I’d tried to run. He caught me by the arm, spinning me around, shoving me face-first against the tile wall. His body pressed against mine, one hand holding both my wrists, the other reaching down?—
And then he wasn’t there anymore.
I heard Big Sauce scream—a sound that cut off abruptly into a wet gurgle. I spun around.
Rashid X stood behind him, one arm wrapped around Big Sauce’s throat, the other hand gripping something that caught the light. A shank—long, sharp, made from God knows what. He’d driven it into Big Sauce’s side, just below the ribs, angled up.
Big Sauce’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened and closed like a fish.
Rashid twisted the blade.
“You don’t touch children,” Rashid said, his voice calm, almost conversational. “That’s the rule.”
He pulled the shank out and Big Sauce collapsed, blood pooling beneath him on the wet tile. Rashid let him fall, then turned to the showers that had suddenly filled with witnesses.
“Anybody touch this boy again,” Rashid announced, the bloody shank still in his hand, “they answer to me. And to my sons. We don’t tolerate this savage shit. You want to be an animal, I’ll put you down like one.”
Sauce stopped moving. Stopped breathing. Rashid let the body drop, then turned to me.
“You okay, young blood?”
I couldn’t speak. Could only nod.
“What’s your name?”
“P-Prentice. But p-people call me Prime.”
“Prime.” He studied me with eyes that saw everything. “You’re that kid who killed his bully. Thirteen years old. They’re trying you as an adult.”
“Y-yes sir.”
“I’m Brother Rashid X. You address as me as Brother from here out.” He held out his hand and dapped me up. “You’re with me now. Nobody touches you. Nobody even looks at you wrong. Understand?”
That was the beginning.
Within a week, Rashid had pulled strings to get me moved to his cell to ensure that he could protect me. His other “son” didn’t like it but let it go. Brother X ran the place—everyone knew it, even the guards. He and his “sons”, a prison gang that controlled everything but operated by a code. They didn’tdeal out violence with rape. Didn’t tolerate savagery, as Rashid called it.
“We’re men, not animals,” he’d said. “Violence has a purpose. Rape is the violence of the weak and of cowards who can’t control themselves.”
Rashid used to be head of security for theMinister, but left after they bumped heads. He then became a contract killer as well as a drug dealer. A drug deal landed him inside. But he never got caught for a murder. Once inside, he created a network of disciplined men. Men who would follow him to the edge of the universe. But I became his prodigy. I became the one with the most advanced skill because he caught me young, when I was the most moldable.
He’d trained me. Every day. Discipline. Control. How to fight properly. How to turn my rage into precision instead of chaos. How to read people. How to kill efficiently when necessary.
But first, he’d made me pray.
Five times a day, he’d wake me up, make me wash, make me kneel beside him. I wasn’t Muslim, wasn’t anything, but he said prayer built discipline. Built structure. Built connection to something bigger than yourself.
“You don’t have to believe in Allah,” he’d said. “But you have to believe in something. Right now, believe in becoming better than what the world expects of a fat kid with a stutter who killed someone.”
Within six months, I’d lost seventy pounds, due to fasting and the workout he provided. The stutter disappeared, replaced by controlled speech. Rashid taught me to pause before speaking, to think before reacting, to breathe through the impulse to let words tumble out wrong.
He’d saved me. Raised me. Made me into someone who could survive. Then thrive.
And Farah was his daughter. His baby girl. The one soft spot in a man who’d killed dozens without blinking.
I could never touch her. Could never even think about touching her. Not after everything Rashid had done for me. He chiseled me into the man I am today.
Some debts couldn’t be repaid. Some boundaries couldn’t be crossed.
