If you're looking for an adventure in the morally grey, and a crash course of the human condition, this is the story for you! What is good and evil? Where is that line drawn, and who decides that? Packed with humor, danger, feels, and awkward relati...
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Tanner slid off his wet coat, and Rachel trembled as he revealed his arms up to the shoulders. In nothing but a black muscle shirt, she could see the holsters on his upper arms that held knives on either one, and the soaked coat clinked as he set it on a table behind him, indicating that he kept more on him.
"Do you want to put that jack knife down now?" Tanner asked, setting his hands on his hips, and her eyes crawled over the defined lines of his muscles that strained against his shirt and wound down his arms.
"No?" Rachel growled. "Let me leave." She inched to the side, and he took a step over to remain between her and her escape.
"Do you not want to play pool?" Tanner asked, as if that were the reason she was going for the door.
"I want to live," Rachel ground out
"You'll be fine. As long as we play quickly," Tanner emphasized with a smirk. "One round can be as short as fifteen minutes, which gives you a good fifteen to hightail it out of here. It'll take you much longer to muscle past me."
"I fucking hate you," Rachel spat as she slid a few steps over, grabbed a pool stick, and stood stiff as a statue next to the table.
"Good. I hate teenagers who think it's entertaining to block my exit when they know I can't touch them. Perhaps you should have thought of that before you stepped on the wrong toes. It's not very fun to have someone in the way of your escape, now is it?"
Tanner's eyes darkened, and she cursed under her breath. This was his way of getting back at her for keeping him from leaving the basketball court. She'd been trying to get him to come out of the pen to enjoy himself, but he clearly saw it as something else. Donovan was so kind that she'd been biased and gone with this man, but the rest of the pen's inmates were clearly not so easygoing.
"It's better you accept your fate rather than bloody your hand railing against an impassible wall," Tanner said, coming around and straightening the pool balls in a triangle.
As soon as the line of sight to the door was clear, she took off, but she jumped back just as quickly from a whizzing next to her ear. It fluttered her hair in the open air before a knife found purchase in the wood floor a foot ahead of her. She couldn't tear her eyes away from the gunmetal-gray throwing knife. Without a hilt it curved dangerously on one edge of the blade where it stabbed into the floor tiles.
"Nine more knives on my person before I run out," Tanner said, rubbing the end of the pool stick in a small square.
"What are you going to do?" Rachel challenged, and he set the pool stick down again. "Are you going to manhandle me over to a pool table and force me to play with you while I count the seconds until the Moceris show up? Unless you plan on planting me in the ground, I can end you with a single word into the right ear."
