“Been teachin’ you how to fight for a while now and you still can’t man up about this. Fucking pussy.”

I tensed and glared up at him. “The man’s three time’s my size, Reap. There’s a reason nobody’s fucked with him, you know. If you had two fuckin’ eyes, you’d understand.”

He still laughed, like this was fun to him. Dickhead. Reaper was a sadistic bastard, and after a while of being tortured by him, I’d had enough and held my own. He didn’t get pissy about it like I thought he might. He seemed to enjoy my attitude when it was thrown at him. I guess that’s what happens when you spend a lot of time with someone. You get used to each other’s shit.

“Still a pussy,” he repeated.

“Got any new words there in your obviously limited vocab?”

He shook his head. “Not when it comes to Ryker Pussy Lawson.”

I gritted my teeth and watched him eat his breakfast. I was going to be doing laundry duties – the shittiest job there was in a cunt of place like this – while Reaper got to kick back on gardening duties. Sometimes I wanted to scream at him and tell him he didn’t know what a rough day really was, especially if he could buy up everyone around him and make a prison sentence seem like a cosy holiday.

“I’ve been where you are now,” he then said, reading my glare easily. “The difference is, I grew a pair of balls and did what was necessary to make it. This world’s going to eat you up otherwise. You want them Nazis over there having a crack at you? You wanna be on your knees, begging for help when they’re stuffing their meat junk down your throat? You gotta show the world just what you think of it. You gotta prove you’re not weak and that you’ll put up a fight even if it means taking a pounding for it.”

I glanced across the cafeteria where the Nazi crew were terrorizing some passer-by. Pieces of shit, the lot of them.

“If my own gang was in here,” I muttered under my breath, “I’d be untouchable.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he disagreed, scoffing at me. “They’d have been abandoned, just like you. You were too small time, Ry. No reason to protect you. Bet that boss of yours is waitin’ to see just how you fare in here on your own. Like I said, this could make or break you. Come out of here with guns blazing and he’ll welcome you in with open arms.”

Yeah, I needed that to happen. It was the only path I had outside of this place.

“Yeah, alright,” I finally said. “I’ll jump the fucker. I just don’t know how I’m going to take the pain.”

He paused eating his buttered toast for a moment and stared hard at me. “You think of a time in the past that hurt,” he said quietly, his eyes growing distant as though he was recalling something of his own past. “I’m not talking in a physical way. I’m talking emotionally. Use it as if it were fuel. Pain is in the mind, and if you’re too busy angry at a memory, you won’t feel it.”

I wondered about that for a moment. I saw Allie’s face in my mind and recalled what she said to me when I saw her in the visiting room. I’d been so hopeful I could mend things between us. I’d also been delusional to think she’d fall right into my charms forever. I thought of her and Heath together, and her abandoning me in a shit place like this while she went off and fucked him.

But that didn’t make me feel angry anymore. It just made me… sad.

I don’t know why they say your heart breaks in two when you’re heartbroken. For me, it broke into a million jagged pieces. It couldn’t be put together again, and even if you tried, it was going to look like a sad looking piece of muscle with thousands of little holes in it.

If only I’d been honest with her from the start…

“Don’t think of her,” Reaper stressed, sensing my thoughts. “Because she won’t make you feel that anger. Think of something else. Think of your brother. Didn’t you say you wanted to cut that boy’s throat? Think of what he did to you.”

“I think about it every day,” I weakly responded. “I think about our conversation when he came to see me. I run it through my head all the damn time, but… it doesn’t make me angry.”

“Then what does?”

With a heavy exhale, I replied, “I don’t know.”

But I did know. I just didn’t want to tell him. That memory was reserved for me, and it was going to fucking suck having to relive it.

*

After a morning of sorting out laundry, I trailed behind Animal as he strode into the cafeteria. He seemed confident in his step, as if the danger had long passed and he was indeed untouchable. I caught Reaper’s eye as he sat atop of one of the lunch tables, like he was already planning his front row seat. He motioned me to him with the jerk of his chin and I left Animal who was waiting in a line-up for food.

“You ready, man?” Reaper asked, jumping off the table to stand in front of me. His eyes were twinkling bright. I wanted to fuckin’ kill him for being so excited.

“Yeah, as ready as a 70 kilo man could be against one that’s, what, 120?”

Reaper looked past my shoulder and deliberated for a second. “130, maybe?”

That feeling of panic swept in. Fuck, I couldn’t do this. This man was going to absolutely wipe the floor clean with me.

“What if he kills me?” I numbly asked.

“Then hope for a swift, pain free blow,” he answered.

“Fuckin’ hell, Reap!”

He barked out a laugh. “Where’s your sense of humour?”

“It kind of fuckin’ disappeared when I realized I’m minutes away from jumping a Viking by the name of Animal.”

He grinned. “Would you rather get fucked in the toilets? Because I can take you there right now. We’ll walk past it and you can bask in the joyful sounds of sobs and skin slappin’ skin.”

I snarled at him. “Fuck you, Reaper. You’ve been by my side for months now, and you don’t give a fuck about what happens to me, do you? You still don’t care for my protection. Still don’t care when I get pushed around. All you care about is yourself.”

That grin fell off his face in a heartbeat. “If I didn’t care about a little shrimp like you, I’d have kicked your ass the second you approached my table talkin’ shit about apples and blades like a little smartass punk.”