Chapter 13
Thirteen
Adrian
Visiting my mother was hard, only eased by Boba, who bounded up to me like I was made of peanut butter and she hadn’t seen me in years. She was all brown and white fur in a chaos bundle, panting and waggling her ass as she reached me.
“Hey baby!” I said, bending down to scruff her up, enjoy all those stinky dog breath kisses as her tail wiggled and her tongue lolled. Shit, I missed having the company she brought. It was the easy kind, with no judgment or expectation.
Every time I saw her, I debated bringing her home with me, but it just wasn’t right. Wasn’t the place. And the things I had planned made it no environment for a dog.
“Hello, Adrian,” Mom said, appearing from the kitchen with a warm, tired smile, a dishtowel in her hands as she dried them. She looked older than the last time, her eyes sadder. “You actually made it.” Her expression was one of soft surprise, or relief, like she didn’t think I would.
I nodded, sheepish, kicking my shoes off by the door, fighting the guilt. This was our weekly dinner, though I’d missed three in a row now due to what I told her were work commitments. It left me full of mixed feelings that churned good and bad.
Home was bleak, though. No one else was here apart from me and Mom. Dad was gone; my brother was gone. My sister had fled the nest the second she was old enough, and we heard nothing of her either, on the other side of the country, living out of the darkness of what had happened to us.
We grew up well, happy memories and smiling faces etched into every facet of this house, heights measured on door jambs, ugly trinkets made by clumsy toddler hands, but now it was dusty, cobwebbed with grief and pain.
And now it was just Mom and me left in this small desert town with a large women’s prison attached, where she happened to be.
I’d grown up in the shadows of the prison, vowing never to step foot in it, not as an inmate — when it still held men — nor as a member of staff.
I’d put people in it, sure, but would never let myself go behind those concrete walls.
How the mighty fall.
Yes, I’d put dozens of men in other prisons, just not that one. It closed before I became a police officer, and while I’d arrested women, I’d had no desire to keep track of them. Only the odd, special few.
I rose up from scuffling up Boba and gave my mother a warm hug, squeezing her a tiny bit too tight before kissing her head and following her into the kitchen. A delicious savory scent was drifting into the hall, my stomach rumbling in hunger. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks.
“How are you?” I asked my mother, looking around for something to help with.
She was a pro, my mother, at making it all look effortless.
A casserole sat on the counter, vegetables boiled in a pot, and not a surface messy.
Not a crumb or sticky patch anywhere, like the food had appeared by magic before her very eyes with a tidy flick of her wrist.
She always nailed it growing up too, raising three rambunctious kids without missing a beat. We’d been happy.
So I settled for sinking my ass onto one of the stools at the kitchen counter, and watched her stir the veggies, trying to drum up some warmth. The distance between us was heavy, tight. Unwanted. But neither of us were ever able to shake it.
“I’m okay,” she said, in a voice that showed me she definitely wasn’t. “Just… quiet, you know?”
“Boba not helping with that?”
“Oh no.” Mom smiled. “She is. I take her for walks with the neighbors a few times a week, and we go to the doggy park when we can. But… dogs can’t talk back, you know?”
I leaned down and ruffled Boba’s fur. “That’s why I like them so much.”
Mum chuckled, switching off the burner and carrying the pot to the sink to drain the water. “I want intellectual conversation, not brainless over there giving me those big eyes for another treat while I spill my heart out.”
“Why you spilling your heart out, Mom?” I asked, stiffening up. “What’s going on?”
“Oh.” She waved her hand at me in dismissal. “Nothing new. Nothing. I think that’s the problem. We’re just sort of… stagnant, you know? I miss him.”
Mom smiled at me then, but it was another sad one, the kind of smile I’d come to know and hate – I wanted her happy, healed and whole. But we were still so far from that. She once said she had it all, a happy husband and kids, a warm home and one good vacation a year.
Now everyone was either dead or scattered to the wind.
While she was stuck in what had happened, unable to see a path through, I had one. I had a plan. A fucking plan. And was well on my way to enacting it. The threads all needed to line up, then I would make my mother proud.
She could never learn what I’d done, but I would know, and that would be enough. If I saw her after, I would be able to look her in the eye with pride.
And if I managed to come back home with a fresh joy in my heart, maybe it would infect her, too.
We settled onto the sofa with bowls of the casserole and watched our favorite show, chatting away, letting the warmth of the food and our connection heal just a little something inside of us.
“You’ve made me wait three weeks to watch these episodes,” Mom said, curling her feet under her and gesturing to the TV with her fork. “I couldn’t stand it.”
I chuckled. “You don’t have to pretend you didn’t watch ahead, Mother,” I teased, smirking when she went bright pink and scoffed.
She thought for a second about denying it, but then shrugged, all sheepish. “Okay, fine, but I’m definitely happy to watch them again. So many handsome men in suits…”
I laughed, trying so hard for it to be real. To want to be here, in this, with my mother and my dog, with comforting food in the house I grew up in. The empty house. My mother rattled around in it by herself, and I didn’t even bother stopping by for almost a month.
She smiled like it was working though, as if she believed me. This is what I could do for her, for now. Make her believe we were healing.
But for me, I was far from done.
The next time I was in the prison, I was on the night shift, having requested a change due to supposed family commitments.
The warden didn’t question it and switched me over to the less popular shift with no complaint, trying to decide who would be most beneficial to move to the day without sparing me another glance.
I hadn’t slept well, spending the day as usual, busy building and learning, and now I had a twelve-hour stretch in front of me. I rubbed my hand through my hair and made my way onto the main floor.
“They were rowdy today,” CO Randal told me at handover, leaning over the desk in our large, windowed observation room.
The ladies were all in their cells, and everyone was changing over, filling each other in on the day just gone.
Randal waggled his eyebrows at me, and I sighed, not wanting to press him for why they’d been rowdy.
"Why’d you move to the shitty shift?” he asked when I just grunted at him, not looking him in the eyes. I was afraid I’d kick him in the nuts if I caught sight of his expression. No doubt it was a punchable one.
“Stuff to do in the day,” I huffed back, snatching up a stack of papers to flick through.
Randal hummed, and I knew his stupid beady eyes were still on me.
I had filled another few inches of a bottle up for Karner, cumming into it for the last few days to build up a good amount for her.
My plan with it was different, though. I loved watching her degraded, looking weak and pathetic.
She’d worn my cum on her flesh last time, on my demand.
I was itching to find out what more I could make her do.
She was getting under my skin, and I hated it.
It was never supposed to happen, an inmate catching my eye, especially not one like her, a killer. The most depraved kind of killer. But she had something about her impossible to resist, and seeing her do what I told her made my flesh run hot. I used to be a good man, an upholder of the law.
Penelope Karner screwed that all up.
“What happened then? Why the rowdiness?” I asked Randal, indulging him with a sigh, watching as he stood and gathered his shit.
The clock had ticked over to 8pm, so it was time for him to fuck off, and he never stuck around a second past if he could help it.
But this time he was lingering, acting like he had more to say. Questions to ask.
“Ah, just the food issue again,” he said after a few beats. “Breakfast was cut down too, and lunch was a sandwich by itself, so they’re all cranky bitches. I swear, man, it’s running hot out there.”
I frowned. Tensions were building in the place with every passing day. Anger and resentment and boredom mixed with empty bellies and a break in routine — I couldn’t see it ending well. These women thrived on predictability; calm thrived on it too. Without that, all bets were off.
I could almost taste the shift in energy; it was thick and bitter.
I placed my bag on the chair Randal had vacated, thinking of how to smuggle some of the food in there to Karner. She’d be hungry too, and it might work to build more favor with her, get me more of what I wanted…
Shit, I was messed up. Swinging from one extreme to the other in just a few seconds. Fuck, I’d even switched to the night shift so I would have more access to her.
At night, we were by ourselves, pacing the halls up and down, waiting for trouble.
It would be so much easier to slip into her cell.
I’d had her old cellmate removed so Karner was alone all the time, ripe for me to pick.
It was an easy lie to tell that I’d found her with a shiv on repeated occasions, and she needed to be moved to a new block where she would be more closely watched.
Cell Block A housed the worst of them, but if they were on good behavior, they could still find time alone. Karner’s old cellmate now had hourly observations and bars rather than a door. She’d kicked and screamed when we dragged her away while Karner was elsewhere.
“And the warden’s said nothing about the budget going back up?” I asked, the warden was always more visible during the daytime hours, so the night shift heard a lot through the grapevine.
Randal shrugged. “Dunno, man, wasn’t paying attention. Have a good shift!” He left, a wave behind him as he slipped out onto the floor and made his way to the gate with the rest of the day shifters. He gave me one last look before he turned a corner. I frowned and turned away.
Hours stretched ahead of me.
I waited until it was quiet, until we were well into the shift and the early hours of the morning, all separate, some COs half-asleep, some playing on their phone in the break room, before I filled my pockets and made my way to the second floor row where Karner had no idea I was coming for her.
My veins bubbled with need as I got closer.
She might have wondered where I was today, but she would be fast asleep now, none the wiser to what awaited her.
I smiled to myself as I reached her door and slipped inside, a crackling voice on the radio telling me no one would be up here anytime soon.
The only active CO was on the other side of the prison.
I moved into her cell and locked it behind me, taking a few steps to her bed.
She was still asleep, at odds with her location.
You’d think no one would sleep well in prison, but here Penelope Karner was, her hair fanned out behind her, her lips parted ever so slightly, a soft snore falling from her every few seconds.
She was beautiful. Even like this, when all the bravado had stripped away. Young, fresh-faced, with that feral gleam hidden in dreamland. Relaxed and docile, you might almost be forgiven for forgetting she was a depraved killer.
Grunting, I climbed on top of her and grabbed her hands, pinning them above her head as she woke with a flash. She gasped, her eyes widening as she was thrown back into consciousness with a start. But as soon as she saw it was me, her body relaxed and her eyes sharpened.
Bad mistake.
“What are you doing here, Adrian?” she said, using my name for the first time. It did something to me I had to ignore, bury deep deep down.
“Call me CO Darling or sir, or nothing at all,” I growled, hating the way she was burrowing underneath my skin already, with just a connected gaze and a few words, all my intentions went out the window.
Penelope Karner was about to get fucked.
I just didn’t know whether it would be the fun kind.