Page 21 of Okay, I Regret a Little
Chapter 16
Faust
T
hose two dickheads in the mailroom were up to something. And I saw how they looked at my mate in the mess hall when I looked away from the witches. They could fuck right off with that. The logical part of my brain kept telling me they had no way of knowing she was mine, but my wolf didn’t care. He wanted to rip their stupid throats out and taste their blood.
I agreed with my wolf. I spent years perfecting the best resting bitch face temper. I never lost it like some other wolves. Ineverintended to experience prison as an inmate, even if it was just overnight for a barfight. Rei was changing all of that because I certainly wanted to get myself fired often by beating the shit out of those two.
And it wasn’t just my job. Rei was friends with them, and for now, I needed the protection they offered her I couldn’t. It fucking killed me I couldn’t just announce this to everyone and work on wooing her. I couldn’t stake my claim and warn anyone away from her. Everyone here was afraid of me, but fucking a guard was an instant death sentence.
Stupid Brody hadn’t gotten that through his thick skull and kept offering favors for sex. Drug dealers and addicts didn’t end up in Silverhold for that, but people who enjoyed them did. Brody was so fucking stupid he would offer to sneak drugs in here for sex.
I couldn’t touch Brody no matter how much I wanted to. It would be brushed under the table if they found it out he snuck drugs in here. It was an instant rape charge if someone found out a guard had sex with an inmate, even if the inmate said consent was there. The power dynamic was just too skewed. Most sane people wouldn’t do it.
As such, I wouldn’t lay a single finger on Rei unless I had to wake her ass up. I had principles, even if some other guards here didn’t.
I needed the protection the sphinx and gargoyle were giving her, but I couldn’t have her sentence extended any longer than it already was. Those two dickheads were up to something. Some criminals in here, I could respect in a way. Wren and Rei were two of them. But there were a lot of them that broke shit just for fun and deserved to be in here.
Those people made up most of the prison population here. They respected the sphinx and the gargoyle, or they wouldn’t let them skip in line—these people only respected violence. I’d been here a while and learned the inmates here. I was probably the only employee here that knew all those little accidents were really Wren.
No one killed in here without me knowing about it. They might pin it on someone else, but I knew who the real culprit was. Sometimes, I didn’t get involved because they had it coming or it was a show of dominance to balance out prison politics. If someone was just killing people for the hell of it, I took care of it unless Wren beat me to it.
The sphinx and the gargoyle hadn’t killed anyone. It was utterly unfeasible that they had, and I didn’t know about it. They had fought no one either because they’d avoided solitary since their transfer. There was this racist system here in prison where no one got involved with anyone unless they were the same species.
They didn’t take kindly to outsiders. The sphinx and the gargoyle were the only representations of their kinds here. The gangs would have come sniffing. They would have been beaten to a pulp until they proved their worth.
That hadn’t happened, so they had donesomething.Whatever it was, it was super illegal, or none of these criminals here would be letting them get away with things no other gang could get away with.
Shit. I didn’t just need to protect Rei from all these witches. Those two assholes were going to get her in trouble. Seven years was a fucking long time not to cook my mate dinner and spoil her. It might take that long to win her over after what I did when we first met, but I really wanted to invite her to my cabin when she got out and cook for her.
I was already going insane having to leave her here at night. It was driving me nuts not being able to romance her as I wanted. This situation was so shitty.
I wasn’t letting a fucking sphinx and gargoyle make it worse by bringing her down with them when they got caught. The rest of the guards here were inept and stupid. The sphinx and the gargoyle might be good enough that I hadn’t sniffed out they were up to something before. They might be the smart kind of criminal I could respect.
My mate was involved in this somehow, and there were plenty of fucking stupid criminals here to expose what they were doing. Those two shitheads were never getting out of here, but Rei had a release date.
And I was going to make damned sure she got it too.
