NATE'S POV
"Captain Nate Cole."
The voice cut through the corridor like a blade drawn slowly and deliberately, its edge finding me before the words fully landed. It wasn't raised. It didn't need to be. Authority lived in the certainty of it; in the way it assumed I would stop and turn.
"Warden Boris," I said, keeping my tone level and professional.
Warden Boris stood several paces behind me, his broad shoulders nearly filling the narrow hall. The fluorescent lights flattened the colour from his face, carving it into hard planes and permanent shadows. Men like Boris survived places like this by learning when not to ask questions and when not to answer them.
"Your request to see Adrian Blackwood has been processed and approved," he spoke up, and relief flickered through me, brief and cautious, and in this facility, nothing came without cost. "But not in his cell."
I frowned. "Why?"
"He refused the request."
I searched Boris's face for irony or hesitation and found neither.
"Inmates don't have the fucking liberty to refuse," I said.
"Adrian Blackwood does." The statement settled between us like a fact no one bothered disputing.
"You'll meet him in the gym," Boris continued. "Alone without your team members."
That earned my full attention. "Alone?"
"He insisted on it." He sighed in irritation
"And you fucking agreed? Why the fuck would you do that ?" I huffed in annoyance.
Boris's jaw tightened. "He has privileges that have been earned through intelligence and compliance." A pause, then a quieter, rougher response. "And fucking unsettling ability to get what he wants."
"Unsettling," I muttered, "is a fucking understatement."
Boris turned and began walking, and I had no choice but to follow while my team remained behind, grumbling in annoyance.
The deeper we moved into the facility, the heavier the air became, not thick with heat or noise, but with tension. This wing was older, reinforced after mistakes that had names attached to them, and the walls felt closer here. The silence felt deliberate, curated.
I'd walked prison corridors before and interviewed men who'd butchered families, dismantled lives, left trails of devastation behind them. None of them had made my instincts coil this tight.
Boris stopped in front of a set of reinforced steel doors scarred with old impact marks and faded warning labels.
"He's in there," he said. "I'll escort you inside. But understand this, Adrian Blackwood controls that room more than I do."
My eyebrow rose despite myself. "Then why am I going in unarmed?"
"Because weapons would only flatter him." The locks disengaged.
The doors swung open, and the scent that hit first was citrus, sharp and clean, cutting through sweat and hot metal. It didn't belong in a prison like Hell's Watch, and that alone set my nerves on edge, and as I took a step forward, the sound of metal striking metal was slow, measured, and heavy.
After a second, Adrian Blackwood stood in the center of the gym, shirtless, skin slick with sweat beneath the unforgiving lights. He lifted the bar with controlled ease, muscles flexing and releasing in a rhythm built from discipline rather than brute force. When he lowered it back onto the rack, the metallic clang echoed through the room like punctuation.
I stopped just inside the threshold, and my eyes landed on the tattoos that spilled across his torso like dark scripture. Ink traced violence and devotion in equal measure. A coiled python ran along his ribs, scales shaded so finely they seemed to move as he breathed patient, lethal, eternal. Near his heart, a rose bloomed in bruised crimson and black, petals torn, thorns biting into flesh as if pain were part of its design.
Hunger and restraint, beauty and threat, and fucking something sacred twisted into something dangerous. The ink didn't decorate him, it fucking confessed him, and my pulse slammed hard against my ribs.
Adrian Blackwood finished his set and straightened, rolling his shoulders slowly, and he never even turned to look at me.
"Come in," he said calmly. "You can stop hovering in the doorway."I stepped fully inside, and the fucking doors closed behind me with a heavy finality that vibrated through the floor.
"I smelled you the second they opened," he continued. "Law enforcement always carries that particular blend of restraint and arrogance."
I said nothing, and Adrian Blackwood stretched, arms lifting over his head, muscles rippling. Only then did his gray eyes lift to meet mine, and the shock that hit me when our eyes clashed was enough to take my breath away.
"Fucking CSI finally came to see me?" he asked, mouth curving into a slow, knowing smile. "Mmm." He stepped closer. "You came a long way for paperwork."
Up close, the pull was worse, Something darker. The kind of presence that bent a room around it, forced attention without asking permission.
"You're Nate Cole," he said softly. "I've heard of you."
"I doubt that," I replied.
"I don't waste time on doubts." He tilted his head, studying me. "And you don't look at me the way the others do."
I held his gaze. "How do I look at you?"
"Like you're deciding," he said, closing the distance, "whether I'm something to cage or something that might burn you alive."
My jaw tightened, and my body reacted before my mind could stop it, adrenaline surging, instincts sharpening.
"I'm here to request your cooperation," I said. "Nothing more."
Blackwood smiled. "That's never true."
He stepped past me close enough that I felt the heat of his body, caught the sharp citrus and iron beneath it. His shoulder brushed mine. Intentional, claiming space.
Behind me, the steel doors groaned, and the locks disengaged, and I turned sharply, and Warden Boris stood beyond the reinforced glass, one hand resting on the control panel. His expression was unreadable, and Adrian Blackwood leaned in, his voice near my ear. "They're giving us more time," he murmured. "That's new."
The doors slid shut again and sealed, and the fucking lock clicked, and my pulse thundered, and I faced him, every instinct screaming danger.
"What did you do?" I asked.
Blackwood's gray eyes gleamed with anticipation.
"I told them," he said softly, "that if they wanted answers, they'd have to let me ask the first question."
" What?"