The heavy iron door of the cell block didn't just close; it groaned with the finality of a tombstone being slid into place, a sound that seemed to vibrate through Adrian's very teeth. He stood in the center of the six-by-nine-foot space, the air thick with the suffocating scent of industrial-grade bleach, old sweat, and the metallic, copper tang of fear that clung to the walls like a second skin.
He didn't move for a long time. He simply stood there, listening to the symphony of the damned—the distant clanging of metal pipes, the rhythmic, hollow sobbing of a man several cells down, and the low, predatory murmurs that crawled through the ventilation shafts. For a man who had spent his life in glass offices overlooking the city, the silence of the cell was more deafening than any boardroom shout.
"Ten minutes," Adrian whispered to himself. His voice sounded foreign, a dry rasp in the stagnant air.
He didn't panic. Panic was a luxury for those who still had something to lose, and Lucas—his own blood, his own brother—had stripped him to the bone in a single afternoon. Instead, Adrian forced his mind to transition from the boardroom to the battlefield. He had always been a man of systems; he saw the world in grids, in trajectories, in the cause and effect of power. Now, he applied that same cold, analytical lens to his cage.
He looked at the small, bolted-down stool, the thin, stained mattress that smelled of mildew, and the stainless-steel sink that hummed with a low-frequency vibration. He needed a weapon, or at least a deterrent. His bespoke suit, now wrinkled and stripped of its belt and tie, felt like a costume from a play that had long since closed.
"You're still standing there like a statue, Thorne," the raspy voice from the adjacent cell drifted through the bars, startlingly close. "That's your first mistake. In here, a statue is just a target that doesn't move. You should be praying, or maybe crying. Most of the 'Silk-Suit' types start crying by now. They realize the gold leaf on their name doesn't stop a shiv from finding their liver."
Adrian walked to the bars, his eyes adjusting to the dim, flickering amber light of the corridor. He couldn't see the man clearly—only a silhouette of someone sitting cross-legged on their bunk, a shadow that seemed to have grown into the stone itself over decades.
"Crying doesn't change the trajectory of a blade," Adrian said, his voice regaining the chilling clarity that had made his rivals tremble. "You said three men are coming. Why tell me? In a place like this, information is the only currency with any real value. What's your price, Cyrus? Or is this just a bored man's entertainment?"
A dry, hacking laugh came from the darkness, sounding like sandpaper on bone. "Price? I like you, kid. You're already thinking about the ledger even while the executioner is sharpening the axe. Let's just say I have a vested interest in seeing Lucas Thorne's plans go sideways. He's been moving too much 'product' through my city lately without paying the tax. He thinks because I'm behind these walls, I'm blind. Consider this a free sample of my goodwill. Call it an investment in a very risky stock."
"How do they get in?" Adrian pressed, his mind already calculating the structural weaknesses of the wing. "The doors are electronic. The guards—"
"The guards are on a 'smoke break' at the end of the hall, paid for by your brother's offshore accounts," Cyrus interrupted. "The locks in Block C have been 'glitching' for weeks. It's a dead zone, Thorne. The cameras will coincidentally go fuzzy in about three minutes. In five minutes, the power to this wing will flicker. That's your cue. If you're still standing when the lights come back on, maybe we'll talk about a real partnership."
Adrian didn't wait for more. The adrenaline began to pump, a cold fire in his veins. He stripped off his silk tie—the last vestige of his former life—and began wrapping it tightly around his right palm and knuckles. He pulled it so taut the circulation began to throb, creating a makeshift glove to protect his hand from the impact of bone. He then took his leather belt, which he had managed to keep through a 'clerical error' he suspected Cyrus had engineered, and threaded it through the heavy, brass buckle.
His mind raced through the profiles of the men Lucas would hire. They wouldn't be professionals; professionals left paper trails and had codes of conduct. They would be 'lifers'—men with nothing to lose, promised a transfer or a commissary bump. They would be arrogant. They would expect a broken socialite, a 'Prince' who had never seen a drop of blood that wasn't his own from a shaving nick.
What Lucas didn't know—what no one knew—was that Adrian had spent his youth in the shadow of their grandfather, a man who believed that "an heir who cannot defend his own throat is just a temporary custodian of wealth." Every summer, while Lucas was yachting in the Hamptons, Adrian was in a humid gym in the city's underbelly, learning the brutal, efficient geometry of Krav Maga.
Flicker.
The overhead lights buzzed, the orange glow dying for a split second before returning as a sickly, pale blue. The sound of the ventilation fans wound down, leaving a silence so heavy it felt like a physical weight.
Flicker.
Then, darkness. Total, absolute pitch. The hum of the prison's heartbeat died.
Clack.
The magnetic lock on Adrian's door disengaged with a sound like a pistol cocking. The heavy steel slid open an inch, propelled by its own weight.
Adrian didn't stay in the center of the room. He moved to the shadows beside the door, pressing his back against the cold concrete. He slowed his breathing, counting the thuds of his heart, turning himself into a ghost. One. Two. Three.
Soft footsteps approached. The sound of rubber soles on linoleum. No one spoke. They didn't need to. They were coming for a slaughter, not a conversation.
The door swung wider. A silhouette stepped in, tall and broad-shouldered, holding a sharpened toothbrush—a 'shiv'—that caught a stray glint of moonlight from a high, barred window. The man smelled of cheap tobacco and unwashed aggression.
"Is he in here?" a whispered voice asked from the hall.
"He's probably under the bed, pissing himself," the first man sneered, stepping further into the cell. "Hey, Prince Charming. Time to go to sleep. Your brother says hi."
The attacker reached for the bunk, his back turned to the door.
Adrian moved. It wasn't a frantic scramble; it was a calculated strike. He lunged from the shadows, swinging the leather belt with the heavy brass buckle. The weight caught the man squarely behind the ear. There was a sickening thud, and the giant crumpled, his head hitting the edge of the steel sink with a crack that sounded like a dry branch snapping. He hit the floor like a sack of grain, silent and still.
"What was that? Barker?" the second man hissed, stepping into the doorway.
Adrian didn't give him time to adjust to the dark. He drove his shoulder into the man's chest, pinning him against the doorframe. With his wrapped fist, he delivered two sharp, piston-like stabs to the man's throat and solar plexus. The attacker gasped, his air supply cut off, his eyes bulging in the dark as he collapsed, clutching his neck.
But there was a third. A smarter one.
A sharp, searing heat bloomed across Adrian's ribs. He felt the fabric of his expensive shirt tear, followed by the wet, hot sensation of blood. The third man had come in low, a serrated piece of metal aimed for the kidneys. Adrian gritted his teeth, the pain flaring white-hot, threatening to black out his vision.
He didn't recoil. Instead, he leaned into the pain. He grabbed the third man's wrist, twisting it with a savage torque until the bones groaned and popped. He slammed the man's face into the iron bars of the cell, once, twice, until the struggle went out of him. The man slumped to the floor, joining his comrades in a heap of broken limbs and bruised egos.
Adrian stood in the darkness, chest heaving, the blood from his side soaking into his waistband, warm and sticky.
"Impressive," the voice from the next cell whispered, a hint of genuine surprise in the rasp. "Most 'heirs' would have been gutted in thirty seconds. You... you have a bit of the devil in you, don't you, Thorne? That wasn't the fighting style of a rich boy. That was the work of a man who knows how to break things."
"I told you," Adrian panted, leaning against the wall as the lights flickered back on, bathing the carnage in a harsh, unforgiving glare. "I'm not a statue. And I'm tired of people touching my things."
He looked down at the men. He reached into the pocket of the one he had hit with the belt and pulled out a small, encrypted burner phone—a luxury that shouldn't exist in a maximum-security wing. His eyes narrowed. This wasn't just a hit; it was a setup. If the guards found him with three beaten men and a forbidden phone, he'd be sent to 'The Hole'—solitary confinement—for months.
In solitary, Lucas could kill him at his leisure, and no one would hear the body hit the floor. He would be "lost" in the system, a ghost among ghosts.
"They're coming back," Cyrus warned, his voice urgent now. "The guards. Two minutes. They'll be expecting to find a corpse, but they'll settle for a riot charge."
Adrian looked at the phone, then at the unconscious men. He had two minutes to decide: play the victim, or start his own shadow network. He looked at the blood on the floor—his blood. It was a debt he intended to collect with interest.
"Cyrus," Adrian said, his voice dropping into a lethal register. "If I survive this night, I want to know everything about the 'tax' my brother isn't paying you."
"Survive first, Prince," Cyrus chuckled. "Then we'll talk business."
Adrian quickly dragged the bodies, positioning them so it looked like a three-way brawl had erupted over the phone. He wiped the blood from his hands onto the shirt of the largest man, then shoved the encrypted phone into a tiny, rusted crevice behind the sink's plumbing—a hiding spot he had identified within his first five minutes in the cell.
He sat on his bunk, clutching his wounded side, forcing his breathing to slow, his face to return to a mask of aristocratic indifference.
The heavy boots of the guards began to thud down the hallway, the sound of authority returning to reclaim the silence. The lead guard, a man with a crooked nose and a badge that read Miller, stopped in front of Adrian's cell. He held a heavy baton, and his eyes were already searching for a body.
When he saw the three attackers on the floor and Adrian sitting calmly on the bed, his face went through a rapid succession of shock, fury, and then a deep, dark calculation.
"What the hell happened here?" Miller demanded, his voice a low growl.
Adrian looked up, his emerald eyes cold enough to freeze the air in the room. He didn't look like a prisoner. He looked like a king who had been mildly inconvenienced.
"They had a disagreement about who gets to keep my watch, Officer," Adrian said, gesturing dismissively at the pile of men. "It seems they couldn't agree on the terms of the trade. I suggest you call the infirmary. One of them sounds like he's having trouble breathing. It's so tragic when the inmates turn on each other, isn't it? Such a lack of discipline."
Miller stared at Adrian, his jaw tightening until a muscle leaped in his cheek. He knew the hit had failed. He knew his payout from Lucas was now in jeopardy.
"You think you're smart, Thorne?" Miller hissed, leaning his face against the bars, the smell of stale coffee and malice wafting from him. "You're in my house now. And in my house, the smart ones are the first to burn. I don't care who your father was. In here, you're just meat."
"Then I suggest you start the fire," Adrian replied, leaning back against the cold wall. "Because I promise you, Miller, I don't burn easily. But I do tend to leave a lot of ash behind."
As the guards dragged the bodies out and the cell door slammed shut once more, Adrian felt the world narrowing to a single point of focus. He was bleeding, he was framed, and he was surrounded by enemies. But as the wing fell silent again, the encrypted phone in the wall vibrated.
A single message flashed on the tiny screen, visible only to Adrian as he pulled it from its hiding spot:
"The board is set. Move your Pawn, Brother. Or have you already lost your heart to the girl who sold your soul?"
Adrian's breath hitched. It wasn't just a message from Lucas. It was a taunt. And beneath the text, there was an attachment: a live-stream video link.
He tapped the screen with a trembling, blood-stained finger. The video flickered to life. It was a high-angle shot of a bedroom—his bedroom in the Thorne Mansion. There, sitting on the edge of the bed, was Elena. She wasn't crying. She was laughing, clinking a glass of vintage champagne with Lucas, who was draped in Adrian's favorite silk robe.
"To the new King," Elena's voice came through the tiny speaker, clear as a bell.
Adrian's grip on the phone tightened until the plastic casing groaned. The rage that had been a cold ember in his chest suddenly roared into a supernova. He didn't just want his empire back. He wanted to see them burn in the ruins of it.
But then, the video panned slightly to the left. In the corner of the room, barely visible in the shadows, stood a man Adrian didn't recognize—a man with a distinctive dragon tattoo coiling up his neck, holding a silenced pistol.
The man wasn't looking at Lucas or Elena. He was looking directly at the camera, as if he knew Adrian was watching from a prison cell miles away. He held up a finger to his lips, then pointed the gun at Elena's head.
The feed cut to black.
Adrian sat in the darkness, the silence of the prison closing in around him like a shroud. His heart was a hammer, his mind a whirlwind of questions. Who was the man with the tattoo? Was Lucas in danger too, or was this a double-game?
"Cyrus," Adrian whispered into the dark. "How do I get a message out of here tonight?"
There was no answer. Only the sound of the wind howling through the razor wire outside.