The Count of Monte Cristo from 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,