The one that liked me. The one that kept asking me out despite me continuously saying no.
“Drummond.” I nodded as I tried to continue past him.
“Wait, Blaise,” Drummond called as I tried to bolt before he could say anything. “I wanted to ask you something.”
I felt my insides turn to dust.
“What?” I asked, resigned.
“Would you like to go to a wedding with me?” Drummond asked. “It’s next weekend. Formal. I can’t find anyone that wants to go with me. Nobody likes going to formal things.”
That, or maybe they just don’t want to go with you because you give off really weird vibes.
Or maybe that was just me.
Whatever the reason, I was about to turn him down gently when an inmate who’d heard our exchange chimed in.
“Listen,” the inmate drawled as he walked past. Not running like Sin had been, but walking and still looking just as sweaty. “You’ve asked her like a hundred different times to go out with you, and she’s said no every single time. There comes a point where you need to just take the hint. You gross her out. Just like you gross everyone else here out. Take the fucking misery elsewhere, because it’s getting exhausting.”
The inmate started to continue to walk, but Drummond got pissed and shoved him. Right into another inmate that had a touching issue.
That’s when shit degraded.
Fast.
One second, everything was calm and collected, and the next shit just… hit the fan.
Inmates started fighting. Guards started protecting themselves.
And before I could so much as process what the fuck was going on, he was there.
Protecting me once again.
I sighed. “I can handle myself, Sin.”
He backed me up until the fence was at my back, and he was at my front.
And all of his hot, sweaty, I want to put my mouth over every square inch of it body was pressed against me.
His skin was still bare.
He’d taken his shirt off at some point in between when I’d arrived, and when all the fighting had started, and now there were so many inches of bare skin for me to enjoy that I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.
“I know you can,” Sin drawled. “But there are about two hundred men out here pissed off because they’re being caged like animals, and there are about ten of you guards. I don’t want you getting a face full of fist like the creep guard is getting right now.”
Drummond was getting a face full of fist, but he was trading punches with the inmate who’d called him on his shit. He wasn’t being ganged up on by the inmates.
The riot alarm started sounding and shit really hit the fan then.
At one point, shit got so out of hand that even I was starting to get scared.
Men were just… everywhere.
One inmate was using the forty-five-pound weights off the weight bench to bash another inmate in the face. While another one closer to us was using the bar to jab people hard in the biggest body parts, taking them down with one single blow.
Then there was someone all the way across the yard that had what looked to be his shirt around a guard’s neck and he was choking him.
Drummond again, this time with a different inmate.
I groaned and started to move out from behind Sin, but he caught me before I could so much as take two steps away from him. Even while being engaged with two very big, very burly dudes.
Sin took them both down with two well-placed punches to the face.
One fell at his feet and tripped up the other one, momentarily distracting him. The other one went to take a step forward and took a face full of Sin’s fist right to his nose.
I watched as his eyeballs rolled back into his head and he went down like a tree.
The smack of his body hitting the dirt caused a plume of dust to billow up around him and us, momentarily distracting me from what I should be doing—which was helping the dumbass Drummond who’d started all of this.
“I gotta go over there and stop them before they actually kill him,” I grumbled as I pushed my bare hand into Sin’s bare back. God, I wanted to run it all along the length of the muscles. Trace the beautiful tattoos that ran down the length of his back. Preferably with my tongue. “Or they’re gonna notice I did nothing.”
“They’re gonna think you’re smart,” Sin disagreed. “Deke!”
Deke, a six-foot-nine powerhouse who had a couple of screws loose, looked up from where he was still reading a book at the picnic table. “What?”
“Can you come here and read while making sure no one gets close to her?” Sin asked. “That way I can go save dumbass over there?”
“The fucking moron who started this all?” Deke asked. “How about you just let him die?”
A shiver ran through me.
Deke wasn’t all there.
Not in a ‘he has something wrong with his brain kind of way’ but in a ‘he has no fucking morals’ kind of way.
That was why he was in here.
Some asshole had thought it’d be funny to hurt his kid.
So what had Deke done? Deke had run over him with his car. Twice. Popped the douchebag’s head like a watermelon by running over it.
Then, when he got out and the guy was lying down on the ground, bleeding and broken, Deke had pulled his gun and shot him in the dick.
Though, granted, Deke had been kind of justified, which was why he’d only gotten ten years in here, and not life.
See, it came out in court that the same moronic motherfucker had tried to come onto Deke’s sixteen-year-old before, and Deke had told him to back off.
The guy obviously hadn’t taken the warning for what it was, and Deke hadn’t been playing around.
“What’s in it for me?” Deke went back to his book.
“The ‘good inmate’ thing that allows you to have macaroni…” Sin left it hanging.
Good inmates got special privileges. Like being able to buy Kraft Macaroni from the prison store and using a special lounge to cook it.
Deke really fucking liked that.
Then again, who didn’t like macaroni?
“Fine,” Deke grumbled as he unfolded his massive frame from the picnic table.
The table groaned as it was relieved of his weight, and it was only then that I saw the entire thing shift back to where all four legs rested on the ground instead of only three.
“Thanks, Deke.” Sin tossed me a look over his shoulder that clearly said ‘stay here.’
I stayed.
I wasn’t stupid.
I wasn’t going to get into a hundred men battling it out to the death.
There were no rules here.
But I also wasn’t going to be able to lie around and allow a fellow guard, inmate or not, to have his life taken away.
I moved slightly to the side when Deke stood directly in front of me and started to read again.
“If you stay behind me, nobody will see you, and I won’t have to do anything besides stand here. If you move, and people see a guard behind me, that means that they’ll come over here and engage. Which, I don’t want to do. I haven’t finished this book yet, and I’m on the last chapter,” Deke grumbled.
I sighed and moved a little farther back until he was covering me. Mostly. And then peeked around his arm again.
Sin was stalking across the courtyard, avoiding punches and kicks, looking like the utter badass that he was as he made his way toward Drummond.