Once upon a time, he would have taken that for granted. And by most people’s standards, this wasn’t much of a view. Just a distant line of trees: ungraceful-looking loblolly pines, their shapes crisscrossed by the wiring of the fence.
But Cooper didn’t look at the trees. He looked at the sky.
He could still remember what it felt like to fly.
The chilly mist against his wings as they sliced through clouds. The bright morning sky and clear, glittering night. The sheer, heart-pounding exhilaration of rocketing downwards and pulling up only at the last possible second. He’d been an adrenaline junkie back then.
He’d been a lot of things back then.
Once, Cooper Dawes had been a sworn US Marshal. He had hunted down dangerous fugitives and kept federal witnesses safe from harm. His job had been his whole life., and he’d poured his heart, mind, and soul into it.
And on the rare days when it had all felt like too much, he’d taken to the skies, and it had always cleared his head.
Now he didn’t have the job.
And all he had of the sky was this single window in Cellblock D.
Prison meant he was a Marshal who would never work for justice again. Justice had spoken—loudly—against him.
Prison meant he was a griffin shifter who would never fly again.
And six months into his life sentence, it was painfully clear that prison also meant being bored out of his mind.
Cooper was in Block D, protective custody. It was where the prison stashed inmates who were deemed to be in need of additional safeguards—mostly because half the men in the prison’s general population wanted to kill them.
As a Marshal, Cooper had personally worked shifts doing prisoner transport for this exact penitentiary. On top of that, some of the most dangerous men inside it, high-level drug traffickers and mob kingpins, were there because he’d tracked them down. Being in protective custody was probably the only reason he was still alive.
But he hated it. His yard time was strictly limited—not even an hour a day walking around in circles on a scrap of asphalt and dust—and it was still the only bright spot he had. He stared out the window every day until the time finally came around.
And when it did come around, like today, all he could really do with it was burn away some excess energy and then retreat into himself, sitting on the bleachers with whatever book he’d gotten from the prison’s library that week. Even in the yard, with the other protective custody prisoners around, he really only had himself for company. Keeping his distance had been a defense mechanism at first, a way to deny where he was and what had happened to him. Now, when he would have befriended Jack the Ripper to have someone to talk to, it was just a habit he couldn’t break.
Cooper had carried around a kind of solitude his whole life, always feeling like the odd one out, but he’d never known the kind of bone-deep loneliness prison had to offer. It was like a dark tide that sooner or later would sweep in and drown him for good.
There was still hope inside him, burning like a candle, but he didn’t know how long it could last. The tide was coming to snuff it out.
I’m innocent.
He hadn’t said that out loud since the trial, when it had practically gotten him laughed out of court. And afterwards? He knew exactly how much weight claims of innocence carried after a guilty verdict had been handed down. No one looked innocent in a prison jumpsuit.
Even his old boss, Roger, the only person from his old life who still sometimes visited him and took his phone calls—even Roger didn’t believe him.
The only person who believed Cooper was Cooper himself. His clear conscience was all he had left to keep him sane. And each time he’d told the truth and the person listening to him—even his own lawyer—had rolled their eyes, he’d felt that clarity get a little more tarnished and that sanity a little less sure.
Cooper had had his whole life stripped away from him. In the space of hours, he’d lost his job, his freedom, and the respect of everyone he’d ever known. Now he was shut up inside a box, one that sometimes felt so small and tight he could barely breathe. His griffin’s wings felt like they were atrophying from lack of use, and Cooper hadn’t been able to hear its voice for weeks. It was unreachable, no