Ashley sat alone in the communal dining room, his head bent and his greasy hair falling into his face. He did not try to talk to anyone, or even look at them. He had learned early on that his usual cockiness would earn him a beating from the other prisoners, and since the phone call he had been reluctant to even antagonise the guards.

It had been three days since he had received the call, and had barely spoken to anyone since. Only he and MacDonald knew what the call had been about, and neither would breathe a word about it. Actually, Ashley would not breathe a word about anything. He hadn't spoken since his small outburst in MacDonald's office. He had only been in this mood twice before – the day his sister had died, and the first time he had been arrested, aged eleven. It was when he was at his most dangerous. Ashley was capable of almost anything, and would show no remorse. In a good mood, he would settle for antagonising someone, and in a bad mood he may beat someone up. In this mood, though, nobody could predict what he would do.

The other prisoners did not know this though. One man, Kevin Patterson, a thirty-something-year-old joiner who had been given three years for battery, took Ashley’s introverted silence as an invitation to push the seemingly scared teenager even further down the pecking order.

“Warren!” he bellowed across the cafeteria. Ashley did not look up, not acknowledging the man’s call in the slightest. “Hey, Warren!” Patterson shouted again. Still Ashley ignored him. This annoyed Patterson. He strode up to the teenager and grabbed him by the shirt, dragging him to his feet.

“You don’t ignore me, kid!” he snarled into Ashley’s face, “You’re new here, you’re a first-timer. You’re worth less than shit in this place! The wardens, they think they run the place, but they don’t have a clue. Around here, my word is law, and you better fucking remember that, or you won’t last another week.”

Ashley finally looked up and examined Patterson’s squashed-looking face infuriatingly calmly for several seconds, reading him. Ashley had always been able to read people. He knew how far he could push them. Sometimes, admittedly, he didn’t listen to his instinct and got himself punched or beaten up or even stabbed, but he was pretty sure he knew this guy’s type.

“You live with your mum?” he asked Patterson in a voice that implied he already knew the answer. Patterson looked at him in shock for a split second – he had, indeed, been living in his parents’ attic before he was arrested – but quickly recovered and replaced his look of shock with a sneer.

“Kid, I fucked your mum!” he taunted. Not the most original of insults, yeah, but Patterson didn’t have what could be described as the highest IQ in the prison.

A slow, dangerous smile spread across Ashley’s face. Anyone who knew him would have had alarms going off in their head by now, but not Patterson.

“You fucked my mum?” Ashley asked calmly.

“Yeah, bitch, your mum’s a fucking slut!”

Ashley’s smile was becoming more and more shark-like.

“You see, what you seemed to think you said there was I fucked your mum,” he said, “But what I heard was I’m a necrophiliac.”

Patterson’s smile froze for a minute as he worked out Ashley’s insult, infuriated by the roars of laughter from the surrounding inmates. After almost a full minute, an angry look of realisation spread across his face and he grabbed Ashley by the neck, flinging him onto one of the dining tables. Food flew everywhere. Ashley, covered in mashed potato and watery gravy, continued to smile terrifyingly.

“You little bitch!” Patterson roared, “You think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you? Well you’ve just earned yourself a…”

“A what?” Ashley asked chillingly calmly, “Another beating? Look at my face, dumbass. I couldn’t fit any more scars on here if I went twenty rounds with a grizzly. I’ve pretty much broken every bone you can break. I’ve been stabbed seven times. I’ve been shot twice. Exactly what are you planning to do to me that’s worse than that?”

Patterson opened his mouth, but quickly closed it again when he couldn’t think of an answer, and instead punched Ashley full force in the face. Ashley, still spread-eagled on the table, reached up and touched his cheek where he had been punched and laughed coldly.

“You’re seriously going to regret that,” he whispered. Patterson tried to sneer, but it was clear that this shark-like youth in front of him was beginning to scare him. The kid might be twelve years younger that him, but that smile…

If he had been in an ordinary bar fight, where all the onlookers were probably pissed anyway, he would have backed down about now. But these guys were tough – they were professional thugs and thieves. Patterson couldn’t risk losing face in front of them.

“What you gonna do, bitch?” he mocked. A few of the onlookers laughed weakly, but mostly they were surrounded by silence.

Ashley, very slowly and deliberately, stood up, brushing the remains of his – and everyone one else on his table’s – lunch from his jumpsuit and hair. He wasn’t smiling any longer. His face was cold and angry, a look that no other eighteen-year-old could possibly carry off with the same disquieting menace. His bony fists were clenching and unclenching. Patterson felt a need to run away. Oh, how he wished he had stayed at mum’s that night, instead of going out to that bar and getting arrested.

“Nobody. Calls. Me. A. Bitch.”

Before he even knew what was happening, Patterson found himself spread-eagled on the ground with what was most likely a broken nose. Ashley was standing over him with his fists clenched and his face red with fury, his knuckles glistening with fresh blood, though nobody was sure whether it was Patterson’s or his own.

“You fucking psycho!” Patterson spluttered, wiping blood from his nose and staggering to his feet. He raised his fists, but Ashley was waiting. He seized the older man by the neck and forced him against a wall. Everybody, even Patterson’s cronies, stood and stared in shock. Patterson was a pretty big guy – almost six and a half foot tall and pretty damn muscular – and Ashley was just a skinny kid. What they were witnessing was impossible! Yet here this kid was in front of them, completely kicking Patterson’s ass.

“Yeah, I’m a fucking psycho!” Ashley snarled, punching Patterson repeatedly in the face, “And you better fucking remember that!”

After a few more punches, Ashley dropped Patterson to the floor, where he lay still, and stalked off, everyone else staring after him. As he passed one of the tables, he flung it over, sending food and people flying in all directions.

IOIOIOI

Naturally, Ashley was reprimanded. This was a prison; there was no place for full-scale fights. Patterson got off lightly in this respect – perhaps the wardens were sympathetic towards him because of his broken nose and multiple bruises. Ashley, on the other hand, was punished. His right to get out into the prison grounds for some relaxation time was withdrawn, and he was put onto laundry duty. Generally, inmates were put on kitchen as a punishment, but the wardens had decided that, due to Ashley’s ‘temperamental’ nature, putting him into a hot room with a lot of knives handy wasn’t the best of ideas.

There were only two other people on laundry duty. One of them was Scabs Wilson, a quiet guy whose name was really Jose. Jose had been in the prison for years now, and just sat on the sidelines quietly, watching everyone. Nobody knew why he was there, or anything much about him at all, but he knew everything about everybody.

The other guy was a tall man – almost seven feet tall – with shoulders nearly twice the size of Ashley’s. The sleeves of his jumpsuit were ripped, exposing rippling muscles and numerous tattoos. His name was Jake Green, and he was by far the toughest guy in the place. He was in there for numerous counts of assault, and could beat up any guy in there. Nobody messed with Jake Green.

Ashley had been very quiet since his outburst in the cafeteria five days before. He would scrub away at the endless grey jumpsuits in silence, not talking to or even acknowledging the other men’s presence. Jake Green, however, had been watching him with a strange curiosity for days now, and finally decided to talk to him.

“What you in here for, Warren?” he asked suddenly, out of the blue. Ashley barely looked up at him.

“I broke the law,” he said carefully, “They frown upon that in Texas.”

Green was unsure whether to laugh or punch the kid. “So you’re one of those smart-asses?” he said finally, “I’m guessing it was that mouth that got you all those scars.”

Ashley looked up, an irritating grin on his face. “Oh, it’s so much more than that, my friend,” he said, “Every one of these scars tells a story. Want to know about any of them? Ask me some time. This one for instance,” he pointed to a neat, crescent-shaped scar which encircled his left eye, “Four guys beat me up when I was twelve. Drug dealers.”

Green suppressed a sigh. He would liked to have said he’d seen this cocky, smart-ass type a million times before, but in all truthfulness, he had never seen someone quite like Ashley before.

“I read your file,” he said, “It’s quite an interesting read – arson, joyriding, drug dealing, assault, armed robbery, rape… You’ve done it all! How old are you?”

“I never raped anyone!” Ashley snapped, spinning round, “My lying bitch of a girlfriend…”

Green held up a hand.

“Chill, kid!” he barked. Ashley, always very temperamental on the moods front, turned back to his laundry, scrubbing away in silence. “So you’re eighteen?”

“Why are you asking me all this shit if you’ve read my file?”

Green ran a hand through his crew cut and smirked.

“Just wanted to see if you were a total psycho,” he said, “And you are. But trust me, kid, that’s going to help you in a place like this.”