The Arrival
The first thing Gideon Lust noticed about Oakridge Penitentiary wasn’t the barbed wire, or the smell of bleach, or even the thick, swampy heat clinging to its concrete walls. It was the eyes. Hundreds of them—peering out from behind thick glass and steel bars. Some hungry, some hollow, all fixed on him as if he were a slab of meat about to be carved.
He adjusted his cuffs. Not nervously—never nervously—but with the same crisp precision he applied to every part of his life. Hair perfect. Shirt tucked. Hands like tools: strong, sure, designed to dismantle and rebuild. The warden’s heels clicked beside him as they walked the long corridor.
“You’re prettier than the last one,” she said without looking at him. Her voice was sandpaper laced with nicotine. “He lasted six weeks before he cried out.”
“I won’t cry out,” Gideon replied evenly.
“You all say that.”
They stopped in front of a heavy door. A red bulb above it pulsed like a warning heart. The warden punched in a code, her acrylic nails tapping the keypad like a drumroll.
“First one’s a firecracker,” she warned. “She asked for you by name. Said if she was going to burn, she wanted to burn all the way down.”
The door groaned open. Gideon stepped inside.
Carmen lay on her cot, one leg draped lazily over the edge. Her hair tumbled in wild curls, dark against the pale uniform. She wasn’t like the others—no fear in her eyes. Just a wolfish grin and a cigarette dangling from her lips.
“So you’re the famous Gideon Lust,” she drawled. “The state’s very own fuck machine.”
His lips curved faintly. “I prefer ‘therapist.’”
“Sure you do.” She flicked ash into a tin can, then sat up, slow and predatory. “They say you can make a woman forget her name. I’d settle for forgetting these walls.”
Gideon didn’t flinch. He’d heard it all before. Requests wrapped in bravado, hunger sharpened by fear. But Carmen… Carmen’s hunger wasn’t fear. It was defiance.
“Then let’s start,” he said, his voice low enough to make her pupils flare.
He crossed the cell in two strides. She watched him like a cat about to pounce.
“You’re not shy,” he noted.
“Shy’s for the living.”
Their eyes locked. His hand reached for her chin—not grabbing, just the ghost of a touch, tilting her face up. Her breath hitched. Not fear. Anticipation.
“You’re testing me,” he said.
“Maybe I like tests.” She leaned forward so their mouths were a hair apart. “Or maybe I like the idea of you failing.”
His thumb brushed her lower lip. Soft. Warm. Still human.
“I don’t fail.”
The first kiss wasn’t soft. It was teeth and tongue, her fingers fisting in his shirt as if she could drag him inside her by sheer force of will. Gideon let her set the pace for exactly three seconds before taking over—hands pinning her wrists above her head, mouth exploring hers with the precision of a man who knew every nerve ending worth lighting up.
She moaned into his mouth, biting his lip hard enough to draw a bead of blood.
“Careful,” he murmured against her skin. “I’m not on death row.”
“Then don’t waste time.”
He laughed—quiet, dangerous. “Oh, Carmen. Time’s all we have.”
His hands moved lower, skimming the jumpsuit’s zipper. He felt her shiver beneath him, though her voice stayed steady.
“Are you going to make me beg?”
“Would you?”
“Not yet.”
He tugged the zipper down inch by inch, exposing the slope of her collarbone, the swell of her breasts, the taut lines of a body still clinging to life.
Her back arched. “Don’t tease me, Lust.”
He smiled, pressing a kiss to her sternum. “I haven’t even started.”
And as his mouth descended, Carmen’s bravado cracked just enough for a whimper to escape.
Outside, the red bulb above the cell door kept pulsing, warning the world that inside, time had stopped.
