It was lucrative, especially for a guy like me. Reeves wasn’t the only one who had tried a time or two to get me to fight. Going against the COs was almost as dangerous as fighting in their club. It made you a target, something to be beaten down and destroyed for not obeying and jumping through their hoops, but none of it mattered to me. I fought to survive. End of story. The ones who had everything to gain and nothing to lose hated me for that.

“Move your ass, X,” Officer Reeves said, pressing his baton into my back.

The bars clicked and clanked before banging into the open position. I followed Officer Reeves into the infirmary with my head down. The smell of the antiseptic in the room always made me feel nauseated.

I looked up, and there she was. The new nurse. She was wearing a pair of soft pink scrubs. There was nothing sexy about her clothes, but she looked so delicate and sweet. Honestly, she was the most beautiful creature I’d laid eyes on in my life.

I wasn’t sure if it was her angelic beauty casting off her porcelain skin or the sheer mystery she appeared to be, but all I could do was stand there, stunned. She was simply breathtaking.

A tiny batch of freckles was scattered across her pert nose, and even from where I stood, I could see the swirls of caramel brown in her green eyes. Her lips were pink and pouty as if she were pondering life’s greatest mysteries. Every now and again, she’d nibble the side of her lip as if she were unsure.

Most of her long, auburn hair was piled on top of her head, as if she’d run out of time when she was pulling it into a ponytail, and her baby pink scrubs hung from her tiny frame.

The muscle in my arm flexed beneath Officer Reeves’ fingers as he ushered me to a nearby bed, and I had to tear my eyes away from her.

She was too pretty. Looked too sweet for such a sour place. She didn’t belong there, and I was sure she knew that. If it was the last thing I did, I’d make sure she didn’t stay long.

Officer Reeves pushed me back onto the bed, smirking down at me. He knew there was nothing I could do to him, so he could be as rough as he wanted. Fucking power-hungry piece of shit.

Stepping to the side, he took his spot next to the door. I watched as he eye-fucked the new nurse while she made her way across the room to collect supplies.

I turned away. I couldn’t watch.

The bed he pushed me on was close to a window, which made me happy. I hadn’t had yard time in days, and my body craved the sun. Birds chirped in the distance, and I could hear them through the thin pane of glass separating me from the outside world.

Closing my eyes, I pretended I wasn’t stuck behind cinderblock walls and I was outside the barbed fencing. Ten years was a long time to be locked away. I was beginning to forget what it felt like to be free.

“It’s a nice day out,” a soft voice commented at my side.

Opening my eyes, I raked her face with my hard stare, connecting the fawn-colored freckles on her nose and cheeks. She swallowed hard. Looking away, she grabbed a pair of scissors to cut my khakis away from my wound.

I didn’t respond. Instead, I turned away and let her do her job.

After she cut away the fabric, revealing the deep stab wound in my leg, she used cotton to soak up the blood that was still seeping from it. Her fingers trembled, showing her fear and insecurities.

Good.

She should be afraid of me. Hopefully, I’d scare her off and she’d leave her position as soon as possible. The truth was that I knew these people. The officers. The inmates. And I knew they would eat her alive.

The inmates would visualize her naked. They’d think about all the graphic things they wanted to do to her body—sick, twisted, perverted things. It made my stomach turn. The rapists who roamed the halls would debate over how and when they would attack her.

The guards would be helpful for a while, but those bastards were just as dirty, if not dirtier, than the inmates were. Most of them weren’t married and had no life outside of the prison walls. They spent countless hours with the lowest form of scum this world had to offer—men with nothing to lose and more time to gain—men so disgusting you wondered if they were ever human.

The guards who had been there too long were, in a way, taught and trained by the inmates who would die there. They were deprived of a female’s sweet touch, so they, too, would plot ways to get her alone, rub up against her, and talk dirty to her until not even the hottest of showers could wash away the stench of their breath.

Anger began to swim behind my eyes. Fury toward any person who thought hiring her was a good idea. But then she laid her glove-covered fingers across my hard skin, and I looked into her eyes.