” she says, her voice patronizing.

  “You can call me Abby,” I whisper.

  A slight smile. Not a nice one. “Ms. Winslow, what do you think we do here?”

  The question is clearly rhetorical. I press my lips together to keep from making things worse.

  “The Kingman Correctional Facility houses over five thousand convicted criminals. My job is to keep it that way. Do we understand each other?”

  Heat floods my cheeks. The last thing I want to do is make her job harder. “Right. Of course.” I shamble back, landing hard on the metal folding chair. It wobbles a little before the rubber feet stop my slide.

  I understand the woman’s point. She has to keep the prisoners in and everyone else out, and keep people like me safe.

  I reach down and pull a book from my bag. I never leave home without one, even when I go to classes or run errands. Even when I was young and my mother used to take me on her rounds.

  Especially then.

  I would hide in the backseat with my nose in the book, pretending I didn’t see the shady people who came to her window when we stopped.

  A little green light above the barred doors flashes on and there’s an ominous buzz. Somebody’s coming through, and I doubt it will be a library volunteer. I slide down.

  Pretend to be invisible.

  It’s no use. I peer over the top edge as a prisoner saunters through the door, and my pulse slams in my throat double time.

  He’s flanked by two guards—escorted by them, I guess you’d say. But they seem more like an entourage than anything. Power vibrates around him like a threat.

  Read, read, read. Don’t look.

  The prisoner is half a foot taller than the guards, but he seems to tower over them by more than that. Maybe it’s his broad shoulders or just something about the way he stands, or his imperiously high cheekbones. The dark stubble across his cheeks looks so rough and unforgiving I can feel it against my palm; it contrasts wildly with the plushness of his lips. His short brown hair is mussed. There’s one scar through his eyebrow that somehow adds to his perfection.

  The little group approaches the window. I can barely breathe.

  “ID number 85359,” one of the guards says, and I understand that he’s referring to the prisoner. That’s who he is. Not John Smith or William Brown or whatever his name is. He’s been reduced to a number. The woman at the desk runs through a series of questions. It’s a procedure for checking him out of solitary.

  The prisoner faces sideways, spine straight, the corner of his mouth tilted up as if he’s slightly amused. Then it clicks, what else is so different about him: no visible tattoos. Tough guys like this, they’re always inked up—it’s a kind of armor, a kind of fuck you. This guy has none of it, though he’s far from pristine; white scars mar the rough skin of his hands and especially his forearms, a latticework of pain and violence, a flag proclaiming the kind of underworld he came from.

  The feel of brutality that hangs about him is compelling and…somehow beautiful.

  I drink him in from behind my book—it’s my mask, my protective shield. But then the strangest thing happens: he cocks his head. It’s just a slight shift, but I feel his attention on me deep in my belly. I’ve been discovered. Caught by searchlights. Exposed.

  My heart beats frantically.

  I want him to look away. He fills up too much space. It’s as if he breathes enough oxygen for twelve men, leaving no air for me at all. Maybe if we were in the library and he needed help finding a book or looking something up, then I wouldn’t mind the weight of his attention.

  No. Not even there. He’s too much.

  Two sets of bars on the gate. Handcuffs. Two guards.

  What do they think he would do if there were only one set of bars, one guard?

  My blood races as the guards draw him away from the window and toward the inner door, toward where I sit. His heat pierces the chill around me as he nears. His deep brown eyes never once meet mine, but I have the sense of him looming over me as he passes, like a tree with a massive canopy. He continues on, two hundred pounds of masculine danger wrapped in all that beauty.

/>   Even in chains, he seems vibrant, wild and free, a force of nature—it makes me feel like I’m the one in prison. Safe. Small. Carefully locked down.

  How would it feel to be that free?

  “Ms. Winslow. Ms. Winslow.”

  I jump, surprised to hear that the woman has been calling my name. “I’m sorry,” I say as a strange sensation tickles the back of my neck.

  The woman stands and begins pulling on her jacket. “I’ll take you to the library now.”

  “Oh, that’s great.”

  That shivery sensation gets stronger. Against my better judgment, I look down the hallway where the guards and the prisoner are walking off as one—a column of orange flanked by two thinner, shorter posts.

  The prisoner glances over his shoulder. His mocking brown gaze searches me out, pins me with a subtle threat. Though it isn’t his eyes that scare me. It’s his lips—those beautiful, generous lips forming words that make my blood race.

  Ms. Winslow.

  No sound comes out, but I feel as though he’s whispered my name right into my ear. Then he turns and strolls off.

  Chapter Two

  ~Grayson~

  I collapse onto the hard cement floor, cool against the sweat and burn of my arms and shoulders. Teke’s up on the top bunk, scribbling in a notebook. He’s been buried in that thing the whole hour I’ve been doing push-ups. What the hell is he writing? It’s weird, him writing, and when you’re locked up, you notice anything weird.

  I yank out my earbuds and turn off my iPod, and the heavy bass is replaced by the tormented cries and mindless noise that goes on 24-7 in this place.

  He catches me looking. “What?”

  “You Stephen King up there or what?”

  “Maybe.”

  I grunt like I don’t care, but now I need to know. I sit up and mop my face with a threadbare washcloth. Teke never offers information for free. Putting me in here with him, it’s just another punishment. Teke is dangerous, yeah. But not to me.

  Guys inside, they’re like dogs. They smell what you are the moment they meet you. Decide right off whether they can fuck with you. I work a kink out of my neck, hoping he offers more.

  “Telling my story.” He flips a page. “It’s therapeutic, man, don’t you know?” His tone drips with sarcasm.

  Now I really do look at him, because when you’re inside, you don’t reveal personal shit. That’s how you survive. “The fuck?”

  “My years as a poor misunderstood brown boy. For English class.”

  English class. That explains it. Teke’s been working hard to better himself through education, or at least pretending to. I can’t blame him. He gets time knocked off for educational achievements, and he has parole coming up. A family on the outside. A mother who still thinks he’s innocent.

  Nothing I do will cut my sentence or make my time easier. When you get convicted of killing a cop, you’re done.

  They put guys like Teke in prisons close to their family system so they can keep up their relationships with a hope to go straight.

  It’s the opposite with me. They put me hundreds of miles away from my crew. They took my phone and letter-writing privileges. No contact with the outside world.

  Makes it hard to escape. But not impossible. Nothing stops me and my crew. Killing a cop is one of the only bad things I haven’t done.

  Teke keeps scribbling. “Just some tragic shit from high school.”

  “You’re putting true shit in there?”

  “Ms. Winslow knows when you make it up.”

  Ms. Winslow. My body stills as I flash back to her sitting there in that metal folding chair. The way she looked at me over her book.

  That look was a bolt through my gut.

  She had these fine features, like a doll or something, and her brown hair was up in a bun like some fucking librarian. Hiding behind her book. The kind of woman nobody sees, but I saw her. I saw the way she shifted. Saw myself twisting that long brown hair around my fist as I fucked her face.

  I see you looking at me, I thought at her. You take a good long look, baby.

  I’ve been told I’m beautiful. By women. By men. I hate it every time.

  “Nothing close to the bone,” Teke adds.

  “You couldn’t pay me enough to dance like a trained monkey for some teacher,” I say. More than that, I would never tell anybody about my past. They wouldn’t believe it if I did.

  Teke eyes me. I’m pushing his buttons, but I can’t stop because Ms. Winslow is at the other end of it. What is it about her?

  “Telling some fucking sob story.” I move to one-armed push-ups. Five sets of one hundred push-ups, and then I’ll move on to jump squats.

  Teke goes back to his notebook.

  I burn through my set, but I can’t get Ms. Winslow out of my mind, peering over the top of her book with those searching brown eyes, scared, maybe a little bit excited. And then that flare in her gaze when I tasted her name on my lips. Ms. Winslow.

  My pulse kicks up. How would it feel to push her? To undo her? To break her fucking glasses? Because I got the sense she might like her glasses broken.

  Yeah, the distance between prim and primitive is not so very motherfucking far. I wonder if Ms. Winslow knows about that.

  I finish my set and collapse.

  The more I think about it, the less I like the idea of Teke and the other guys telling Ms. Winslow personal stories.

  “Stupid high school stories,” he explains, maybe taking my silence for judgment of him.

  I grunt.

  “I don’t give a crap,” Teke continues, not that I asked. “Let all those fuckers on the Internet read it. See what I care.”

  My gaze rivets onto him. “What fuckers on the Internet?” None of us have access to the Internet.

  “Our stories. They’re going in this journal she’s putting together. The Kingman Journal.”

  “To go on the Internet?”

  Teke shrugs. “Who’s going to read it?”

  I pat my forehead with the cloth, trying not to look like every cell in my brain is buzzing. She’s putting the stories online…for the outside world to read. It’s exactly the break I need.

  “Maybe I’d like to write my memoirs,” I say.

  “What? You?”

  I shrug. “Why the fuck not?”

  “Too late. Class is full.”

  “Maybe there’s room for one more.”

  Teke gives me a disgusted look because he knows I’ll find a way in.

  I put in my earbuds and crank the music, mind spinning.

  I wait a day to try to get permission to sign up for the class, until Dixon is on duty. I go up to him at lunch. The newest guards on this wing, they’ll say no to anything because they’re scared assholes who don’t want to look soft. The old-time guards want to break your balls. But a guy like Dixon, he’s been around enough that he’s done establishing his cred, but he hasn’t put in enough years to erase the hope that people can better themselves.

  He eyes me under his tan cap. “You suddenly want to take a class? You up to something?”

  I shrug.

  “An English class. You want to take an English class.”

  “What? I read. You’ve seen me reading.” I know he has.

  He twists his lips and pulls out his iPad. Every guard has one now. He turns it so I can’t see and slides his thumb across the screen a few times. Maybe he feels protective of poor Ms. Winslow. Maybe he sees what I see—a woman so carefully put together, she’s just begging to be messed with. But that’s the last thing on my mind. I’m planning to be a star student.

  “Guidelines say twelve to sixteen.” He looks up. “I’m seeing sixteen. And it’s already started.”

  “You can’t stick another in? Maybe ask her…” Because guidelines are made to broken. Like rules. Like people.

  He looks back down. “What about modern lit? That one’s not full.”

  “I’m more interested in contemporary memoir,” I say. That’s Ms. Winslow’s si
xty-four-dollar name for the class. Contemporary memoir.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  I wait. If he asks her, she’ll say yes, and we both know it.

  When you’re inside, everything has a certain value, and if you want it, you have to trade for it or fight for it. Cigarettes, protection, information, fresh air. If this guard was a fellow prisoner, I could strong-arm him a different way. But he’s a guard, and so we bargain.

  “Fifty bucks…”

  “Guidelines say sixteen students,” he says.

  Damn. “A hundred.” It’s all I have.

  He shakes his head. No.

  This is dangerous. He knows I want it bad. He smells it—the guards have a sixth sense like that. But I have to get in. Teachers like Ms. Winslow don’t last long; I’m betting The Kingman Journal won’t make it past the first issue. And I need to put a little something in that issue.

  I pull my iPod out and slap it onto his desk. My music. It took me months to save for the thing. Even more to buy a few good songs from the shit selection they have at the canteen. No Internet, remember? Well, that’s about to change.

  Dixon pulls out the jack and takes the iPod, leaving me with the earbuds. And just like that, I’m in.

  Chapter Three

  ~Abigail~

  The English department hallway smells like dust and aging paper. I breathe it in, and my heart rate slows. This is a far cry from the cold, gray prison.

  On the first day of class, I’d stood at the front of the room, hands clasped together, knuckles white, as sixteen men in orange jumpsuits filed in. I know what they saw—a prim, buttoned-up schoolgirl. They could sense my uneasiness. I gave out the syllabus, fumbling my speech, stiff and unnatural. The only good thing about the class was that the man from the east entrance hallway wasn’t in there.

  Ms. Winslow.

  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and I can’t go back. I just can’t.

  I head toward my advisor’s office, determined. Desperate. I need her to let me out of this project. One of my classmates is doing a memoir project with high schoolers. Others are working with veterans, nurses, the elderly. It’s not fair that I got the prison inmates. Not when it drags up every bad memory I have. Not when I think I might belong there more than anyone knows.