Page 8 of Endangered Species
“Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”
Cy grunted as he pushed the weight up and set the barbell in the holder, sitting up and stretching out his muscles before slapping the palm of the man spotting him. He used his shirt to mop his face as he checked on Nicky for the hundredth time since they’d been let outside for rec time. Nicky sat against the fence—not close enough to be obvious but close enough for Cy to get to him if needed—his expression indifferent but his eyes alert. He didn’t watch the other inmates. Instead, he watched the guards, having identified them as the bigger threat. People on Cy’s part of the cell block would keep away from Nicky on his say so…for now. He’d earned that level of respect, but the guards didn’t give a fuck about Cy’s street cred. They knew they could get away with anything. This was their world.
Workout finished, Cy dropped down onto the wooden bleachers, snagging his well-worn copy ofThe Count of Monte Cristofrom where he’d left it. He wasn’t reading it, just absently flipping the pages as he watched Nicky beat out a rhythm on his knees from across the yard. It made Cy smile a bit. A lot of things had clearly changed about Nicky, but he still fidgeted like he couldn’t stop himself. It might drive anybody else crazy, but Cyrus found the knowledge soothing. Some things would always be a constant.
They were doing their best to limit their interactions while the guards were still roaming, and Nicky was trying to overtly baby his bloody nose so it would look like Cy had given him the welcome they’d all anticipated. The inmates seemed confused by Cy’s sudden aggression towards a man he’d just introduced as his family, but they minded their business. Some things were off limits, and whatever his and Nicky’s beef was, it was family business, even if they weren’t related by blood.
If Cy was being honest, his thoughts of Nicky were hardly family-friendly. There was little left of the boy Cy had known. Nicky was all grown up. He wasn’t jacked like most of the dudes on the inside, who spent their rec time pounding weights. Truthfully, it was hard to know what he hid under that shapeless jumpsuit, but he was clearly fit. He still had the same ocean eyes, dirty blond hair, and quick smile, but instead of a chubby baby face, he had chiseled features and a five o’clock shadow that made him look a little like some teen girl’s naughty professor fantasy come to life.
But Cy was no teen girl. He was a gay man who’d grown up in a maximum security prison. It wasn’t like there hadn’t been opportunities over the years. Once you’d been in long enough, the others turned a blind eye when one decided to take another up on their offer. But this wasn’t some random prison hookup. Nicky was the only person in Cy’s life he could ever remember feeling a connection to. Nicky had given him somebody to protect when he was trapped with an absentee father and a psychotic stepmother. Nicky’s mother. May she rot in hell.
A shadow fell over him, and then Preacher sat down beside him. “That’s him, huh?”
“Word travels fast,” Cy muttered.
“That’s prison life,” Preacher said in a voice as dry as sawdust but with a sageness that made it sound as though he was offering a life lesson when, really, it was…well, not.
That’s why they called him Preacher. He was older than Cy by only a few years, but he’d been there since he was sixteen and had a way of speaking that made him seem like some wizened old man. It didn’t hurt that he looked the part, tall and lean with prematurely graying hair that he scraped back into a ponytail and a beard that was just a touch too long. He also wore a wooden cross around his neck, though he didn’t seem to ascribe to any religion that Cyrus could discern. The cross somewhat exempted him in the eyes of the other inmates, keeping him from choosing any sort of affiliation. Preacher was Switzerland—everybody’s confidant and Cy’s only real friend.
“Why’d you punch him?” Preacher asked, leaning back and propping his elbows on the riser above the one they sat on, making no effort to hide the way he stared at Nicky. Cy tried not to let that bother him.
“He made me.”
Preacher side-eyed him. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t mean it in the ‘if he hadn’t made me mad, I wouldn’t have hit him’ kind of way?”
Cy grimaced. “Rogers cornered me in the kennel and basically told me I had a free pass to do Nicky in whatever way I saw fit.”
Preacher snorted. “And they say we’re the animals.” Cyrus nodded but didn’t comment even though he could almost predict Preacher’s next question. “Who’d he piss off?”
Cyrus shrugged. “I don’t know. He hasn’t said yet.”
“And Rogers didn’t say more? That’s not like him.”
“He just implied that making him my bitch might be a good start, but it sounds like they’re hoping our history might trigger my latent homicidal impulses.”
Preacher squinted as the sun broke through the clouds. “They really don’t know you.”
If anybody else had said so, it could have come off like a challenge, but Preacher was just shooting straight. He wasn’t a liar, and he didn’t hide his opinions, regardless of who he was talking to. “No, but now, I’m in a bind.”
“How so?”
Cyrus sighed, staring as Nicky tipped his head towards the sun, closing his eyes. The other inmates noticed, too, but they kept their distance. “If I don’t do the things they want, they’ll just find somebody else who will.”
“And? Why’s that your problem? The kid cost you twenty years of your life. I get not wanting to go all eye-for-an-eye on him, but the kid’s not yours to protect.”
But he was, though. He just was. Nicky had been Cy’s to protect since the moment he laid eyes on him almost twenty-two years ago. Cy had failed him back then in every conceivable way. This was Cy’s chance to right his wrongs, to protect Nicky the way he should have done when he was a little boy. “That’s the thing, I can’t sit back and let the wolves have him.”
Preacher gave a noncommittal grunt. “Well, they smell blood in the water, friend, especially with you having hit him in the face. Thor hasn’t taken his eyes off him since we hit the yard. If you want to keep him from getting turned out in the showers, you better do something to stake your claim, or they’ll be fighting over him like the last piece of Thanksgiving pie.”
Cy dragged his gaze from Nicky to where the man in question held court, sitting on a different set of risers closer to the basketball hoops. Thor was a career criminal, a monster who’d spent his life committing all manner of depraved acts as the main enforcer of a racist biker gang, no different than the ones who’d run the small California town where Cy’s troubles started. On the inside, Thor ran the Aryan Brotherhood and most of the drug supply that came into the prison. He also liked to collect new fish and pimp them out to the other inmates. He thought of himself as an entrepreneur. The idea of Nicky being on the receiving end of that abuse made Cy want to smash something.
“How exactly do I do that without making myself the monster they keep telling me I am?”
Preacher sniffed, his gaze wandering between Thor and Nicky. “I didn’t say you wouldn’t be a monster, but you know that saying about the devil you know versus the devil you don’t? If given the opportunity, who would your boy choose? My guess would be you.”
“That doesn’t exactly make me feel better.”
“It’s not my goddamn job to make you feel better,” Preacher reminded, his tone as calm as the sea. “I’m just speaking the truth. Your boy got thrown to the wolves, and you better do something to let them know you’re the alpha or it will be open season on him. If you really give a shit about this kid, and again, I don’t know why the fuck you do, then you better make it very clear to the others to stay away or become this kid’s shadow, ‘cause the moment they get him alone, all bets are off.”
