A Pound of Flesh (A Pound of Flesh #1)(5)

Carter cast him a skeptical glance.

Jack placed the tips of his fingers under his chin. “What would you like to study?”

“I don’t care.” Carter shrugged. “I just wish they’d leave me the f*ck alone.”

“It’s all part of the conditions for the chance of early parole. You need to show progression in your rehabilitation. And if taking a couple of classes while you’re here does that, then you have to play the game.”

Carter knew that, and it infuriated him. Since the age of fifteen, he’d been passed from one lawyer, parole officer, and counselor to the next, with no thought about how or if he would ever do something more meaningful with his life. Though what meaningful meant, Carter had no f*cking idea.

Nevertheless, after nineteen months at Kill, he was starting to think spending the rest of his days locked up wasn’t the attractive prospect he’d initially perceived it to be.

As a wayward, arrogant, angry teenager, he’d enjoyed having a revered reputation. Now the excitement and thrill had waned. Court, detention centers, and prison were old news, and he was getting bored with the law institution as a whole. If he didn’t change his shit, he’d be on the wrong side of thirty wondering what the f*ck happened to his life.

Jack cleared his throat. “Have you had any visitors recently?”

“Paul came last week. Max is coming Monday.”

“Wes.” Jack sighed, pulling off his glasses. “You need to be careful. Max—he’s not good for you.”

Incensed, Carter slammed his palm on the table. “You think you have the right to say shit like that?”

Carter knew that Jack considered Max O’Hare a disease, infecting everyone around him with his drug issues, long criminal history, and his ability to land his friends in deep shit—Carter’s being in Kill a case in point. But Carter had owed Max big-time. Being in prison was simply squaring a debt, and he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

“No,” Jack soothed. “That’s not what I think at all—”

“Well, good,” Carter interrupted. “Because you have no idea what Max has been through, what he’s still going through. None.” He took a long pull on his smoke, staring at Jack over the burning embers.

“I know he’s your best friend,” Jack said after a moment of tense silence.

“Yeah,” Carter agreed with a sharp nod. “He is.”

And from what he’d heard from the guys who’d visited, Max needed him now more than ever.

*

Even when Kat Lane was asleep, the world around her was shadowed and oppressive, riddling her dreams with fear. Her small hands gripped the sheets, twisting in desperation. Her closed eyes clenched and her jaw tightened while her head pressed into the pillows beneath it. Her spine was rigid and her feet moved in her sleep as she found herself running, panicked and terrified, down a shadowed alley.

A sob rose from her throat, trapped in a never-ending slide show of the night that had happened almost sixteen years before. “Please,” she whimpered into the darkness.

But no one would come to save her from the five faceless men who chased her. She shot up into a sitting position with a scream, sweating and breathless. Her eyes darted around her pitch-black room before, realizing where she was, she closed them and cupped her hands to her face. She exhaled through a rough throat and brushed the tears away, trying to calm herself with slow, deep breaths.

She’d woken this way every day for the past two weeks, and the grief that hit her every time she opened her eyes was all too familiar. She shook her head, exhausted.