Even with his lungs heaving, Agent Moses smiles. “A card. It’s sewn into the waistband of his trousers.” Shock must cross my face as he’s quick in his attempts to relieve it. “It’s what’s on the card that’s most important.”
Having neither the time nor the care to seek further information, I point to the tablet playing live footage of Demi and a smirking guard. “Call him off first.” When Agent Moses attempts to assert his authority, I speak louder, “Get her out,thenI’ll do whatever the fuck you want.” I step closer to him with a scowl that leaves no doubt what I say next isn’t a worthless threat. “But I’m not moving from this spot until you call him off.”
He isn’t happy, but he does as told. All cowards do. “Wait for further command,” he instructs down the sleeve of his jacket, advising me he is wired up.
After a beat, he spins the tablet around to face me. It shows Demi sitting back on the chair where she was originally. I know it isn’t dubbed footage. The fear on her face isn’t something that can be doctored, much less the fact Caidyn is now in the room with her.
“Happy?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He moseys over to the chair I knocked over when I pinned him to the wall, then tips it upside down. Confusion twists in my stomach when he removes two items taped to the bottom of the chair. One product is a stopwatch. The other is an instrument I hoped to never see much less use during my time at Wallens Ridge—it’s a shank.
Agent Moses sets the stopwatch for three minutes before he curls the frayed rope necklace around my neck, then conceals it with my plain white t-shirt. When he attempts to shove the shank into my hand, I shake my head.
He chuckles out a breathy laugh. “Do you really think he’ll hand over a card he’s gone to great lengths to hide?” He calls me a fool under his breath before he forces the shank into my hand. When I remain standing still, unsure what the fuck is going on, he nudges his head to the door. “You better hurry. Three minutes is already pushing it. You don’t have time to waste.”
It dawns on me what he’s talking about when he nudges his head to the stopwatch dangling next to my heart. The timer is counting down. I’m on the clock.
With my jaw tight, I push back my anger for a more appropriate time before racing out the door of the meet-up room.
“Let him go,” instructs the warden when one of the guards tries to stop my exit. He peers at me with remorse when I sprint by him, exposing he’s being railroaded by Agent Moses as I am, but he doesn’t attempt to slow me down.
I pass the guard’s hall, a high-traffic area for employees coming and going, then stomp across the wide walkway down one side of C-Block. The narrow walkway is reserved for the guards. With recreation time coming to an end, it takes me dragging my eyes down the slow-moving line heading back to the hull three times before I spot the man Agent Moses pointed out. He’s in the line across from mine. Although he appears to have no gang-affiliated tattoos on his body, I’m still cautious. He isn’t being bumped into like several other new ‘fish.’ He has a four-inch barrier around him. That’s unheard of around here.
I wait for the guard on the steel platform above us to switch his focus to a rowdy group coming in from the yard before switching lines. Much to the dismay of an Asian man with a series of face tats, I slot in behind the unnamed man.
Certain there’s more to this world than constant violence, I give communication a shot. “You don’t know me, but you can guarantee I wouldn’t ask this if it weren’t important.” The man remains facing the front, but I know he heard me. Not only do the hairs on his nape stand to attention, but he also nods. “I need the card sewn into the waistband of your pants.” Although the volume of my voice is on par with earlier, he acts as if he didn’t hear me. “It’s urgent.”
“It always is,” he murmurs back, his tone less than impressed.
I can’t see the stopwatch’s countdown on my chest, but I feel every second that ticks over. I’m running out of time, leaving me no choice but to grab the stranger’s pants like Demi did mine anytime her impatience got the better of her.
As expected, the dark-haired man retaliates. “Back off,” he warns before pushing me into the Asian inmate standing behind us. “I’m not someone you should mess with.”
“And neither the fuck am I,” I reply with a roar, my voice loud enough to prick the ears of several inmates. I wasn’t lying when I told Owen I held my own this morning. I won’t be jumped again any time soon, but slathering on an extra layer of attitude won’t go astray. “Give me what I want or—”
“You’ll steal my lunch money?” With a mocking grin, the unnamed man messes my hair. I know what he’s doing. He’s treating me like a kid since I’m a good twelve years his junior. It pisses me off to no end, and when it’s followed by the alarm on the stopwatch sounding, it leaves me no choice but to use my fists.
Before he knows what hit him, I fist his shirt in a white-knuckled hold, yank him forward, then slam my fist into his nose. I would have preferred for him to go down after one punch, but it doesn’t seem as if luck is on my side today—or this year. He retaliates to my punch by cracking his fist into my jaw, then he pushes me to the ground.
It’s a bad move on his behalf.
I’m faster on the ground. More deadly. It only takes another three hits to his face to subdue him enough I can shift my focus to his pants. The crowd circles in on us, and I sense the heat of the guards’ guns they’re aiming at my head, but since the stopwatch’s timer is the loudest of them all, I use the shank Agent Moses shoved into my hand to rip through the cotton material of the man’s pants.
I already hate the person I’m becoming, but the disgust grows more rampant when I find the card Agent Moses wants. It isn’t a business card as such. More an identification card for an undercover cop called Charles Tate. The photograph on the government official ID looks oddly similar to the man lying bloody on the floor as does the name tattooed across his chest.
Fuck!
I just dug my grave, and my burial site is only feet from Demi.
It dawns on me that Agent Moses has been planning this for some time when my sprint away from the beaten officer isn’t shadowed by the guards who watched the spectacle unfold. They give me a clear passage like the warden ordered their counterparts only minutes ago.
I charge for the front entrance of the prison instead of the room I left Agent Moses in. My priorities are undeniable even to a man with a stone heart, so I know the direction I need to take.
My intuition is proven accurate when my race through the guards’ hall has me spotting Agent Moses standing outside the entrance of the visitor waiting room. He’s by the door the guard blocked while placing on latex gloves.
After shoving Charles’s card into his chest, I sprint into the visitors’ waiting room, praying like fuck Demi is still in there. My screaming lungs suck down their first full breath in over three minutes when I spot her and Caidyn on the other side of a thick pane of glass. Their eyes rocket to mine when I bang my fist onto the glass. Caidyn looks shocked, and Demi is straight-up devastated.
“Get her out of here.” When Caidyn remains still, his shock at my bloody appearance too perverse for a nonchalant response, I scream. “Now, Caidyn! And don’t bring her back here. She can never come back here!”
