I cut him off. “I don’t claim to know anything anymore, Hawk. Tell Raven I love her.” With a nod of my head at the guard he opened the door and I walked back to my cell, already planning how I could handle this without getting an extension added to the time I was already serving.
The situation kept me up all night, and by morning I was calling in a few favors that would have done not only myself some good during the time I had to spend in San Quentin, but would have been good for Angel’s Halo down the road. I just hoped that after this, Felicity would realize she meant more to me than I had stupidly tried to make her think.
The yard was busy, as it normally was midmornings. There were men pumping iron on one part of the yard, while some were just sitting around getting some sun before having to spend the rest of the day either in their cells or doing their work duties. I sat at a table with the men I normally stuck with. They offered me protection from rival MCs that I’d pissed off over the years while I stood as a symbol of their own protection to their people on the outside.
I had a grin on my face, pretending to listen to the men around me. But my eyes were on the man standing by the fence with five men who were a lot like him. Junkies. Men that were in here because they had let drugs rule their lives. Some of them were necessarily bad people, but the one who I was looking at right then was possibly as bad as they came in my eyes. I let my hate power through me as I watched the man scratch at his arms.
Ten minutes later I was up, walking toward the gates with everyone else as we went inside for lunch. It was time, and by the end of the day I would know if I was going to be spending the rest of my life in San Quentin or not.
One of my men stood close as I eased my way through the crowd toward my prey. A man in front of me glanced up and nodded before bumping into the guy to his left. A grunt filled the air and I moved fast, punching the guy in the lower back three times. Startled, the guy turned, pain and rage filling his eyes. I let him hit me over and over again before fighting back. I didn’t let up, and the men around me gave me plenty of time to do the damage that needed doing before the guards could get to me.
A sharp pain sliced through my side and my grin was pure evil as I took the shank that someone had so generously supplied—and had cost me three huge favors that I’d been saving up for Bash and my MC brothers. Pulling the shank free, I had less than a second to see that it was a plastic comb melted down to a sharp point. In the next minute the shank disappeared into the guy’s chest and I was rewarded with a gurgle as blood quickly filled his lungs.
I pulled back enough to see his face. “For Lucy.” The words were just a whisper but I saw the startled look in the man’s eyes as he sucked in his last breath.
I didn’t get lunch that day. Instead I was in the infirmary all day. With Vince Grady pronounced dead, my story along with those of the men around me at the time had to be taken into account for what had happened. Self-defense. It was the story I was sticking to, and with the six stitches needed to close up the wound on my side where someone had stabbed me to make it look like Grady had shanked me, it was a plausible story.
By dinnertime the guards and warden let me know that it was being written up as self-defense and I went back to my cell hoping that Felicity’s boss could sleep at night now.