I crave her touch more than anything.

The energy pent up in my body with need for Serena spurs me on when I’m in the exercise yard. Today, my legs work back and forth on the machine, and I listen to the rhythmic clanging of the metal weights behind me.

On most days, I focus my mind entirely on the burn in my body, the strain on my muscles. It’s the only way to truly know your body’s strengths and weaknesses.

But today, all I can think about is Serena. Sometimes, even my mind gives into the temptation to escape to a fantasy outside these horrible walls and iron bars.

I picture myself coming back to my home to find her there, jumping into my arms as I press my lips to hers and walk her back into the room, shutting the door behind me and pushing her onto the couch. I think of the feel of her soft, fresh clothing, fabric I haven’t touched in so very long, before I rip it off her with so little effort. I can hear her gasp in my ear as I expose her before me—my lover and my victim.

I think to myself about how I’ll descend on her like an animal, tearing off the lingerie she described so sweetly, revealing her soft skin to me, turning to show me everything I’ve missed in these long years away from her. My rough hands have grown stronger and tougher, but the one thing they crave more than anything is her. I’d run my hands over her breasts, feeling the hard buds of her nipples as I run over them with my thumbs and listen to the soft, desperate sighing of her voice. Her voice is sweeter than the notes of a symphony in my dreams.

I can nearly feel her legs when I pull her panties down along her thighs, her calves, over her ankles, and I toss them to the side to devour her exposed body with my eyes.

Prison food is awful, but the one taste I’ve missed more than anything in the world is the taste of Serena’s sweet honey. It’s one of the many things I use to keep myself stable, to remind myself of the pleasures of the outside world. When I’m free from here, I’ll bury my face in her pussy, rest her on my jaw and devour her with all the passion she deserves. I’ll satisfy all the needs that have been so painfully pent up inside me for so long.

There is no privacy in prison, except for the little bit of it that comes with solitary confinement. I got a taste of that my first few months in here. One of the old big-shots on my cell block decided to pick a fight with me, and I left him with broken bones. Solitary is hell, but the one thing that kept me going was the thought of Serena.

I saw myself sinking deep inside her to the hilt after I’d feast on her pussy. I remembered the feeling of my balls hitting her ass as I enter her. I picture my thick, pulsing cock grinding against every inch of her inner walls, every depth that I’m so familiar with, yet there is always something new to discover in being intimate with Serena. In my mind, I’m right there with her, groping her breasts, letting my hands rove down to her hips and angle her up as I buck deeper into her, filling her up with myself in every possible way, my cock harder and stronger than ever before with my new strength.

When I’m free, my girl will enjoy every bit of my newer, stronger body. My principessa deserves nothing but the very best.

As I work out, I feel my blood running hot with my thoughts, so I use that to fuel my body to work out even harder. Eventually, I’m able to re-focus myself and clear my head. Going for a jog sometimes helps too, but in the heat of things, I can’t keep her out of my head.

From the time we were young, I never have.

I finish my workout and stand up slowly, rolling my shoulders back and feeling my heart’s steady rhythm in my chest. A jog might not be a bad idea to cool down. The recreation yard hardly passes as a good space for that kind of thing, but we all make do with what we have. I jump up and down a few times to shake my body out, then head off.

Jogging gives me some of the most privacy I can carve out for myself. Even on the exercise equipment, someone’s always hovering around, but I’m rarely messed with when I run.

But I hear the sounds of footsteps running up behind me, and I get the feeling today won’t be one of those days.

The footsteps are gaining on me. There’s a chance it’s just some hotshot trying to look tough and pass me, but I’ve been around long enough to know better. It’s no surprise to me when I see two men out of the corner of my eye.

Dark hair and swarthy. They’re Italians. I’ve seen them before, but we don’t talk. That means this won’t be a pleasant time.

“Good workout, Lomaglio?” says one of them, and I shoot them a glare as I slow to a stop.

“Cut the shit,” I say, in no mood to be taken out of my private thoughts. “What do you want?”

“Woah woah,” says the other, furrowing his eyebrows. “Don’t knock my teeth out, big guy. You don’t want to spend more time in the hole, do you?”

I look between the two of them, making sure to control my body language carefully. If I look like I’m about to start shit, we’ll draw the guards’ eyes, and they’re not afraid to act before anything even happens.

But these two don’t look like they’re about to start a fight. There are tells you come to recognize, tense postures that are like red flags. The look of these two tells me they’re here to talk more than act, though. I want to leave them be and walk away, but you learn better than to turn your back on anyone in a place like this.

“Then don’t give me a reason,” I say evenly.

“Look, Lomaglio,” says the first guy, talking to me as if I were at a job interview. My face is unmoved. “Everyone knows you’re a fuckin’ maniac. We just wanna be clear on where we stand. You can appreciate that, right?”

“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care,” I grunt, my face stony.

“We’re people who look after our friends,” he says, crossing his arms.

“So some new guy slips in the bathroom and knocks his own teeth out, and you want to come start a fight in the rec yard?” I scoff. I’m careful with my words, because I know there’s a good chance one of them is wearing a wire in exchange for benefits from the guards. Every prison has rats, and I don’t take chances. I won’t incriminate myself.

“No, you beat the shit out of friends of our friends, and we take offense to that,” the other guy says, just as careful as me not to start bowing up and posturing.

“You’re Cleaners,” I say, a grim smile on my face. “You think you’re a real gang on the inside. How sweet.”

“Tough talk from a guy who’s got a sweet piece of ass on the outside, all alone by herself,” says the first man.

Now he has my attention.

“What was that?” I say, my eyes turning to him with a spark of fire in them. “I must have heard that wrong.”

“Nothing to worry about, big guy,” he laughs, “We can keep an eye on her a lot better than you can.”

In my mind, I’m already weighing the satisfaction of breaking this man’s face versus spending a few months in the hole.

“Yeah,” says the second man, “you really oughta think about that before you go busting up our friends in here. See, you’ve got all that muscle on you, but her? I hear she’s pretty soft. And anything you do in here is gonna bounce back on her, and buddy, that’s gonna hurt her a lot more than it can hurt you.”

“Not if you’re dead,” I say, starting to see red as I approach the men. I’ve forgotten all care for my stance, and a few other men in the yard are starting to look toward us. I don’t care. Nobody threatens my girl.

“Lorenzo crumpled like paper in my hands. I wonder if all you Cleaners are made of the same stuff.”

But just as the men seem getting ready to fight, I hear the sounds of whistles around us as a handful of guards rush over to us. The two Cleaners put their hands up innocently as the guards wrestle us away from each other. I could throw the guards around like dolls, but I go with them as they pull me away, my eyes glaring daggers into the smug men.

As I’m led back to my cell, though, I’m seething, because I know they’ll make good on their threat. I can protect myself just fine in a place like this. But Serena? She’s tough, but nobody can take on an entire mob on their own.

The guards march me down the path to my cell, and I don’t pay attention to their yammering on about me being on thin ice for the last incident. I enter my cell stoically and hear the familiar sound of it shutting behind me.

My new cellmate’s tired eyes greet me.

“Tough workout?” he asks, not bothering to sit up from his bed.

“Bad spotters,” I reply, and he cracks a smile as I move to my bed and sit down. There’s a piece of mail addressed to me that I push to the side for the time being. I need to refocus my thoughts.

My quiet cellmate is Eduardo Trueba. He’s an old man, and I can tell by the way he carries himself in here that he’s been inside for a long time and doesn’t plan to see the world as a free man again. Men who have nothing to lose can be very dangerous, but Trueba is the kind of man who’s hard to read.

His hair is white, he’s got some weight on him, and he doesn’t leave his cell very much. He has a book that he often reads with a cover in Spanish, but I haven’t spoken to him very much.

He hasn’t shown himself to be trouble, and that’s good enough for me.

“You’re a big man,” Trueba says, “so long as you look like you’re the biggest fish around, you’ll always have little ones nipping at you.”

I glance at him. He looks peaceful, sitting there with his hands folded over his belly.

“Maybe I should spend some time in the library, take a lesson from you.”

He gives a chuckling grin. “Been here ten years, just one shank-wound to show for it. It’s not a bad gig, if you can keep your blood cool.”

I crack a smile of my own at that. In my case, both of us can tell that that’s never going to happen. I pick up the letter again and push myself back on my bed against the wall. The others aren’t back from the rec yard yet, Trueba looks like he’s in the mood for a conversation, and hell, I could use a distraction too. I figure there’s no harm in indulging the old man.

“Ten years?” I say with raised eyebrows. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d do hard time.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Trueba chuckles. “Maybe I should get a few prison tattoos on my face. What do you think about a snake with flames coming out its mouth?”

I grin and nod, giving his face an appraising look. “That could be good, or maybe a knife. You can say your mind’s still sharp.”

He laughs out loud at that, a hearty laugh from the gut. “I like that, good thinking.” After he settles down a little, he looks thoughtful again before he speaks. “I don’t think my crime was so bad, but the law didn’t agree.”

It’s an unspoken law in prison that you don’t ask what people are in for, so I just nod, but he goes on.

“It was a bank robbery,” he says, looking up at the ceiling with a wistful look in his eye. “We were damn good at it, too. Heard of the Harrison Avenue job?”

I raise my eyebrows and give a nod. I have heard of that one, in fact. It’s one of the most famous robberies in the city’s history, nearly forty years ago. A small crew hit a bank where some billionaire had a fortune in jewels, and as soon as the robbers had it, they all just disappeared, melted away into the city, and the jewels vanished too. It was like they were never there.

“That was me,” he says, but there’s no pride in his voice, just the simple words. “I planned the whole thing, and I got a hold of those jewels with my own two hands.” He looks at his gnarled fingers. “It’s funny, the only thing I could think about in the heat of the moment was how crazy it was, some punk like me from Harlem holding more money than I’d seen over my whole life. Apartment, car, everything.”

“Couldn’t imagine,” I say.

He gives a sad smile. “Well, you do what you have to when times get hard. And times were hard for me and my wife. I have a big family, and where I grew up, you don’t just leave them when you get married. Everyone just gets closer together. My friends and I, we saw a chance, took the risk, and…” he shrugs, “got lucky, I guess.”

“Takes a hell of a lot of luck to knock over a bank,” I say, folding my arms over my chest.

“Takes a lot more to get away with it,” he says with a wink. “Dunno if I’m proud of what I did, but nobody got hurt, and boy, my family didn’t have no problems for a good thirty years. And man, those were a good thirty years,” he says, looking up at the ceiling, and I can see true happiness in his eyes. “Didn’t live in luxury or anything, that would have gotten too much attention. We just kind of... did our thing, you know? Made sure my kids got college taken care of, didn’t worry about bills, health, nothing. It was... it was nice.”

“What happened?” I ask, interested now.

He shrugs. “They got better at tracking down people like me. That DNA testing stuff got invented, and eventually someone dug up my case, tested some old evidence, and the next thing I know, I’m getting arrested at my granddaughter’s quinceanera.”

“Damn,” I say, shaking my head.

“That’s what I said,” he says with a sad grin, but that soon fades. “They roasted me in court, too. Wanted to make a big show of locking me up. I’ll die in here,” he says, nodding to himself. “I wouldn’t mind, if it were just me. I’ve had a good run. Nice, happy years. But I worry about my wife sometimes. Sure, she’s got the rest of the family to take care of her, and they couldn’t trace what’s left of the money if they tried, but still.”

“Leaving someone alone like that without being able to do anything hits you hard,” I say, and he looks over at me. I see tears in the old man’s eyes as he gives a short nod, then looks away.

“You get that,” he points out.

“Yeah,” I say, flexing my fist. “I get that.” He looks back at me.

“You’re young though. I don’t need to know you that well to know you don’t deserve a place like this. You oughta have your whole life ahead of you. You love her?” he asks, seeing right through me.

I look at the scar on my forearm and think of Serena. “I deserve everything I get in here, but I love her more than anything.”

He nods sadly. “I’m too old to blame the law for anything, but when I was in that courthouse…” he tightens his fist, and I see some muscle flex in his arm. He’s tougher than the impression he gives. “To them, criminals like me are just stepping stones. The lawyer who put me away is probably drinking wine on a yacht somewhere right now.”

The look on Detective Price’s face when he arrested me appears in my mind, and I clench my jaw, nodding. “Men like that are no men at all. I know that too well.”

“Yeah?”

While we have something close to privacy, I tell him my story, from how I ended up working for the Costa family to how I ended up shoved into the back of a police car by Price. By the time I finish, prisoners are starting to file back into their cells down the halls, and our privacy vanishes with it.

And by that time, Trueba is watching and listening to me with interest, and I can see him sharing my anger. “Sangre de dios,” he mutters. “You live a more exciting life than I’d ever care for, my friend.”

“More than I care for anymore either,” I say. “And now, I’ve got another eight years to look forward to. As long as that fucker is around, I won’t see parole.”

“Careful with that kind of thinking,” he says, giving me a serious look. “It’s easy to lose hope in a place like this, and that kind of thinking will do it. I’ve seen that stack of letters you keep under your bed,” he says, nodding to my mattress. “Those things are going to save your life. Stick to them. Don’t let them slip away. Keeps you tied to the world outside, and that’s something that vultures like your detective can’t touch.”

I give a nod, but his words remind me of the letter in my hands. I’d half-forgotten about it, talking with Trueba. I look at the front, and my eyes widen. It’s not from Serena.

It’s got a fake return address on it, one that I know belongs to Nico, my comrade.

I tear the letter open and look at the words jotted down in his neat handwriting. Nico has been a point of contact for me for all things that have to do with business. He writes in code, of course. To the censors, it reads like a normal letter from a friend, but he uses phrases and specific wording that I understand perfectly.

And what I read is not good. My hands tighten around the edges of the page, and I feel the urge to drive my fist into the wall.

According to Nico, Serena’s place is being watched by the police.

Trueba sees the anger in my face, but he doesn’t ask what the letter says. He’s sharp enough to know better than that. “Everything okay, Bruno?”

“No,” I say through my teeth. My mind flashes back to what those two goons tried to threaten me with. Anything I do in here will come back to hurt Serena. And now, the police are watching her, the same corrupt cops that helped the Cleaners get me thrown in this hell-hole in the first place, no doubt.

There’s nothing innocent about what those cops are doing. Corruption runs deep in our part of the Bronx, and I know that this means trouble. And if they’re already going after Serena, that means they really aren’t going to leave us alone.

Even if I try to stay out of trouble in here, they’re not going to leave Serena alone. Trueba’s words ring in my ears truer than ever. If it were only me, it would be one thing... but this is more than just me. This is more than just the mafia. This is the one I love, the one good thing through all this misery.

This is Serena. And there’s nothing I can do from inside this place.

I read over the letter one more time, and I crumple it in my hand. My jaw is set, and my eyes are resolute. Trueba looks at me with a concerned face. “You alright, man? What’s on your mind?”

I look back at him, but I don’t answer, because I know exactly what I need to do. I have no other option.

I have to break out. Soon.