Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) Read Free Page A

damning, blood-stained blade.
    Thank God, it wasn’t a correctional officer who’d got killed. Then real bullets would've been loaded into real guns – Mini-14’s – and taken a bunch of inmates out. Fuckers didn't mess around when a CO was attacked. As it was, a shit storm flew down on them loud as thunder and hard as icicles.
    As leader of the Lords, Anson Stark had put out the word that Griff wasn't to go down for the attack in the prison yard. Stark wanted his second in command to stay in general population where he could control the inmates at large, and provide intel to and from the SHU, to and from the outside world.
    Since Cole Hansen had the bad luck to be on the spot when the incident happened, and had the shiv in his fucking hand, for Christ’s sake, he was asked to take the fall. He now occupied a cell in the white shot caller’s pod, where the president and founder of the Lords of Death operated his gang from the cell right next to Cole.
    Cole had no choice but to keep his trap shut and man up. That’s how a petty criminal who'd been serving a three-year sentence for burglary was now doing a term for murder and gang retaliation in security housing.
    Worst fucking luck ever.

 
     
    Chapter 5
     
    Even though another doctor had been called in to assist in the medical wing, Frankie worked extra hours the day of the stabbing. She tried to catch a quick nap in her car, and finally, still groggy and tired, returned to the clinic.
    The ward was much quieter now, housing only the seriously injured inmates, along with the regular terminal patients. The others had been dispatched to their cells.
    As Frankie passed the security desk, she waited for the question she’d heard many times before.
    “Hey, Jonsey.” Beefy Officer Quinn, who checked her through prison personnel security, squinted at her badge and rummaged through her personal cooler. “Why does a pretty gal like you wanna get ogled by these degenerates when you could have a lucrative private practice on the outside?”
    Frankie never understood if the degenerates Quinn referred to were the prison workers or the inmates. She smiled blandly and turned away as he released the door’s lock, then waited another minute while the second security door’s entrance to the prison proper was released.
    She sighed and squared her shoulders. Another shift in the trenches.
    Making her way through the labyrinthine prison, security check after security check, to the SHU’s hospital and her tiny office at the front of the clinic, she considered Quinn’s tiresome question. Why had she chosen prison work instead of private practice?
    The work was brutal, the patients surly, and her co-workers often disturbing. Although she repressed the reality when it threatened to take over her life, in her heart she knew why she worked here so tirelessly.
    She saw her father’s shattered image in the face of every inmate who passed through the clinic doors.
    Her two nurses, Harry and Mike – male and burly, and looking like inmates themselves – were already at work. Heaving another sigh, she removed her coat and sank into the desk chair in her office, reaching for the “kites” lying in her inbox.
    Kites were inmate requests for services – medical, counseling, legal. There were a pile of them today, delayed after their request dates while being vetted by correctional personnel who determined their priority. These likely were further held up because of the yard incident earlier.
    “Kites” actually referred to any form of prison communication. Literally a request for various services from inmates to staff, they’d also come to be a way for inmates to communicate with one another secretly – and illegally – inside the prison. A reversion to man’s most basic form of contact in a world where talking was a privilege, and whispering a defiance.
    The kite lying on the top of the pile was from inmate Cole Hansen. Frankie had treated him more than a few times since she’d