Mess Me Up (Bear Bottom Guardians MC 1)

That was what I was afraid of.Chapter 16I don’t need someone that sees the good in me. I need someone that sees the bad in me and doesn’t give a fuck.

-Rome’s secret thoughts

Rome

“Yo,” I said to the guard in C unit. “Do you mind opening the gate? I want to go talk to someone.”

The guard, Corry Orman, opened the gate and shrugged. “They’re in the yard.”

The yard was the area outside where the inmates went twice a day to get in their daily exercise. There was weight equipment, basketball goals, and a small running track. Most of the inmates worked out, but there were some who sat on their fat asses and watched all the other inmates doing what they did.

Slate, Izzy’s brother, was one of the inmates who worked out.

He was benching three hundred and fifty pounds—who knows if he could handle more since that was the heaviest weight that the prison supplied for the inmates—when I walked up to him.

Nobody was spotting him, which wasn’t surprising.

He’d been a cop, and nobody in the prison system liked cops except for the guards, other ex-cops—which there weren’t many of—and loners that would like anyone as long as it helped protect them.

He clocked me the minute I came up to him.

Racking his weight, he sat up, shirtless with sweat running down his chest, and stared at me with Izzy’s dark eyes.

“What?” he asked.

I offered him my hand. “My name is Rome. I’m dating your sister.”

Slate blinked, staring at me blankly. Then reached out and took my hand.

We were drawing attention from the other inmates. It wasn’t every day that a guard offered his hand to an inmate.

But these were special circumstances.

“You’re dating my sister,” Slate said blankly. “Which one?”

He knew exactly which one since he only had one sister.

Bayou had informed me that he’d heard rumblings of mine and Izzy’s relationship in the yard—how the hell they knew this shit was beyond me—and that he wasn’t very happy about it.

Mostly because he’d also heard that there’d been a murder and that Izzy was involved in it. I just so happened to get tight with her right around the same time.

Since Slate had no other way to investigate the problem, he’d made assumptions that I was the reason his sister was involved in whatever she was involved in instead of her finding trouble on her own, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

But, being the nice person that I was, I’d decided to come in early for my shift to inform her brother about what was going on.

I snorted. “From what I understand, Izzy is the only one. Unless y’all are hiding one from her that she doesn’t know about.”

Slate’s mouth kicked up at the corner.

“Yeah.” He grinned then, but it quickly fell off his face. “Is my sister okay?”

I thought about that, then decided to fully explain everything, starting with how we met.

I ended it with how she’d found the photos in Senator Antilles’s house.

By the time I was finished explaining, his fists were clenched on his knees, and he was staring at me furiously.

“She was supposed to live with me after she was injured. She hated being back with our parents,” he murmured, sounding sick to his stomach. “My fiancée and I had a pool house, and we were going to put her out there. Right before my fiancée was murdered, and I went off the rails, I introduced her to Rodrigo. I’d met the motherfucker during an investigation and thought he and Izzy would hit it off. Then I went down for murder, and I found out that he’d started abusing my sister. It was the worst feeling in the world to know that I couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it. My world was imploding all around me, and I could only sit there and witness it.”

The idea of losing Izzy was something that made my breath stall in my chest. The idea of knowing that someone I loved was being abused, and I could do nothing to stop it was a special kind of torture. The idea of that person being Izzy set something inside of me on fire.

I’d had to control myself when it came to her ex, Rodrigo.

But the more that I learned about him, the more that I realized what an asshole he really was. I mean taking advantage of a woman who’d lost her child was bad enough, but abusing her on top of that? Yeah, that didn’t sit well with me.

I clenched my own fists.

“You and she make a good pair then, both of you knowing what it feels like to lose a child,” he murmured into my darkness.

I blinked, seeing him staring at me with his own demons in his eyes.

“Take care of her,” he ordered. “I don’t want to have to break out of this prison, it might make your friend the Warden look bad, but I’d do it to protect my sister.”