Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) by Dean Crawford Page B

tight around his wrists and then the cell door rattled open and Xavier was pulled out of his cell and turned onto the gantry.
    A chorus of whoops and yells sallied back and forth as inmates cheered. Xavier glimpsed some of them exchanging wagers on his chances of survival as he was prodded along by the guards’ batons, although at this time the baton charges were switched off as he had not yet done anything to provoke the guards. Xavier considered begging for his life, telling the guards that he was innocent, that he did not deserve this , that he had done nothing wrong and that most of the cons on the block wanted him dead only after a long and agonizing period of suffering, but he knew that they would not have listened to him. The sticks considered Xavier as guilty as the cons did, and probably relished the opportunity to see him pay for the murder of Officer Anthony Ricard, a loyal prison service employee so brutally betrayed and gunned down by one of his own.
    Then, as now, the perfect storm had been created.
    The guards led him around the gantry, not down onto the lower tier. Xavier knew that this was a break in protocol, that he was not being moved to one of the lower cells as most newcomers would be when it was time to join the rest of the population. He was prodded and cajoled past a row of cells belonging to lifers and saw in one of them two big, blocky, bearded faces glaring out at him. Thick knuckles grabbed the bars of their cells as the two lifers watched him pass by, their murderous gazes following him as he was led to the cell at the far end. There the tier ended in a thirty foot drop to the chow hall: no escape.
    The cell door rattled open, and Xavier was turned and pushed inside, and as he stumbled forward so his belly turned cold with true dread and he wondered in despair at the way he had been betrayed by what seemed like the entire universe.
    The cell smelled of crude aftershave, itself better than the stench of urine and sweat that permeated most of the block. Three men were squashed into the one man cell, two of them sitting patiently on the lower bunks and watching as Xavier’s manacles were released. The third man leaned on the wall at the back of the cell with his muscular arms folded across a barrel chest, squat and brutal like a gigantic white toad, his jagged hair sparkling with lights like a psychopath’s Christmas tree. Zak Volt watched as Xavier was given a last shove into the cell, and then the door rattled shut behind him and the guards left him alone in the cell with the three most brutal inmates in the entire gaol.
    The raucous outside died down as the other inmates fell into silence, waiting and listening for whatever was about to occur inside the “The Shock’s” cell. Xavier surveyed his meagre surroundings and bleak outlook, and decided to say and do nothing.
    Zak Volt regarded him for a long moment before he spoke in a surprisingly soft voice, the voice of a man devoid of the need to project the violence and rage contained within.
    ‘You’re already a dead man on this block, y’know that, right?’
    Xavier was about to reply but he found that he was unable to speak, his throat parched and thick with the same loathing that he had felt in his own cell. He settled for a casual shrug, as though an unofficial death warrant was no big deal to him.
    Volt pushed off the wall and moved to face Xavier, a good two inches shorter than he but invested with such an aura of psychotic fury that Xavier felt as though he had shrunk to half his normal size as Volt’s emotionless gray eyes peered into his own.
    ‘The act doesn’t fool me,’ he whispered. ‘You’re scared.’
    Xavier raised an eyebrow.
    ‘I’m surrounded by a couple hundred men who want me dead,’ he replied, his voice working all of a sudden. ‘You think I wanna dance a jig?’
    Volt stared at Xavier for a long moment and then he laughed, a bellowing laugh directly into Xavier’s face, and in an instant Xavier understood