Page 19

“So, how’s this gonna go, ghost? You get in line like everybody else, or do I have to make you bleed for it?” he snarled, and the murderous noise in my head, which had been grinding away since before they cracked the doors, stood up and stretched like a lion waking. Because this it understood.

“Bleeding,” I said. “In about a minute.” Of course, this wasn’t the reply he was hoping for. He came at me a second later, and he came with a shank in his hand.

Excellent, I would need that blade… just not for him.

A blade kept low the way a man does who is intent on murder in prison and used to getting away with it. Half a toothbrush with a razor blade melted into the shaft, taped at the grip, and honestly, a half decent piece of work in a place like this. But I had been cut with worse by men who were paid a great deal more.

I let him get close, because I wanted the thing in his hand.

He came at me then and as easy as breathing, I took his wrist and turned it past where God left off. The hand went with it, the small bones in it giving one after another, and the sharpened toothbrush dropped out of his fingers and into mine.

His men had suddenly gone very quiet, and the whole yard held its breath waiting for me to open him up. Every eye in that place was on the blade in my hand. That was their mistake. They were all watching the wrong hands.

So, I dropped it and let his little toothbrush fall onto the concrete between us where every man on that fence line could see it. Then I showed them what I had actually come with.

Because a weapon is a shortcut. A weapon is for men in a hurry, or men who are not quite enough on their own, and I have never once been either. Although it did have to be said… I was a fucking artist with a blade when I wanted to paint.

There wasn’t a great deal to tell after that. The asshole whose name I still didn’t care to know had spent years winning fights against men who were already beaten before they started. But I had been in a ring since before I could spell my own name, with my father leaning on the ropes. Which meant that when I hit him, his legs stopped having opinions on where they wanted to go.

He was crimson from the nose down by the time he hit the concrete, and well… crimson has always been my color.

Once he was at my feet, looking up at me, breathing wrong with one arm not working, I finally allowed myself a grin. His eyes started to do that frantic wet thing they all do when they know the end is near.

Although he was only half broken and nowhere near enough for me to make my point. And the noise in my skull stood up and asked me for the rest of him.

Demanded it.

Craved it.

But I needed to remind the darkness in me that a dead man buys me a transfer. A dead man in the yard buys me a bus, a new building, a new state, a hearing, and men in suits arguing about where to put the ghost now. And the only thing in the entire state that I wanted was standing at that moment behind too many locked doors in a room that smelled of disinfectant and sugar.

Which meant… I was not going anywhere.

So, I did the other thing instead.

The crazy fucked up thing that not a single fucker in this yard would understand. Something that would give them something else to talk about. Something infinitely worse than just another killer in a yard of many.

So, I bent, and I picked his little blade back up off the concrete, because it turned out I had a use for it after all.

I looked at him, and then turned toward all of them, and I said it loud enough for the fence line to hear.

“You want my blood?” I asked. Then, with the whole yard watching, I opened my own arm with his shank.

Not the wrist. Only fools and finished men open a wrist, and I had an appointment to keep. Half the forearm instead, up toward the inside of the elbow, slow and masochistic so they got the whole of it. So, they heard it. There is a sound to it as a blade cuts flesh. A sickeningly satisfying sound and if you take your time, a silent yard hears every inch of it. And they hear all of it when the man holding the blade doesn’t make a sound.

And I went deep. That part was not temper; it was a calculation. A shallow cut is wiped, taped and forgotten, and it buys a man twenty minutes in a room. A cut like this one has to be sewn shut. Nine stitches, at a guess. Ten at the most.

And stitches have to come out again.

Fourteen days. A second appointment, written into a chart in somebody else’s handwriting, that no guard in this building could argue me out of.

Two hares. One shot.

Pain is only discipline of the mind, boy. The body screams because you let it.

My father taught me that in a ring, with gloves too big for my hands and men twice my age across from me. So, I didn’t scream and I didn’t blink. I might as well have been watching the fucking rain, and not my own blood running off my elbow onto the concrete in a good, hot, steady stream.

Then I crouched over him, took a fistful of his hair, and wrenched his head back until his jaw fell open.