The Bound And Marked Series: Book 1: No Safe Harbour

Alright so for the first time writing on here I am putting this disclaimer in the very beginning. This is a work of fiction and it is a gay romance novel, yes. But one of my favourite ever books and movies was the Shawshank Redemption, the reason I loved it so much was the realism, it was fiction off-course but none of the characters except a few who died early on were white, they were all grey.

The book didn't sugarcoat the disgusting double standards and hypocritical evil of a place like a modern day American prison or prison anywhere for that matter.

I know Prison Romance novels are a popular trope but don't go into this book expecting a fun, light romantic frolic, lots of hand holding and young uncomplicated love. There is going to be racism, violence, bigotry, prejudice, abuse, homophobia, rank hypocrisy in all its unsavoury glory.

This whole series is not going to be cookie cutter, neither the characters or the premise.

I tell you as the reader from the beginning because I always want and yearn for feedback and support for my work in the form of reviews reactions etc. But I refuse to tone down anything in any of these books, if you want heartwarming, pleasant romance novels then please read something else, I have plenty of those too.

This series was my first ever attempt at male/male gay romance/suspense/dark and gritty writing but with my trademark style and humour thrown in off-course, it cant be all serious, i am too silly for that haha.

I don't like staying confined to one thing. So I put this forward for all of you to read in all honesty as a writer, if you find the content objectionable please beware and read something else. I am not holding any punches with any of these books. They will be graphic, and there will be violence and a lot of angst, plus some of the characters are far from lovable in the beginning. But if you do read and enjoy please do let me know what you think?? do you want the others in the series as well?? do you like these forays into different genres of romance??

Many thanks for your understanding and Support.

The subterranean sally port smelled of sulfur, unwashed skin, sour spit, and the choking, blue-gray exhaust of an idling diesel engine.

Sam Holloway couldn’t wipe his forehead.

The heavy steel chain linking his wrists to the heavy belly-chain box around his waist gave him roughly four inches of slack. Every time he tried to lift his hands to push his dark-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose, the coarse links bit into his hipbones through the thin cotton of his county-issued dungarees.

His lenses were filmed with condensation and cold institutional sweat, turning the world into a smear of harsh white floodlights, slick gray walls, and gunmetal-painted bars.

He was shivering, but not entirely from the November draft cutting through the heavy steel bay doors. It was the vibration of the facility itself. It hummed up through the rubber soles of his cheap slip-on sneakers—a deep, mechanical thrum of high-voltage generators, air handlers, heavy hydraulic locking systems, and hundreds of caged men breathing the same sour air. It felt alive, like a giant gut churning through human waste.

“Move your fucking feet, Holloway!” a voice barked directly behind his ear.

A heavy, leather-gloved palm slammed between Sam’s shoulder blades. The force knocked him forward, his leg irons clinking violently as his toes caught on an expansion joint in the concrete floor. He stumbled, his balance wrecked by the short chain between his ankles, his heart hammering against his ribs like a panicked animal.

“Eyes front, shithead,” the guard spat.

Officer Henderson.

Fifty-something, gut hanging over a nylon duty belt that creaked under the weight of pepper spray, handcuffs, and a heavy Maglite baton. A brown plug of chewing tobacco bulged inside his cheek, staining his lower lip.

“You ain’t at the country club no more. You’re at Blackwood. Pick your feet up or I’ll drag you across this floor by your chain.”

Sam swallowed dryly. His throat felt coated in raw sand. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me, you little prick. Just shut your mouth and walk.”

Around Sam, seven other men from the county transfer van shuffled in a miserable, chained row.

None of them looked at each other.

You learned that early on the four-hour bus ride across the state—eye contact was an invitation for a shiv or a beatdown.

To Sam’s right was Toby Rollins, nicknamed “Twitch” in the county holding tank because his body was still vibrating through the ragged tail-end of a meth crash.

Toby was weeping silently, snot running over his cracked top lip, his eyes darting wildly toward the gun cage built high into the intake wall. Behind the steel mesh, two officers stood with 12-gauge shotguns racked and leveled at the floor.

“Hey,” Toby whimpered, his voice barely a wet hiss between his teeth. “Hey, glasses... you think they put us in dorms? My cousin said they got dorms here. Said you get a TV in the dayroom...”

“Shut your goddamn cock-holster, Rollins!” Henderson roared, tapping his baton against the kid’s hip bone with a dull, sickening thwack. “No talking in the sally port! Move!”

They were herded through a reinforced steel slider into the intake bullpen—a windowless chamber that smelled of industrial lye soap, stale urine, and cold radiator grease.

“Form a line on the yellow tape!” another guard barked, a younger screw with a shaved head and dead eyes. “Toes on the tape! Don’t turn around! Don’t look at the man next to you!”

Sam placed his sneakers against the faded yellow line. Behind a waist-high steel counter, three intake officers sat with clipboards, rubber gloves, and stacks of manila folders. The bureaucracy of captivity was methodical, loud, and entirely devoid of mercy.

“Drop the chains,” Henderson grunted.

A guard moved down the line with heavy brass keys. The locks snapped open with an ear-splitting clatter. First the leg irons, leaving raw red chafing around Sam’s ankles, then the belly chain, and finally the wrist cuffs.

Sam’s arms dropped heavily to his sides, the blood rushing back into his fingers with a painful, pins-and-needles burn. He reached up with trembling fingers and pushed his dark-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose, blinking against the harsh halogen strips above.

“Strip!” Henderson barked, stepping up on the low wooden riser. “Everything off! Drop the county rags in the rolling bin. You keep your socks, you go to the hole. You hide a fucking paperclip, you go to the hole. Drop ’em!”

The rustle of cotton was fast and frantic. Men peeled out of orange scrubs, dropping them into the dirty canvas bin like shedding dead skin. Sam’s fingers trembled as he tore at the Velcro fasteners on his shoes. He stepped out of his pants, peeled off his undershirt, and stood bare on the freezing, wet concrete.

He had never felt so violently exposed.

At twenty-six, Sam was not built for violence. He had the slender, lean frame of a man who had spent his adult life in server rooms and fluorescent-lit cubicles, living on takeout noodles and black coffee. He had inherited his mother’s sharp features—high, cutting cheekbones, an elegant nose, and a dusting of dark stubble along a square jawline that contrasted against his warm olive undertone. Beneath messy, dark wavy hair falling across his damp brow, his light hazel-green eyes were impossibly bright and exposed the second his glasses were ordered off his face.

“Take the glasses off, college boy,” the younger screw ordered, holding out an open plastic bin. “Put ’em in here.”

Sam hesitated for a fraction of a second, his heart seizing. “I—I can’t see without them. The prescription is very heavy.”

“Did I ask for your life story? Put the fucking spectacles in the bin, Holloway, before I crush ’em with my boot.”

Sam took them off with cold, shaking hands and set them in the tray. Instantly, the room dissolved into a sickening smear of gray shadows, blinding white glare, and indistinct silhouettes. He felt blind, naked, and entirely defenseless.

“Squat!” Henderson yelled, stepping forward with a wooden tongue depressor. “Deep. Grab your cheeks and pull ’em wide. Cough.”

Sam shut his eyes tight against the blur.

Don’t think.

Just detach.

Just leave your body.

He bent his knees, humiliating tears burning behind his closed eyelids, and coughed three times until his chest hitched.

“Turn around. Lift your sack. Open your mouth. Tongue up. Sweep your gums with your fingers.”

It was a mechanized slaughter of human dignity. In less than ten minutes, whatever remained of Sam Holloway, lead data architect, was ground into fine dust.

Next came the intake medical line. A middle-aged nurse with frizzy gray hair and latex gloves sat behind a rolling stainless-steel cart, not even looking up as Sam was shoved toward her.

“Name and DOC number,” she muttered, her voice deadened by decades of staring at bruised flesh.

“Samuel Holloway. DOC 94821.”

She reached out with cold, gloved hands, turning his arms over to inspect the inner crooks of his elbows for needle tracks. “Tattoos?”

“None.”

“Scars?”

“Just... an old appendectomy.”

She checked his scalp with two wooden sticks, parting his thick, dark waves to look for lice, then flicked her pen against his medical chart. “Any history of seizures, psych meds, asthma, heart trouble?”

“No.”

“You allergic to penicillin?”

“No.”

“Step over there.” She didn’t look at his face once. To her, he wasn’t a twenty-six-year-old man whose life had just burned to ash; he was an inventory item to be cleared for general population.

When he was finally ordered back toward the intake desk, his dark-rimmed glasses were shoved back into his hand. He jammed the stems behind his ears, his vision snapping back into focus just as Henderson tossed a bundle of stiff, coarse fabric at his chest.

“Two pairs of scrub tops, two bottoms, state issue. Two boxers. One pair of socks. One rubber spoon, one rubber toothbrush, one comb, one three-ounce bar of lye. You lose it, you don’t get another.”

Henderson glanced down at the intake sheet clipped to his board, his pencil pausing. He looked up, his piggish eyes raking over Sam’s dark glasses, the striking green of his irises, and the warm olive skin of his face.

A sneer split the officer’s chapped mouth. “Well, look at this. Samuel Holloway. Computer fraud. Corporate espionage. Wire fraud. Sentenced to six years maximum security.” Henderson laughed—a dry, hacking rattle. “Arthur Holloway’s kid. The big-shot partner at Holloway & Partners.”

Sam’s jaw locked.

He clutched the rough bundle to his ribs, trying to stop the tremor in his hands.

“My father has nothing to do with this.”

“You’re damn right he doesn’t,” Henderson chuckled, leaning over the counter close enough for Sam to smell the wintergreen dip and stale coffee on his breath. “Your old man put out a formal disavowal before the ink on your plea deal was even dry. Called the warden himself to make sure everybody knew you weren’t getting special treatment. Didn’t even hire your defense, did he? Left you to some public defender hack.”

Sam looked at the floor, staring at a rust-colored stain between his bare feet.

He didn’t answer.

There was nothing left to say.

The memory of the sterile holding cell forty-eight hours ago flashed behind his retinas.

Arthur had stood there in his bespoke charcoal wool suit, silver hair immaculate, checking his gold wristwatch as if Sam were a dentist appointment he had squeezed into a tight afternoon.

“You have disgraced this family, Samuel,” Arthur had said, his voice as smooth and cold as marble. “You stole proprietary data from our primary corporate client. You leaked it to the press like some pathetic, moralizing martyr. Did you really think you were going to change the world?”

“Arthur, people died,” Sam had whispered, clutching the edge of the steel table. “The trial data was falsified. The heart medication was killing people. Your firm knew. You were helping them bury the FDA subpoenas.”

Arthur hadn’t even blinked. “My firm represents our clients within the boundaries of the law. You broke federal statutes. And you did it from an IP address routed through your personal apartment. You are sloppy, you are sentimental, and you are an embarrassment. I gave you an education. I tolerated your presence under my roof because my mother insisted on doing her Christian duty when that whore left you on our steps. But you made your bed with degenerates. Do not write to my house. Do not call my office. As far as the Holloway name is concerned, you died the moment you touched that keyboard.”

Then Arthur had turned and walked out, leaving a court-appointed public defender to tell Sam that five to six years at Blackwood was the “best-case scenario."

“Hey! Four-eyes! You deaf?” Henderson barked, slamming his flat palm against the counter.

Sam flinched, snapping back to the cold bullpen. “No. No, sir.”

“Work assignment: Inmate Law Library and General Stacks. Clerical detail.” Henderson stamped the routing slip with an aggressive, violent thud. “Look at that. They gave the four-eyed college boy a desk job. Take your shit and get in the staging cage. Tier 4 is calling your name.”

Sam scrambled into the uniform. The V-neck hung loose on his collarbones, the bright, garish orange an ugly contrast against his warm skin. The trousers were inches too long, pooling over his bare feet until he stepped into the cheap canvas plimsolls tossed at him from the bin. Gathering his thin foam mattress and his plastic mesh kit bag against his chest like a shield, he hurried toward the holding pen.

Inside the cage, sitting on a rusted steel bench bolted to the floor, an older Black man was already waiting. His orange uniform was faded to a pale peach from years of industrial laundry, and his knuckles were swollen with arthritis.

“Preacher” Danforth.

He was doing thirty-to-life for an armed robbery that went sideways in the nineties, and he moved with the slow, deliberate rhythm of a man who knew every crack in the prison’s foundation.

Toby Rollins sat on the far corner of the bench, shivering uncontrollably, his teeth chattering so loud it sounded like dice in a cup. “I’m gonna be sick,” Toby muttered, rocking back and forth, wrapping his scrawny arms around his ribs. “I swear to God, I’m gonna puke. They’re gonna put me in with a skinhead, man. I can’t do this. I stole some fucking oxy out of a CVS, that’s all I did...”

Danforth didn’t look at Toby. He didn’t look up when Sam stumbled into the cage either, but as Sam sat down on the far end of the bench, trembling so hard the plastic mesh bag rattled against his knees, the older man spoke without turning his head.

“Tuck your strings in, boy.”

Sam blinked through his dark-rimmed glasses. “What?”

“Your pants,” Danforth murmured, his voice deep, gravelly, and barely loud enough to carry over the ventilation hum. “The drawstring. Tuck it inside the waistband. You leave it hanging out, somebody grabs it from behind in the sally port or the stairwell, they drag you like a dog on a leash. Tuck it in.”

Sam frantically shoved the white cotton string inside the elastic band of his pants. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Danforth said softly, staring straight ahead at the steel mesh door. “Don’t look nobody in the eyes on the walk up. Don’t speak unless a screw asks you your number. And whatever you do, don’t borrow nothing. Not an envelope. Not a stamp. Not a pinch of tobacco. In this place, you take a favour, you belong to the man who gave it to you. You understand that?”

“Yes,” Sam whispered, his knuckles white around his rolled-up foam mattress. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” Danforth replied grimly, his dark eyes shifting slightly toward Sam’s face. Danforth’s brow furrowed, his gaze raking over Sam’s sharp jaw, the dark curls falling over his forehead, and the startling, pale hazel-green eyes behind the lenses. “Where you headed, son?”

“Tier 4,” Sam said.

Danforth went completely still.

Even Toby stopped rocking for a second.

“Tier 4 is maximum security, kid,” Danforth said, his voice dropping an octave. “That ain’t where they put property crimes and paper-hangers. That’s where they keep the lifers and the heavies. Who authorised that?”

“Henderson,” Sam murmured, remembering the guard’s ugly sneer.

“Henderson’s a bastard,” Danforth muttered, his jaw hardening. “He’s feeding you to the wolves just to watch the blood splatter. Tier 4 is run by the hard-asses. The white boys hold the top flats, the Latin Kings hold the south catwalk, and the Bloods take the center. An outsider with green eyes and skin like yours? You’re walking into a wood-chipper. When you get into that cell, you find the corner of your rack and you stay on it. You don’t breathe too loud. You don’t ask questions. You just disappear.”

“What if my cellmate...” Sam’s voice faltered. “What if he doesn’t want me there?”

Danforth gave a cold, dry chuckle that had no humor in it. “Pray that’s all he wants—for you not to be there. Because if he does want you, son, ain’t nobody on Tier 4 gonna come through that gate to save you.”

The heavy magnetic lock on the bullpen gate disengaged with a deafening, metallic CLACK that reverberated through the iron bench.

“Holloway! Up!”

Standing in the open threshold was a different breed of corrections officer.

Aaron Miller didn’t look like Henderson. He was in his early thirties, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, holding himself with the rigid, clipped economy of an ex-Marine. His navy uniform was razor-sharp, creases pressed into the sleeves, his brass badge and heavy duty buckle polished to an uncompromising shine. His square jaw was freshly shaved, shadow tracing his skin, and his eyes were a cold, calculating slate that gave away nothing. There was no tobacco bulging in his cheek, no slovenly sneer twisting his mouth. He was an iron post wrapped in state-issue cloth.

“Holloway,” Miller repeated, his voice clipped, dropping flat into the stale air. “Pick up your roll. Let’s go.”

Sam stood. His knees were stiff from the cold concrete, but he forced his spine straight. He hauled the thin foam pad under one arm and gripped the mesh kit bag in his white-knuckled fingers, stepping out past the threshold.

Behind him in the cage, Toby Rollins let out a wet, ragged sob, tucking his shaking head between his knees beneath Danforth’s motionless shadow.

As they crossed the transition gate into the main service conduit, Sam’s canvas shoe caught the dragging hem of his oversized trousers. The awkward bulk of the foam mattress threw his center of gravity. He pitched sideways, his ankle wrenching, and his kit bag slapped the wet concrete with a sharp smack. The dark-rimmed frames flew off his nose, skipping across the floor toward the iron stairs.

Instantly, the world melted into an impenetrable blur of wet gray floor, searing overhead halogen tubes, and indistinct silhouettes.

Sam didn’t cry out. He dropped his shoulder, reaching out blindly to steady himself against the cinderblocks.

Before he could hit the floor, a massive hand clamped down on his upper arm. The grip was shockingly firm, arresting his fall in mid-air, but it wasn’t brutal. It didn’t dig in to bruise; it held him upright like a hydraulic vise.

“Stand up on your feet,” Miller said quietly.

Sam pulled himself up, setting his heels hard against the stone. He didn’t thank the man; he didn’t apologize. He stood there half-blind, his pulse hammering against his temples, waiting.

Miller released his arm without a word, bent down in a smooth, fluid motion, and picked up the dark frames. The officer turned them over in his broad, calloused palms, testing the hinges with mechanical precision, then lifted the hem of his pristine uniform shirt to wipe a smear of concrete grime off the left lens.

He held them out.

“Put ’em on,” Miller said, his voice dropping low, strictly professional. “And roll those cuffs before you hit the flats. You go down on the tier, nobody’s stopping the walk for you.”

Sam took the glasses, his fingers brushing the cool plastic stems. He slid them behind his ears, his jaw tightening as the room snapped back into sharp focus. He didn’t lower his gaze to the floor. He looked directly at the brass nameplate pinned to the officer’s chest—A. MILLER—and gave a single, tight nod. “Understood.”

Miller’s face remained a mask of carved stone. “Eyes on my belt, Holloway. Follow the yellow line. Do not deviate.”

They cleared the final security slider into the central rotunda, and the sheer volume of Blackwood State slammed into Sam’s eardrums like a physical concussion.

It was an industrial amphitheater of caged fury. Tier 4 stretched upward four stories—a rusted canyon of reinforced steel bars, suspended metal catwalks, and exposed heating pipes that wheezed, rattled, and leaked sulfurous steam.

Five hundred men were locked inside their cells, and the arrival of a new fish on the walk was an event.

Tin cups raked violently across iron bars, creating a shrieking, rhythmic rattle that vibrated straight through the floor and into the arches of Sam’s feet. Screams, whistles, and vicious threats rained down from the upper tiers, bouncing off the weeping limestone walls.

“New meat on four! Look at the fresh fish!”

“Hey, glasses! Bring that pretty little mouth up to 412! I got a hot soup and a warm bunk for you!”

“Look at that soft skin! You won’t make it to the weekend, boy!”

“Send him down to the end of the flat! Let the dogs have him!”

The noise was an assault, foul and suffocating. Sam felt the venom of it prickle across his scalp, but he didn’t shrink into his collar. He set his teeth, refusing to give the voices above the satisfaction of watching him cower. He kept his stride steady, matching Miller’s heavy, measured cadence down the painted yellow strip, his hazel-green eyes fixed dead ahead.

He had spent years in boardrooms surrounded by men with bespoke suits who wanted to destroy him; these men just didn’t bother wearing the suits.

Miller walked with practiced authority, his right thumb hooked over the retention strap of his side-baton, ignoring the barrage. He led Sam past the shower annex, past the mop stations, straight down to the absolute end of the ground-floor range where the air grew noticeably colder.

Cell 114 sat buried in the deep shadow of the exterior retaining wall, where the tier’s concrete met the weeping, moss-stained limestone of the prison’s outer fortress.

It was dark, drafty, and isolated from the rest of the flat.

Miller halted outside the heavy sliding gate. He pulled an iron key-chit from his duty belt, signaled the control booth high above the rotunda, and waited.

The overhead mechanism groaned with a screech of ungreased gears. The barred door jerked, rattled, and rolled back six inches before shuddering to a halt.

Miller turned, his cold slate eyes taking in Sam’s lean frame, the sharp cut of his jaw, and the quiet, stubborn stillness in the kid’s shoulders. A sliver of something grim and entirely unreadable flickered behind the guard’s expression.

“This is your cell,” Miller said, his tone barely carrying over the background din. “You stay in your lane. Don’t touch his gear. Don’t ask questions. Keep your head down and your senses sharp, and you might see breakfast. Step in.”

Sam didn’t hesitate. He stepped across the iron threshold into the cage.

Behind him, the gate slammed shut with a concussive BANG that vibrated through the iron frame, followed by the heavy, mechanical thud of the deadbolt sliding home.

The noise of the tier seemed to drop away instantly, swallowed by the freezing damp of the stone.

Cell 114 was eight feet of raw concrete by six feet wide. The walls were unpainted, flaking with damp saltpeter and mapped with decades of scratched initials and dark, scrubbed-out stains.

In the far corner sat an unshielded stainless-steel toilet and basin combination, the bowl caked with rust rings and hard water scales. Bolted directly into the limestone on the right were two iron bunks, stacked one above the other.

On the bottom rack—the only rack that mattered—a man was sitting.

He wasn’t lying down like some lazy yard-bird. He was sitting on the edge of the thin mattress, his elbows propped on his knees, his massive forearms hanging between his spread thighs.

He was vast.

Not the bloated bulk of a gym lifter, but the brutal, dense, slab-like mass of a man carved out of raw iron and cheap state carbohydrate.

He wore a dirty, threadbare white ribbed tank top, cut low across his collarbones, exposing a thick mat of dark, coarse hair curling over the top of his chest. His shoulders were monstrous, corded with heavy, rope-like sinew that bunched with the slightest twitch of his breathing. Sprawling prison-house ink stained his skin—crude, faded black tribal bands and dense, tactical script wrapping around his thick forearms, while a dark, jagged mark coiled up one side of his thick neck, disappearing into his hairline. A tarnished silver crucifix on a heavy steel chain hung against the dark hair of his chest.

His head was shaved down to raw, graying stubble, highlighting the blunt brutality of his skull. His face looked as though it had been hacked out of granite with a dull axe and never smoothed over. Thick dark stubble bristled across a square, uncompromising jaw, and slicing straight down his left cheek—from the bone under his eye to the corner of his mouth—was a thick, puckered white scar, raised and jagged from an unstitched blade fight.

He didn’t move. He just watched Sam through eyes the color of winter river ice.

Cold.

Still.

Absolutely lethal.

The air in the six-by-eight box was thick with him.

It hit Sam the moment the door locked—the suffocating, heavy musk of stale tobacco, dried sweat, rough lye soap, and the dark, iron tang of raw testosterone and violent history.

Slowly, deliberately, Brock Keller rose to his feet.

The movement was unnervingly quiet for a man his size. He didn’t strain; he simply uncoiled, rising up and up until his six-foot-five frame seemed to blot out the halogen light filtering through the bars. He filled the entire width of the cell, his head clearing the concrete ceiling by barely an inch. His massive work boots struck the floor with a dull, heavy thud as he took a single, prowling step forward.

Sam’s breath locked in his lungs. Every survival instinct he had ever possessed screamed at him that he was standing three feet from an executioner. The physical disparity was absurd; Brock could easily snap Sam’s spine over his knee with the flick of one massive wrist.

Brock stopped eighteen inches away.

The sheer heat radiating off the man’s skin was stifling.

Up close, the scar on his cheek looked vicious, the thick stubble framing a mouth that seemed incapable of smiling. He looked down, his ice-gray stare raking over Sam with slow, surgical contempt—taking in the olive skin, the dark curls falling over his forehead, the sharp, defined jaw, and the striking, pale hazel-green eyes behind the dark-rimmed lenses.

Brock’s heavy hand shot out.

Sam didn’t flinch back. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a drum, his knuckles turning dead white where he gripped his kit, but he held his ground.

Brock’s calloused fingers clamped onto the hemp twine binding Sam’s foam mattress. With a flick of his thick wrist, the cord snapped like dry thread.

Brock didn’t throw it on the floor. He used the roll to shove Sam back against the iron bars with a heavy, dismissive jolt.

“Up top, college boy,” Brock rasped.

His voice was terrifying—a low, gravelly scrape that sounded like two iron plates grinding through gravel. It was the sound of vocal cords scarred by smoke, isolation, and years of dead silence.

“You sleep on the top rack,” Brock said, his jaw tightening as he looked down at Sam’s face. “You don’t sit on my bunk. You don’t put your feet on my blanket. You don’t touch my boots, and you sure as fuck don’t touch my tobacco. You use the pot, you wait till I’m asleep or facing the wall, and you keep your eyes forward when I take a leak. If you snore, I’ll choke you till you pass out. If you make a peep after nine, I’ll throw you off that rack onto your fucking head.”

Sam drew in a slow, controlled breath through his nose. The terror was an icy knot in his gut, but a spark of cold defiance sparked behind his lenses. He had lost his career, his freedom, and his family name forty-eight hours ago; he wasn’t going to roll over like a dog for a convict.

He adjusted his grip on the mattress, his voice quiet, flat, and remarkably steady. “I don’t snore. And I don’t touch other people’s property.”

Brock’s eyes narrowed into razor-thin slits. A thick vein pulsed at the base of his scarred temple. For a long, dangerous second, the air between them went dead. Brock leaned in an inch closer, until his rough stubble was close enough to graze Sam’s cheek, his breath hot, smelling of cheap state tea and raw anger.

“You got a lot of mouth for a boy wearing clean clothes,” Brock growled, his chest expanding against the low cut of his tank. “You think you’re smart because you talk like a schoolteacher? You think that means shit in here?”

“I think it means I heard you the first time,” Sam replied, holding the killer’s cold gray gaze without blinking. “And I don’t need to be told twice.”

Brock stared at him.

The sheer nerve of the kid—this green-eyed man in an oversized state jumpsuit standing inches from his chest and talking back with an unyielding spine—sent a violent jolt of irritation straight through Brock’s gut.

It infuriated him.

In fifteen years on Tier 4, no fish had ever looked him in the eye without shaking.

And underneath the fury, uninvited and suffocating, came a sudden, dark rush of heat low in Brock’s belly. He looked at the curve of Sam’s mouth, the sharp, stubborn jaw dusted with faint dark stubble, and the light, luminous green of those eyes defying him. The thought of breaking that quiet arrogance, of putting his hands on that warm skin and hearing that steady voice shatter, hit Brock like a hammer.

He hated it. He hated the kid for bringing it into his cage.

Brock leaned down until his mouth was pressed against the shell of Sam’s ear, his voice dropping into a chilling, venomous whisper.

“First-degree murder—or at least that’s what the state tried pinning on me. There wasn’t enough left of the bastard to make it stick, so they settled on second-degree and twenty-five to life. Between you and me? I executed three rival runners in a warehouse off the docks. Emptied a clip into their skulls and watched the blood drain into the storm grate. Took twelve cops and two service dogs to put me down.”

Brock pulled back slowly, letting the horror of it settle into the space between their faces. His steel-gray eyes were completely dead.

“That was fifteen years ago, college boy. I’ve got five more to go before I even smell a parole board, and they’ll turn me down without blinking. So if you think for one second that I give a single fuck about snapping your scrawny neck and staying in this box forever, you test me. Go ahead. Give me a reason.”

Sam’s throat felt parched, his chest tight under the suffocating weight of Brock’s size and the lethal certainty in his words. The reality of the monster sharing his air was absolute. But Sam didn’t break eye contact. He swallowed the bitter taste of fear, lifted his chin half an inch, and said nothing. He simply stepped sideways, out of Brock’s shadow, and gripped the rusted iron rungs of the ladder.

Brock watched him.

His fists stayed clenched at his sides, knuckles white, his chest heaving with heavy, agitated breaths as he watched Sam haul his slender frame up to the top bunk.

Sam unrolled the thin foam pad over the cold iron slats, laid his plastic kit bag against the cinderblocks, and sat down with his back against the wall, drawing one knee up to his chest. He looked down over the iron lip of the upper bunk.

Brock hadn’t looked away. He stood in the narrow center of the cell, head tilted up, the jagged scar on his cheek stark against his dark stubble, his eyes boring into Sam like an iron chisel.

For five endless seconds, the two men locked eyes across the dark space—one towering, lethal, and burning with an unacknowledged fire; the other lean, bruised, and quietly unyielding.

“Count!” an officer’s voice bellowed down the flat, followed by the hard strike of a nightstick against the bars outside.

Brock broke the stare with a sharp, ugly scoff.

He turned his broad back, dropped down onto his own bunk, and kicked off his heavy boots, leaving the silence of the cell heavier than an open grave.