From Prison To Dominance!

Chapter 2

The Reaper’s scream tore out of him.

Before it even finished leaving his throat,Rhys hauled him off his feet and drove his skull into the concrete.

Blood pooled fast. No one said a thing.

Then Pratt, still bleeding, still shaking, staggered forward and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder like he might collapse without it.

“Thank you,” Pratt breathed. “God, thank you. We’d have lost this whole block if you—”

“Don’t thank me.”

Rhys slowly walked toward the bleeding gigantic man and crouched before him. The Reaper barely had life left in him.

Rhys smiled.

“You’ll be a good boy when I’m gone, won’t you?” He asked.

The reaper gurgled on his own blood. The words couldn’t even come out.

“Blink once for no, twice for yes.” Rhys said to him.

Blink. Blink.

Rhys smiled again. “Good boy.”

He gently rested his hand on the Reaper’s chest and closed his eyes. For a moment, everywhere stilled.

Blackened light spread from Rhys’s palm into the Reaper’s chest.

The Reaper screamed as his bones knit back together. The shattered elbow sealed. The cracked skull closed seam by seam.

The reaper fainted afterwards. Alive, healed, but weak.

Rhys’s jaw tightened as he removed his hand. Something in him drained a little, the way it always did.

A cost no one else could see.

“Take it from here.” He said to Warden Pratt who quickly put handcuffs on the large man.

Rhys stood up and walked away.

Behind him, the block that had gone dead silent came apart in a different way.

Men who’d done a decade in this place, ruthless criminals who didn’t cry for their own mothers’ funerals, pressed their faces to the bars and wept like children watching their father leave for war.

“Don’t go,” one of them rasped, an old man with more scars than skin. “Please. Stay a bit longer.”

Rhys didn’t stop walking, but he did turn his head, just enough that they could see his face wasn’t unkind.

Tired, maybe.

But not unkind.

“Stay out of trouble,” he said. “All of you. I mean it.”

“We can’t survive this place without you,” someone else called, voice cracking.

“You can.” He reached the gate to processing. A guard was already unlocking it, hands fumbling with the keys out of pure nerves.

“You’ve survived worse than this block. Get clean. Get out. Be someone your kids aren’t ashamed of.”

The gate creaked open.

“Become reformed,” he said. “Because I’m not coming back to fix this place a second time.”

“Yes boss!”

They echoed behind him.

Blackgate Federal Prison was a mess when Rhys came in five years ago. With over two hundred inmates constantly being recycled, at least two persons died every week.

Only people who had done the most punishable offenses were sent to Blackgate. The walls weren’t kind. And the violence broke people to shreds.

And as for Rhys, he was beaten, bullied, and assaulted for weeks as a new inmate. The guards swore he wouldn’t make it. The older inmates gambled on how long he’d survive.

And Rhys almost died.

Not until that night. The night a mysterious old man found him crumpled in his cell, gasping for breath.

The night Rhys made a decision that changed his fate.

And from that day on, Blackgate had a new king.