Caged Wolf (Darkmore Penitentiary, #1)

by Caroline Peckham

Any hopes I’d have of a reduced sentence had been crushed like a nut in a nutcracker a long time ago. Lionel Acrux had ensured I paid for my crimes with my youth. Since then, I’d tried to live vicariously through my brother’s stories. In here, it was all about survival. And I’d been caged so long, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to live without watching your back at every second.

“The more attention Plunger gets, the harder he works for it,” Roary’s voice came from the cell to the right of mine. “Just ignore him or he’ll bend over and give you a real show with a full view of his asshole.”

I was released from this cell for the night. Firstly and most importantly, I needed to find Sin Wilder. He was the one I’d come to break out of here after all.

think Twelve would benefit from a firm hand, so I’m assigning you as her corrections officer. Hastings can be her second, he could learn a thing or two from how you deal with an inmate like this.”

“I want you to give her a six week assessment before she begins the correcting process. Observe her temperament, her strengths, her weaknesses, how she responds to the other inmates and how she adapts to the prison lifestyle. Make notes on anything she needs to improve upon.”

Incubuses were shapeshifters of the best fucking kind. We could slip into the skin of anyone’s deepest, darkest desire just by touching them and sensing it in their flesh. And the best part about that was, I held onto every skin I’d ever owned. If I had access to my Order form, I could look like any one of them. Male, female, tall, short, dark, fair, I had them all baby, and everything in between. Of course, I couldn’t shift in here, so I couldn’t flex that power over my appearance. But my personality had split so many ways since my Order had Emerged that I could still hop from one to the next no bother. The real problem was knowing which parts of my personality really belonged to me and which were other people’s fantasies that had gotten stuck to the inside of my head. Luckily, my real face held enough sway with girls anyway and paired with my sugary words, I could get by just fine in here. Not constant blowjobs and orgies fine, but I survived.

I was hired by the meanest fuckers in the kingdom to kill even meaner fuckers. I was only ever called in to slay the worst of the worst, asshole-of-Solaria types. And that suited me real good. Because I happened to be one of them too. And no one knew how to kill a monster as well as another monster.

My real name was not in fact Sin Wilder. It was Whitney Northfield. Fucking…Whitney. Either my mother had a twisted sense of humour or she’d decided to pass on her name to me a few hours before she dumped me in a garbage can on the corner of Moonlight Street. Not beside the can. Not even with the lid off. Inside, lid down, baby screaming.

I could spout the alphabet or discuss my plans to murder the rulers of Solaria, no one would care either way.

The Lunar Brotherhood and the Oscura Clan had been enemies for as long as anyone in our generation could remember, but if my cousin Dante could bend the rules as far as they were concerned then so could I. And I already had a plan in mind for the Lunar Alpha. I needed him on side if I wanted my idea to work. I needed to have the entire prison under my sway, which meant uniting a few of the biggest gangs in here to give us unquestionable numbers.