by Mark Allen
Then again…
“That might be a bad idea,” he said, while the hot blood hammering through his veins called him seven kinds of a fool. “Seems like I’ve caused you enough trouble for one night.”
“You didn’t cause me trouble, you saved me from it,” Luna replied. “And a bad idea would be me still being here when the sheriff shows up and finds out I’m the reason his boys got the crap kicked out of them.”
“She’s right,” Fred said. “You need to get her outta here, Kane.”
Luna put her hands on her hips, tilted her head, and gave him a wink and a smile. “Come on, cowboy. I don’t bite.”
Kane winked back. “Maybe I do.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“My Jeep’s outside. You can ride shotgun.”
Fred waved as they walked out the door. “You two kids have fun now.”
They rolled out of town with moonlight sparkling on the calm waters of Vesper Lake. As the adrenalin overload ebbed from his system, Kane reflected on how he had come to a remote mountain town to get away from violence, only to find himself the subject of a violent brawl just a few hours after arriving. Sometimes he felt like a giant shit-magnet. But at least he hadn’t killed anybody.
Yet, some cynical inner voice sneered.
Kane shut it down. There had to be more to life than violence and bloodshed. Sometimes you had to kill to live, but that didn’t mean you had to live to kill. They might call him Reaper, but there had to be more to his life than just death and destruction.
He glanced at the woman sitting next to him. She caught his look and smiled at him, green eyes luminescent in the moonlight. She looked vibrant, alive, and carefree. Part of him knew he might be making a mistake taking her back to the cabin. But another part suggested that spending time with someone like her, someone so full of life, might be exactly what he needed right now.
As if sensing his pensive thoughts, Luna reached over and lightly touched his shoulder. “You all right, cowboy?”
He looked into her sparkling eyes for another heartbeat, then turned his head to watch his headlights punching through the autumn darkness. In a quiet voice, he replied, “Still trying to figure that out.”
Chapter Four
Black Bog Federal Prison
Kumi Ghastin was not the first woman to ever reach the rank of warden within the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons, but she was the first Japanese-American woman to do so. Once upon a time, that fact had filled her with pride and a great sense of accomplishment.
Before she’d sold her soul to evil incarnate.
Born to poor parents in the tiny town of Utashinai in Japan, her family had immigrated to the U.S. when Kumi was just three years old, seeking the proverbial better life. They found it in Harker Falls, a quiet farming town on the eastern border of upstate New York, just a stone’s throw from Vermont. Her father had worked at one of the dairy farms, then the local hardware store, then apprenticed with a plumbing and heating company before opening his own plumbing business when Kumi was fourteen.
With more money came a bigger house and a better school, where Kumi had blossomed into a straight-A student. She suffered racism, of course, but ignored it, refusing to give the brain-cell-deficient racists the satisfaction of seeing her bothered by their cheap, ignorant insults.
Not everyone exhibited racism. With her alabaster skin, long, black, silky hair, and curves in all the right places, she had attracted plenty of male attention in high-school. More than one would-be suitor who got too grabby found himself rejected with a swift karate chop or kick. Her body might have blossomed, but her sexuality remained dormant. She graduated with high honors but without a boyfriend.
That all changed in college. She picked up a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice from John Jay College in midtown Manhattan, maintaining the high honors that had marked her entire scholastic career. Her hormones also kicked into overdrive, and she screwed her way through a series of steamy but short-lived romances. Her bed-hopping ways soon earned her undesirable nicknames that had nothing to do with her oriental heritage.
In an effort to repair her badly damaged reputation, she stopped dating altogether and went celibate for the entirety of her junior year. But when Luke Ghastin transferred in from the University of Rochester, that all changed. He sat next to her in a forensic evidence class, and not only was she struck by his good looks, but also by his intelligent manner of speaking. He possessed a depth that surpassed the men she had known in the past. He seemed to be truly interested in her mind, she thought, and not just her body.
Their pre- and post-class conversations soon became coffee-shop marathons, and eventually—because she took this relationship slow and steady rather than fast and hot—became regular dates. They were five official dates in before he made a physical move, and by then, she was more than ready to consummate their feelings. She didn’t tell him until much later, but it was the best sex of her life. Not just because of the intensity of her orgasms, but because it was the first time she had made love to someone with whom she felt a true, deep connection.
Marriage came shortly after graduation, followed by the birth of a daughter. With her master’s degree, she easily qualified for a position with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and by the age of forty-one, she found herself Associate Warden of Programs at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida.
She got passed over for promotion to warden a half-dozen times, always to men far less qualified but who were part of the “good ol’ boy” system. Feeling she had no choice, she played the EEO card, using her gender and race as leverage. The agency caved and promoted her to warden, but gave her a little “fuck you” by transferring her to one of the least desirable correctional institutions in the federal system.
Black Bog Federal Prison.
Knowing it was blatant retaliation but refusing to give them an ounce of satisfaction, Kumi accepted the promotion—and transfer—with a bright smile. Inside, she had cringed. Black Bog Federal Prison was a notoriously bleak place, as cold as hell most of the time, and rumored to be about as lawless as the Old West.
She had been stationed there less than three months when Nazareno “The Nazarene Dragon” Pedregon arrived.
His takeover had been swift, ruthless, and unstoppable. Nazareno possessed a cobra’s charisma and enjoyed access to billions of cartel dollars, plus he exhibited a merciless willingness to brutally destroy those who opposed him. Through a combination of bribes and threats, he had rapidly corrupted the vast majority of the prison. Those who weren’t outright corrupted were at least wise enough to remain silent. Those who tried to go the whistleblower route about the wickedness festering behind the walls of Black Bog Federal Prison were found rotting in ditches with their tongues cut out.
Kumi tried to have him transferred to a high-security penitentiary, but that request got shot down immediately, making her realize that Nazareno had high-ranking prison officials in his pocket. She called in federal inspectors, who showed up just long enough to emphatically tell her never to call them again and get with the program.
It was after those federal inspectors left that Nazareno had walked into her office unannounced, unshackled, and unescorted by any correctional officers—another sign that the entire prison had bowed to his will.
She didn’t frighten easily, but her heart had hammered in her chest as he just stood there and studied her with his dead-eyed shark’s stare. Droplets of sweat beaded his shaved scalp and make the inked blood on his crown of thorns tattoo gleam with faux realism.
Projecting outward calm even as her guts twisted into knots, Kumi had put down her pen, crossed her arms, and asked, “What are you doing here?”
Nazareno hadn’t spoken a word. Just approached her desk, sandaled feet silent on the carpet, and placed two photographs in front of her.
The first was a picture of her daughter at her college campus, taken through a telescopic lens. The second was a photo of Luke, asleep in their b
ed at home, taken through their bedroom window.
The blood had frozen in her veins, and Kumi stared up at him in horror.
“You will do what I command when I command it,” Nazareno had said. “Any refusal, even the slightest hesitation, and your family will die. I will have your husband flayed, and his flesh fed to dogs. I will have your daughter taken to an MS13 hellhole, where she will be gang-raped until she begs for death. Then I will have her scalped and holes drilled in her skull. Gasoline will be poured into these holes, and then I will have her brain set on fire.”
Kumi had not hesitated to react. Nazareno clearly expected her to beg and grovel and promise to do whatever he wanted, but she chose a different option—one completely unexpected.
She had attacked.
Her radio featured an emergency alert system, but she knew pressing the red button would be a waste of time. Nobody would come to her aid. She might technically be the queen of the prison, but everyone knew Nazareno reigned as the undisputed king. Nobody would interfere with whatever happened next.
So she tried to kill him with her bare hands.
She had read Nazareno’s file from cover to cover. She knew he was an expert in savate, judo, and aikido, but she also knew she just needed one good strike to the neck to take out the cartel kingpin. Her father had taught her that karate should never be used with lethal intent, but this situation called for a desperate exception.
“Kiai!” she had screamed, moving in for the kill.
Nazareno had effortlessly kicked her ass.
And then he did much worse.
Afterward, she had sprawled listlessly on the floor amidst her torn clothes, battered and bruised, Nazareno’s power over her unequivocally asserted, his control of the prison complete. The beat-down and the violation had not broken her, but the threats against her family had. Since she had not been able to defeat the drug lord, she would be compliant. She had no doubt that Nazareno’s horrific threats were anything but idle.
That had been nearly two years ago. Two years of hell. Two years of hiding the secret from Luke. Two years of knowing that vicious butchers kept a constant watch on her family.
Tonight she was working late to catch up on the endless cycle of paperwork pushing that constituted a warden’s daily routine. Nazareno might be the top dog around here, but there were nearly eight hundred other inmates. Black Bog Federal Prison might be corrupt as hell, but it still had to function like a normal prison, at least from the outside looking in. The show must go on.
She signed her name on a form denying an inmate’s claim against an officer who had allegedly stolen a candy bar and a can of Coke from the convict’s locker. She knew she could only get away with that decision because the inmate belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the few gangs not directly under Nazareno’s thumb.
As she tucked the claim form back into a manila envelope for routing and processing, Nazareno walked into the office. The fact that there were five locked doors inmates had to get through—two of them controlled by correctional officers—before reaching the warden’s area proved just how deep the corruption ran at Black Bog Federal Prison.
Kumi laid down her pen. In her head, a scenario played out like a movie in which she jammed the pen into the drug lord’s ear and impaled his brain or stabbed it into the hollow of his throat and watched with a satisfied smile as he choked to death on his own blood.
But of course, that was all just a vengeful fantasy. The reality of how this visit would go down would be far different.
“Nazareno,” she greeted him. Her long black hair, pulled back in a ponytail, had slipped over her shoulder. She flipped it back, knowing it would probably be in Nazareno’s fist pretty soon.
The drug lord’s cold eyes locked on her like a viper staring at its prey. “When I take time out of my busy day to pay you a visit, the least you can do is smile when you see me.”
For the sake of her endangered husband and daughter, she bit back the “Kutabare”—Japanese for “fuck you”—that rose to her tongue and instead plastered a bright, blatantly-faked smile on her lips. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long day, and I’m ready to go home.”
“Of course,” Nazareno replied. “Home to where your beloved Luke is waiting.” The perpetual threat to her husband remained unspoken but was implied behind the otherwise harmless words.
She nodded, acknowledging both his words and the tacit threat they contained.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This won’t take long.”
Kumi steeled herself. When Nazareno said that, it usually meant he was about to take her hard and rough. It would be brutal, but it would be quick—usually just sixty seconds or so. Less, if she screamed. It helped him get his rocks off.
Instead, he walked over and handed her a slip of paper with two names on it: Yvonne Fariss and Bonnie Little. Kumi recognized both. They worked in Financial Management, better known as the business office. Yvonne held a contract specialist position, and Bonnie was an accounting technician.
Kumi looked up with a frown. “What do you want with business office people? There’s no way we can transfer government funds into your accounts without raising serious red flags at the Treasury Department.”
Nazareno smiled—no warmth, just a crocodile-like baring of his teeth—and shook his head. “You misunderstand. It’s not dinero I want. I have all the money I need. Hell, Dios comes to me for a loan sometimes.” He chuckled at his sacrilegious wit.
“Then what are these names for?” Kumi asked.
“I want them killed.”
Kumi blanched. “Why? For God’s sake, Mrs. Fariss retires next year.”
“Mrs. Fariss and Mrs. Little will both be permanently retired tomorrow.”
“Nazareno, please! I’m begging you to reconsider.”
“Would you prefer it to be your daughter instead? I’m told the victim actually lives long enough to feel their cerebral fluid boiling.”
“No! No, of course, not.”
“Then make it happen,” the drug lord commanded. “Word on the compound is that those two putas are making noise about calling their congressman and reporting what is going on here at the prison.”
Good for them, Kumi thought. But then she realized that actually, no, it wasn’t good for them. Their refusal to be corrupted and their contemplation of taking action had earmarked them for early graves. “Couldn’t you just pay off the congressman?” she suggested.
“Of course, I could,” Nazareno said. “But why should I? It’s much cheaper to kill two bitches than it is to bribe a politician.”
Kumi thought about telling him that Yvonne and Bonnie both had families, but decided not to waste her breath. You couldn’t appeal to a man’s sense of decency when he had none. Nazareno was the kind of person who would watch a toddler get dismembered with the same emotional detachment most people feel when looking at a dead fly.
Resigning herself to the inevitable, she asked, “How would you like it done?”
“Give the names to SORT,” Nazareno instructed. “Goatsack and his boys will take care of the rest.”
Kumi nodded. SORT stood for Special Operations Response Team, the prison’s version of SWAT. While the other specialized operators in the prison—DCT, short for Disturbance Control Team—utilized batons, shields, and stun munitions, SORT was considered the lethal option when things went sideways. DCT might kick an inmate’s teeth in; SORT would blow those teeth out the back of the inmate’s head if necessary.
The SORT leader was Duff “Goatsack” Cantwell, a grizzled correctional officer just a year away from the Bureau of Prison’s mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven. Duff only stood five foot ten, but every inch of it was hard-packed muscle, like slabs of granite attached to his skeleton. A fitness enthusiast—some might argue “extremist”—he hit the gym a minimum of three hours a day, and most of those hours were spent lifting weights. He chugged protein powder the way some people guzzled coffee and sported the linebacker shoulders, tree-tru
nk biceps, and bulging thigh muscles to prove it.
Kumi stared at the names on the paper. She would give the information to Goatsack in the morning, and before noon, the women would be dead. More scars on her conscience, more wounds on her soul, more guilt to bear. But if that was what it took to keep her husband and daughter safe, she would suffer the emotional anguish.
She looked up and gave Nazareno a nod. “It will be done.”
“Good.”
“Anything else? I really do need to get home.”
“Just one last thing.”
Kumi’s heart sank. “No,” she murmured. “Please…”
“Take off your clothes.”
“Please,” she repeated. “Not tonight.”
His eyes narrowed with anger. “Defy me again, and your husband will be in a hundred pieces before you make it home. Now take off your clothes.”
Blinking back tears, Kumi stood up and unbuttoned her blouse, then pushed her slacks down over her hips so they fell around her ankles.
Before she could even kick them away, Nazareno pounced on her, growling like an animal as he slammed her down on the desk. There was an element of lust in his attack, but she knew it was mostly about power, about reminding her who was in charge.
As she suffered his abuse, Kumi closed her eyes and wondered if she would ever wake up from the hell her life had become.
Chapter Five
Dribble Creek Camp
The fire roared and crackled, the flames leaping at least eight feet high. Orange sparks drifted into the cloudless, star-speckled night before winking out in the velvet darkness.
“Now that’s a bonfire,” Luna said appreciatively.
Kane tossed on another log, causing more sparks to billow like dozens of fireflies. The sudden rush of heat made them push their chairs a little farther back from the blaze. “Don’t want to end up like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,” Kane joked, reaching for his half-finished Jack and Coke. He’d already downed one.