Chapter 3: Waterproof Sins
Steam clung to the tile, a thick veil. Sarah’s back was against the cold wall, Dom’s body a furnace pressed against her. The water beat down, a roaring cascade that muffled everything but the ragged pull of their breath.
His hand was still between her legs, fingers slick and insistent. Her teeth were buried in the muscle of his shoulder, a silent scream against the thunder of her pulse. The shadow beyond the fogged glass lingered—a dark, blurred shape pacing just once before moving on.
It was gone.
Dom didn’t pull away. His forehead dropped to the tile beside her head, his whole body shuddering with the effort to stay still. His other arm caged her in, a bulwark against the world. “Breathe,” he muttered into her wet hair. “Just breathe.”
She released his shoulder, a red crescent left behind. Her legs were jelly. “Was that…”
“Thompson.” The name was a curse. Dom finally eased back, his hand leaving her. The sudden absence was its own shock. He glanced at the glass, his eyes sharp, calculating. “Patrol pattern’s off. He doesn’t do rounds this time of day.”
The water began to chill. The adrenaline shift was violent, leaving her naked in more ways than one. She reached for the thin, state-issued soap, hands trembling. “He knows.”
“He suspects.” Dom turned his own shower on, the spray hitting his chest, water sluicing over the ink across his shoulders. “Big difference. He sees shit in the shadows all day, dreams of catching it.” He looked over at her. “You okay?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice. She focused on scrubbing her skin, the mundane ritual a lifeline. The intimacy of a minute ago felt like a dream, violently punctured. Now it was just two convicts in a shower block, cold and watched.
“My transfer request got denied,” Dom said, the words flat.
Sarah froze. “What?”
“Paperwork came back this morning. ‘No compelling justification for relocation.’” He mimicked the bureaucratic drone perfectly. “Thompson’s signature. Big and bold.”
The chill sunk into her bones. The warden was playing chess. Denying Dom’s transfer kept him here, kept them together. A pressure point. “Because of me.”
“Because of him,” Dom corrected, shutting off the water. He grabbed his towel, rough as sandpaper. “This is his kingdom. We’re just pets. Sometimes he likes to pull the leash and see if we choke.”
They dressed in silence, the damp concrete floor sucking heat from their feet. The walk back to the cellblock was a gauntlet of echoing catwalks and guarded stares. Dom walked half a step behind her, a silent, imposing shadow. She felt the weight of eyes from the tiers above—inmates, guards, all the same in their curiosity.
Their cell door clanged shut with a finality that echoed in Sarah’s teeth.
Dom leaned against the closed door, listening to the guard’s footsteps fade. He ran a hand over his shaved head. “We need to talk about the warden.”
Sarah sat on her bunk, pulling her knees to her chest. “I know what he wants.” Her voice was small.
“You don’t know the half of it.” Dom stayed by the door, his voice low. “It’s not just favors. He’s got a pipeline. Contraband, pharmaceuticals from the infirmary, information on snitches. He uses people as mules. Burns them out. I’ve seen it.”
She remembered the warden’s office, two months after she arrived. The polished desk, the way his eyes didn’t meet hers, but traced the neckline of her jumpsuit. The ‘special assignment’ he’d offered, his hand too heavy on her shoulder. She’d stammered a refusal. He’d just smiled, said there’d be other opportunities. “He approached me. After the thing in the library with Garza.” Her fight with another inmate over a stolen book—a brief, brutal scuffle that earned her a week in solitary.
Dom’s jaw tightened. “What did he say?”
“That I seemed like a smart girl who understood how things could be easier. Lighter duties. Extra commissary. Maybe even a word to the parole board.” She wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “He said everyone has a price, even sparrows.”
The air in the cell grew heavier. Dom pushed off the door and sat on the edge of his bunk, facing her. The space between them was only three feet of scuffed floor, but it felt canyonesque. “He’s making his move. The shower wasn’t an accident. The denied transfer. He’s circling, Sparrow. He wants you scared. Isolated. So you think your only option is him.”
“I have you,” she said, the words out before she could filter them.
A muscle feathered in his cheek. “I’m a con with a temper and a life sentence. My protection only goes so far, and it puts a target on your back just as big.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “We need a move he doesn’t expect.”
“Like what?”
“Information. The only currency that matters in here. We find out something he can’t afford to get out. Something real.” Dom’s eyes were dark, intense. “The trustee who cleans his office, Miller. He’s got a gambling debt. He talks when he’s scared.”
“You want to pressure a trustee?” The risk was astronomical.
“I want to breathe,” Dom said, his voice gravel-rough. “I want you to walk out of here someday without his ghost on your heels. That means we play a dirtier game.”
Sarah stared at the grimy window, the sliver of free sky. She thought of the woman she was before this place, hopeful, naive. That woman was gone. What was left was someone who could bite a man’s shoulder to stay quiet, who could recognize the cold calculus of survival. She looked back at Dom, at the hard lines of his face, the unexpected softness in his eyes that was only for her.
“Okay,” she said.
The word hung between them, a fragile bridge over a terrifying depth. The practical tension of the plan momentarily receded, replaced by the simpler, more terrifying weight of the man sitting across from her. She watched his hands, the knuckles scarred, now resting loosely between his knees.
“Can I ask you a question, Dom?” Her voice was barely above a whisper, fighting the echo of the cell.
He looked up, a guarded readiness in his eyes. “Always.”
She drew a slow breath, the air tasting of dust and stale disinfectant. “Why did you want to be transferred?” The question tumbled out. “I thought… we had something here.”
For a long moment, he was utterly still. The constant background noise of the prison—shouting, a distant buzzer, the shuffle of feet—seemed to fade. He studied her face, the messy bun coming undone, the vulnerability she couldn’t hide. His own hardened exterior seemed to soften at the edges, a crack in the granite.
“Yeah,” he finally said, the word rough. “We have something.”
He stood up, the movement fluid, and crossed the three feet. He didn’t sit beside her, but knelt on the cold floor in front of her bunk, putting himself lower, his eyes level with hers. One of his hands came up, his thumb brushing a stray, damp strand of hair from her cheek. The touch was astonishingly gentle.
“That’s why I requested it, Sparrow.” His gaze was unwavering, intense, stripping away every last defense. “Because this place grinds good things into dust. I’ve seen it. And what we have…” He paused, searching for the right words, a man more comfortable with action than sentiment. “It’s the only clean thing I’ve touched in a decade. I wanted to get you away from the smell of this place. From Thompson. Even from me, if that’s what kept you safe.”
A single, hot tear traced a path down Sarah’s cheek, following the path his thumb had taken. She hadn’t even felt it coming. “That’s stupid,” she whispered, a watery, half-hearted protest.
A faint, almost invisible smile touched his lips. “Probably.” He leaned forward, his forehead nearly touching hers. The scent of cheap soap and him filled her senses. “But it’s true. And since they won’t let me leave…”
He took her face in both his hands, calloused and warm. His voice dropped to a raw, quiet rumble that vibrated in the space between their mouths. “I love you, Sarah.”
The world stopped. The confession wasn’t flowery; it was a stark, simple fact, delivered with the same finality as a cell door locking. It didn’t ask for anything. It simply was.
She didn’t say it back. The words lodged in her throat, too vast, too terrifying to release in this tomb of concrete and regret. Instead, she surged forward, closing the distance, and kissed him. It was an answer, a confession of its own—desperate, thankful, and scared all at once.
When they broke apart, breaths mingling, his grip on her face tightened just slightly. “Thompson doesn’t get to touch this,” he murmured, his voice thick. “That’s the new plan. He doesn’t get to even look at it.”
He rose, pulling her up with him, her body fitting against his as naturally as a key in a lock. The denied transfer slip, the warden’s shadow on the glass, the entire oppressive weight of the institution—it all shifted. The threat wasn’t gone. It was sharper now, more personal. But the battlefield had just been redefined.
He rested his chin on top of her head. “We use Miller. We find the leverage. And we do it fast.”
The silence after his declaration was a living thing, thick with the echo of his words and the distant, metallic rhythm of the prison. Sarah’s fingers curled into the rough fabric of his jumpsuit, holding on as if to a lifeline. She felt the truth of what he’d said in the steady hammer of his heart against her ear.
“Fast is good,” she whispered into his chest, her voice muffled. Then she tilted her head back to look at him. The raw honesty in his eyes demanded her own. “But, Dom… what do we do if we…”
She faltered, the clinical terms feeling absurd in the heat of the moment. She tried again, forcing the words out in a blunt, practical rush. “If we fuck. We don’t have condoms here. And you know a woman is… well, in the month… fertile. And I be honest when I say I want to have children, but not here. Not in prison.” The confession landed between them, vulnerable and starkly real.
He didn’t flinch. His hands, which had been resting on her back, slid down to her hips, anchoring her. He let out a long, controlled breath, his gaze turning inward, calculating. “Right.” The word was an acknowledgment, not a dismissal.
“I’m not on anything,” she added, the admission making her face flush. “They took my script when I was processed. Said it wasn’t ‘essential.’” She gave a bitter, hollow laugh. “Figured depriving us of everything was the whole point.”
“The point is control,” Dom murmured, his thumbs making slow circles on her hip bones. “This is part of it. Making something human feel impossible.” He looked from her eyes to her lips, then back up, his expression shifting from strategist to something far more tender. “You want kids.”
It wasn’t a question. She saw him turning the idea over, studying it from all angles, the way he might study a cell door’s lock. “Someday. When the sky isn’t made of bars,” she said softly.
“Someday,” he repeated, a promise woven into the word. He leaned in, his lips brushing her temple. “Then we don’t fuck.”
The bluntness of it, the cool, decisive clarity, sent a jolt through her—part disappointment, part profound relief. He pulled back just enough to see her reaction, his eyes serious.
“Not like that. Not without a way.” One hand came up, his knuckles grazing her cheekbone. “There are ways, Sarah. Not perfect. Not foolproof out here, and definitely not in here. But ways. Timing. It’s a gamble. Everything in here is.”
He was offering her a choice within the cage, a sliver of agency. It was the most intimate thing anyone had ever given her. “A gamble,” she echoed, her mind a riot of fear and want.
“Yeah.” His voice dropped to a husky whisper, his mouth hovering near hers. “But I’m all in. On you. On someday. So tonight, we don’t roll those dice. We just…” He closed the final gap, his kiss devastatingly soft, a ghost of what it could be. It was a kiss of restraint, of a future postponed, and it burned hotter than any hunger.
When he broke away, they were both breathing unsteadily. He rested his forehead against hers, his eyes closed. “We get our leverage on Thompson. We get you out. Then we have that conversation on the right side of the wall, with a pharmacy between us and a real door that locks from the inside.”
A laugh hiccupped out of her, tense and hopeful. “A pharmacy and a door. Sounds like a dream.”
“It’s a plan.” He finally straightened, though his hands didn’t leave her. The moment of vulnerability receded, folded back into the protective shell of necessity. The hungry look returned to his eyes, but it was tempered now, banked like a fire. “For now, Miller cleans the warden’s office on Thursdays after lockdown. That’s tomorrow. He takes a smoke break by the laundry vent at 2100. That’s when he’s alone.”
The shift was jarring and absolute. The tenderness was still there, a warm stone in her pocket, but his mind was already moving, navigating the brutal geography of the prison. “You want to meet him then?” she asked, her own voice steadying, falling into step with his.
“We meet him then.” Dom’s jaw was set. “You’re coming. He needs to see you, see that this isn’t just my fight. He needs to understand what’s at stake.”
She understood. Miller needed to see a young woman with desperate eyes, not just a hardened con. It was another kind of leverage, and the fact that Dom was willing to use it, to expose her like that, spoke of a true urgency. “What’s his debt?”
“Two cartons of stamps to a guy in B-block. Gambling on football. He lost. Interest is accruing in ways that aren’t friendly.” Dom’s smile was thin, devoid of humor. “We offer to make it disappear. In exchange, he tells us what’s in Thompson’s desk. The thing he doesn’t file in the cabinet.”
The buzzer for final headcount blared, a sudden, shrieking violence of sound that made Sarah jump. Dom’s hands tightened on her for a second before letting go. The institutional timing was relentless, slicing their private world into regimented pieces.
Footsteps approached in the hall, the jangle of keys a constant soundtrack. Dom gave her a last, long look—a look that held the kiss, the confession, the terrifying hope of ‘someday,’ and the immediate danger of tomorrow night. “Remember,” he said, his voice barely audible over the noise. “Laundry vent. 2100. You’re a sparrow. Be quiet. Be sharp.”
He turned and moved to his bunk, the imposing figure of Dominic Toretto seamlessly reassembling itself just as the guard’s face appeared at the slot in the door. But Sarah saw the trace of it, the man who had knelt on the floor, in the way his eyes found hers one more time before the metal slid shut with a definitive clang. The plan was set. Tomorrow, they would hunt. Tonight, the ghost of his restraint was the only thing holding her together.