I shut my eyes. Fuck, if this was a nightmare, would someone just wake me up already?!

“Well, boy, now that you know about him, you better start pleading your case to me, otherwise they’re going to find you swinging off a branch too.”

My eyes whipped open. “Pleading my case? I didn’t do anything!”

He shrugged and finally locked his cold eyes to mine. “Yeah, but now I told you about the man, told you what I’ll do his wife and why. I can’t let you walk out into the world knowing you’ve got that kind of information against me.”

What in the holy fuck? He told me the “information”, and now he was using it against me? My head spun. My headache worsened as I tried to think my way through this. Did this man just enjoy trapping people? Was he setting me up?

It was a sick game.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, knowing full well I sounded desperate.

“Well, depends. What’re you willing to do for me?”

I didn’t know. He could see that from my silence.

He sighed heavily, shaking his head in disappointment. “You’re proving yourself useless to me. Thought I saw some fire in you, waking up and swearing your little heart out. Thought I could use a young man. Guess not.”

He stood up, and my body jolted with panic.

Think.

Think!

THINK!

“I’ll find you that money,” I let out in a rush, fighting the tremble in my voice. “That man had a daughter. I can – I can get it to you through her. She won’t suspect it. N-none of them will.”

He looked down at me with furrowed brows. “Why would I do that?”

“Because a suicidal father will seem real suspicious if something bad happened to the mother too.”

He stared at me hard, and I couldn’t for the life of me read his emotion. The seconds ticked by at an excruciatingly slow pace… until finally, his lips curved up and he smiled widely with a crazed look in his eyes.

“Boy, I like you.”

I sagged in the chair with relief.

“I’m Boss,” he then said, leaning over to look me in the eye, “and you’ll learn very fast that you’ll never want to fuck me over. Because nobody ever walks away.”

*

Prison is like a giant pause in your life.

You know time is passing, but you don’t feel it. It’s not the isolation from the world that kills you. It’s the repetition. You wake up with no purpose and go to bed dying a little more on the inside. Your heart is nothing more than a reminder that you’re still alive, but it isn’t your most vital organ. It’s not what gives you purpose. It doesn’t tell you how to make it day after day in a place filled with violent criminals.

No, it’s the brain that keeps you going. The brain tells you what to do. It tells you to keep your fucking head down and never start trouble. To just exist.

Exist.

I was existing. But like a fucking plant in need of water, I was wilting. I needed her. I needed that water. I needed her to put some breath into me again, to give me hope that there was something good on the other side.

Which is fucked up. Because having hope in a place like this was a dangerous thing. It made the fall that much higher – that much harder.

Most days I cursed her. She abandoned me, but for the life of me I couldn’t find it in me to hate her. I knew in some fucked up way this was karma. I didn’t deserve her, but I’ll be damned if she thought being away from me meant we were done.

She was mine.

I never sought to fall in love with her. It just happened. But I knew the exact second it started to happen, and those memories haunted me every night I was alone in my cell.

“Get up, Lawson,” came a voice, jolting me awake. “Got a visitor, ya prick.”

I got up and on came the chains. “Fucked up bastard,” the fat guard, Jacko, muttered as he went, abusing me because I took it with my mouth shut. “Sad looking shit, aren’t you?” Yeah, he could talk. I’d let him. He didn’t know what I was capable of, but the more he went on, the more I reserved a spot for him in the future where he’d see it. He’d know exactly who he was fucking with.

He took me down to the visiting wing.

I hoped it wasn’t Matt again. The shit that man had fed me the last time he was here was downright mental. Talking about how Heath wanted Allie – my Allie!

I thought about our conversation on my way.

“She’s not waiting for you,” he’d blurted out, avoiding my eyes as he shrugged in defeat. “There is absolutely no mention of you to anyone. She spends all her time going to school and being at the apartment with Heath. I don’t… What the fuck do you want me to say, Ryker? She’s not waiting for you, man.”

I didn’t let those words settle. I treated them as though it was wind; a slight whip in the face and it was gone.

“It’s Heath, man,” he continued, finally looking me in the eyes while he tapped his fingers nervously on the table. “He’s been spending a lot of time with her, Ryker.”

I rubbed my face in exasperation. The fuck did it matter? “I’d rather she spend time with my brother than any other man in that piece of shit, rat nest of a fucking town, Matt. I told him to look out for her –”

“If you saw the way he looked out for her, Ryker, you’d be pissed the hell off, too.”

I didn’t respond for a few seconds. I searched his face. Was he high? The man was getting it wrong. I knew what he was trying to imply, but that shit made no sense to me. Heath promised he was going to be there for her. I trusted him to stick to his word, and by the sounds of it, he was. He had a nice, hot little thing on the side, and Allie was far below his league. He’d never looked at her, never cared when she was around. This was harmless, and he was probably annoyed as fuck I’d left him to do this shit.

“You’re getting it wrong,” I told Matt. “I’m positive it ain’t like that.”

Matt blinked hard at me in annoyance and shook his head. “Fine, man. Don’t believe me then. But I know what I’m seeing, and they’re close. She never goes anywhere without him.”

Again, just wind. Maybe I was putting up a wall, or some shit. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it, but at the end of the day, it didn’t make sense to me. If they ever got together – God fucking help Heath if he took it that far – it would be the shock of my life. I’d kill him. And I guess that was what scared me the most.