Chapter Eleven

Kane

I had another second to delight in the body pressed against mine before it was gone. Ripped away so suddenly I stumbled, but then I took in Danny's pallor and the trembling that skittered over his body and I stopped myself from reaching for him. He was out of the door before I'd even processed that.

Reaching for him?

What the actual fuck? I had nearly been the oldest fucking virgin in America. Before jail I had no friends and during lock up, it was only Archie who had protected me.

Until he hadn't.

I ruthlessly pushed away the feeling of the slimy hands and sharp nails biting into me. Four of them had tried to hold me down, and I'd never known how I got away. I'd tried not to think about it, because I'd known a dick up my ass wouldn't have been the worst thing I was likely to have shoved up there. And I remembered freezing for an endless moment as exactly that happened before I went beserk.

I must have thrown the shadows out and been so freaked I hadn't realized. It had been a year after O'Connell started, and I knew damn well he'd gotten his buddies to look the other way. Showers were never unsupervised.

I took a few breaths and calmed down. I wasn't inside anymore, and they couldn't get to me. Where was Danny? Sadie had gone, predictably, and I wondered if he had gone to his room, but I also knew he wouldn't leave Shae alone for that long. The man made me crazy in lots of ways, and right up to that moment I hadn't acknowledged that getting rid of the hate had made way for me to feel something else for him. The trouble was, I didn't think he had let go of his, and I wasn't sure why he hadn't. Did being close to me disgust him so much?

Was I gay? BI? Was it ridiculous for a thirty-plus-year-old guy to have any doubts? My feelings as a kid—if you could call them that—had been mostly about fear, desperation, and hunger. Not that they were much different now.

And somewhere in my own fucked-up mind, I knew that whatever had made him run wasn't about me. This wasn't a simple rejection. It was complicated and fucked up for both of us, but in a lot of ways my trauma—I hated that word—wasn't as bad. Not that you should pile up bad shit like bricks. See who had the tallest stack. It wasn't something measurable. You couldn't compare. But right at that moment, I knew Danny was suffering and while I might not be able to help, I wanted him to know I cared enough to try.

Before I second guessed myself, I followed him to the room where we'd put Shae, and even though the door was ajar, I slid down the wall outside and sat.

Then I talked, tossing words out into the silence like fucking confetti, even though I didn't know if he was interested in catching them. "I was okay while I had Archie. Okay being a relative term, but he kept me alive and kept the Shot Caller from ordering me to pay fines."

"What's a shot caller?" Danny asked from inside after a long moment when I wondered if he would say anything.

"Leader of the prison gang. There were factions, but the Aryan Brothers were the biggest gang in mine, probably the whole of Georgia for what they got away with. Archie protected me and I never had to pay fines. Fines ranged from outside contracts to good food to ending up in the hen coop."

"The what?" Danny repeated, and I sighed, wishing I'd never brought it up.

"The hen coop is what they called the cells some prisoners are allocated to according to a special sign. Often sexual identity. At sixteen, I was small and skinny."

"Fuck," Danny breathed out.

"Yeah," I said, suddenly tired that the life was still imprisoning me. Would I ever be truly free? "Thing is, the designation didn't depend on reality, simply appearances. Crimes were taken into consideration. Basically, the hen coop is like a prison within a prison. They get jobs like cleaning other cells, which often leads to—" I swallowed down my dry throat. "Rape."

I heard the door open but didn't get up off the floor. I wasn't even sure I could do this and look at Danny.

"Things went south for me when Archie died. By that point, I was too big to personally mess with and no one would have relegated me to the coop, but there was a guard that hated me. Never knew why."

"Was that O'Connell?"

"How'd you know?" I wished I dared look up at him.

"Complaints, disciplinary actions. It all has to be recorded and signed. He was the regular name in the file I saw."

Made sense. "He had it in for me. Food was his favorite, and I never knew how he did it, unless it was bribing the inmates."

Danny closed the door behind him, took one look at me, and put his back to the wall next to me before sliding down. "Food?" Of course, Danny would focus on that.

"I spent a lot of time in and out of the clinic. It took me too long to work out that it must be the food making me sick, so I stopped eating it. I once had to go five days with no food."

Danny pressed his lips together. "Which explains your caution."

"Sorry," I said. "It became ingrained. I was once in the line, and they swapped a fresh dish out as I was reaching for it. It didn't strike me as odd until I saw the cook swap the dish back for the half-empty one after I was already sat down. I'd already taken a couple of bites because I was starving, so I just said I had to go to the bathroom, and I made myself throw up."

I didn't realize the warmth I felt on my arm was Danny's hand until I looked down and saw his fingers resting on it.

"The food...when they gave us it was…" Danny's breath hitched. "Once it was covered in maggots, as if they were daring us to eat them."

My hand covered Danny's, almost of its own accord.

"I'm still not great at eating at restaurants," Danny said, "but if you're ever in Tampa, there's a great little diner called Betty's. All the team eat there and Betty's a sweetheart."

I smiled. The chances of me eating out were less than zero, but I supposed you never knew.

"Are we going to talk about it?" Danny croaked out, and of course I knew exactly what he meant. The kiss. If you could call it that.

"I suppose you were my first, if it matters," I said.

He blinked and looked confused. "First?"

"First kiss. Mom must have kissed me, not the same obviously, but as I told you, she—" But I couldn't say it because she might not have just fucked off. She might have even been murdered and I didn"t know what to do with that. "And I was inside at sixteen."

"I always knew I was gay," Danny said. "Even when I didn't have a name for it." He huffed. "But then my older sister outed me on Thanksgiving to my brothers. My Dad already knew though."

I was briefly diverted and so thankful for the change in subject. "She did?"

"Emily Margaret, named after my grandmother. Six years older than me but might as well have been twenty. My brother Cornan was teasing me about a girl at school. I was just helping her with math, and Emily informed everyone that I didn't like Theresa. I was much better suited to her older brother Scott. I wanted to die, but no one even batted an eyelash. I guess it was obvious."

Which explained why he kissed a man, but still didn't explain why he kissed me in particular. Was he that desperate? Maybe.

Danny let go and stood up. "I need to check on Shae." I agreed and followed him, not knowing what to make of the conversation, not knowing what to make of any of it.

**

Rawlings came back and checked on Shae himself and listened to what went down. I was sure he'd already spoken to Ringo.

"We still have to get your medical exam and we can't do much until Shae wakes," he said, and I gazed at him, wondering if Danny had said anything about my ability. Probably. Danny owed his loyalties to Rawlings, not me, and I briefly wondered why that hurt.

"There's two exams," Rawlings said. "One I need for my insurance, which costs a shit-ton as you can imagine, and the other is voluntary."

"What do you mean? The voluntary one," I qualified, suspicion crawling over my skin.

"The team in Tampa has their own dedicated doctor who works for the FBI. Specializes in enhanced. But she has a colleague that's based in Atlanta, private. I've never met her, but her specialty is vision."

"Eyes," I clarified, like I was stupid and didn't know what vision meant.

He nodded. "I'm going to assume you've never spoken to a doc or had any sort of eye exam. I place my team members in the roles most suited to them, and the ones least likely to get them or anyone else killed. You have a talent I really need to know about. Blunt, I know, but that's why all people are employed around the world in the history of forever. If you medical training, you'd be a Danny. Mechanical, you'd be an engineer. Etcetera."

I gazed at Rawlings. I remembered the zeros on the contract. Remembered how he'd stepped between me and the gun pointed at me by the old guy at the gas station. Remembered how he'd picked me up when I got out. Then I thought about what he was saying and what Danny had told me. Took in the tightness of his eyes and the way he held himself, and I knew this man would never forgive himself for leaving his men alone in that pit. No matter the circumstances. No matter that he wasn't even in the damn country. They were still his. And somehow with my screwed-up life, I might have landed on my feet. Yeah, he was a boss. He ran a company for profit. But I had a feeling he was so much more and maybe, just maybe, I had a chance to be part of that.

"What about Shae?"

"Danny can keep an eye on him, and he's not going to wake up anytime soon. Ringo's on standby and close."

"Okay." I knew I couldn't put it off any longer. Shae was still out of it, but we all grabbed a quick sandwich and took bottles of water with us. Then Rawlings and I left.

The first was a generic exam by a bored doctor. The only thing he checked with my eyes was a pupillary response and we were out of there in thirty minutes.

"I think you were just robbed," I said dryly, getting in his truck, and Rawlings snorted.

"Every-fuckin-day."

I grinned, feeling lighter—almost normal. Rawlings put an address into his GPS and we pulled out. "Going to take a half hour," he said. "Can you drive?"

"A car?" I said in surprise.

"Well, I'm assuming they don't give out pilot's licenses inside."

Okay, so that was a dumb question, and I was starting to appreciate Rawlings"humor. "Only getaway vehicles, unfortunately," I retorted, which got me another snort.

"Then I'm going to set you up with Jay."

"That's Blue Evanson." I remembered him listing the team's names.

"Yep. One thing the army gets you is nicknames," he agreed. I would never admit the only reason I knew what a Blue Jay was because of one of Archie's books. They even let him have a bird feeder and an extra bit of garden. None of the other prisoners touched it.

"He's a good defensive driver. Ringo as well, but you need to meet everyone. He'll have you tested and passed in a day."

I liked that idea. Maybe with my new paycheck I could get my own car.

The second doctor surprised me. Not just because she seemed really nice, but also because in the first couple of minutes she told me her younger brother of ten years old was enhanced, but blind, and it had led her to studying her specialty. I got the impression he had other talents that made up for the loss of vision, but obviously she didn't say and obviously I didn't ask. I was so damn glad he had support, though.

She did what she explained was a general exam, then asked my permission to put drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils. I shrugged because it didn't seem unreasonable, and so she did so. Then, after a moment, she frowned. "That's unexpected."

I arched my eyebrows. "Unexpected is kind of the story of my life."

She grinned. "Let me check some more things." So, I put my chin on the rest and she shined lights in my eyes and hummed and took measurements, which seemed to go on forever.

"You have a high level of Rhodopsin." I leaned back and waited for the explanation. "Do you mind if I share this with Mr. Rawlings?"

"No." I sighed. Might as well. We both went into a smaller office and Rawlings joined us.

"Rhodopsin is a pigment found in the photoreceptor cells of the eye. Basically, it stimulates biological responses in the body and means you can see light. I won't bother you with fractions or median levels, just to say your Rhodopsin levels are off the charts. A very unscientific term, but it's something my equipment cannot measure."

"I can see in the dark," I blurted out, knowing it was hardly a secret from Rawlings. She nodded.

"At the very least. I imagine the detail you see is also exemplary. I would love to give you more information, but without more tests that we would struggle to keep private, I can't because I simply don't have the equipment here. I also don't understand why your pupils wouldn't dilate. It didn't make the examination harder, which surprised me." She smiled. "Have you noticed anything else other than accurate vision?"

Rawlings just seemed curious, and I knew then that Danny hadn't shared what I'd told him, and my throat tightened as I shook my head. I had no idea why Danny hadn't, but that small gesture meant an awful lot, even if I knew I was going to have to tell Rawlings when we left. Privacy and dignity were something you left behind when the prison gates shut you in, and to claw a little back made me feel things I wasn't sure I ever had before.

And Danny had done that. With his prickly vibes, pizza casserole, almond shower gel, and the nearly kiss. And his understanding. And the feeling that, for once, I might not be alone.