PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
The world had turned red. A thick, metallic red, dripping over Seth’s eyes and filling his mouth with the copper taste of the end. It wasn’t the Boston sunset setting the room on fire; it was the sound of leather slicing through the air one last time.
For ten years, that whistle had been the soundtrack to his nights. His father’s belt, the metal buckle seeking out flesh, the pain stealing his breath while he bit his tongue to keep from waking Riley. Seth had been a punching bag, a silent vessel for all the alcoholic rage of a man who didn’t deserve to be called a father. He had accepted every bruise as a tax paid for the silence of the house.
But that night, the belt hadn’t fallen on him.
Seth had watched that massive hand claw into Riley’s collar. He had seen pure terror widen in his brother’s eyes—the very eyes he had sworn to protect at all costs. When his father’s arm rose against the little boy, something inside Seth snapped. It wasn’t a loud noise; it was a quiet click, like a dam buckling under the weight of an ocean of accumulated hatred.
The coldness of the floor vanished. His knuckles screamed, but Seth wasn’t listening. He only felt the rhythm.
Hit.
Hit.
Hit.
Beneath him, the man who had brought him into the world was mutating into a shapeless heap of meat and wheezing breaths. Every time Seth’s fist sank into that familiar face, every time he felt the cheekbone yield, an electric shock shot up his arm.
For ten years of my nights. Punch.
For the scars on my back. Punch.
For my mother’s silent tears. Punch.
He wanted to erase him. He wanted to make sure that man would never stand up again, never breathe the same air as them.
“Seth! Stop! You’re killing him!”
His mother’s voice sounded like it was coming from another planet, distorted by a terror he had never heard in her before. He felt her fragile hands grab his shoulders, a desperate attempt to tear him off that body. Seth growled. It wasn’t a human sound. It was the snarl of a wild animal that had finally locked its jaws around the throat of its predator.
He raised his arm once more. His right hand didn’t even look like a limb anymore; it was a mess of blood and ferocity. He was about to land the final blow—the one that would settle the score in a morgue.
“Seth... please... stop.”
Riley was curled up under the kitchen table, hands pressed tightly over his ears. He was staring at Seth like he wasn’t his brother anymore. He was staring at him as if he had become the mirror image of the man he was destroying.
That look hit him like a bullet straight to the chest.
The red haze evaporated instantly, leaving Seth submerged in an icy cold that seeped into his bones. He looked down at his hands: they were coated in his father’s blood. The man on the floor wasn’t moving; his breath was nothing more than a horrific whistle escaping a shattered nose.
Air rushed out of his lungs. Seth staggered backward, slamming hard against the refrigerator. Nausea surged up his throat, sour and violent. He stared at the belt on the floor, abandoned like a dead snake’s shed skin.
“I... I just wanted to protect you...” he tried to tell Riley, but his voice was ash.
Then came the blue lights. They cut through the darkness of the filthy kitchen, cold and unrelenting. Seth didn’t try to run. He just stood there, watching the blood drip from his knuckles, fully aware he had broken the chain. But the price had been catastrophic: he had turned into a monster just to kill another.
The blue lights put out the fire raging in Seth’s chest, leaving only the metallic slam of a cell door that was becoming his new skin.
They stripped him of his clothes, stripped him of his name, stripped him even of his right to hate. The judge had been clear: one year for the attempted murder of his father. But then, past sins resurfaced—the assault charge for that guy from the outskirts Seth had put into a coma months earlier during a street fight. The consecutive sentences pushed his time up to two years at Long Island Juvenile Correctional Facility. A hellhole where the only law was submission or violence.
All he had left was an inmate number stamped on a file and the silence of a cell that felt like a concrete coffin.
“Face down on the floor, 1094-S! Move! Hands behind your head before I break your fingers!”
The guards’ shouts were like lashes, but to Seth, they were nothing. After ten years of beltings, screaming couldn’t touch him anymore. It was the smell that hurt. That stench of industrial bleach, rancid sweat, and desperation oozing from the walls.
They shoved him onto a chair, and the electric razor buzzed over his head. Dark locks fell to the floor one by one, stripping away every piece of his identity, leaving him raw and exposed. Then they threw the stiff blue inmate jumpsuit at him.
They slammed his face against the freezing wall. The taste of blood—his father’s, dried on his lips—mixed with the dirt of the floor. They searched him with useless brutality. Seth had nothing left. Not even a name. Just a number and a rage consuming him alive from the inside out.
“Seth Sinclair. Inmate 1094-S. Quite a rap sheet for a kid,” a guard spat, pressing his heavy boot into the back of Seth’s shaved neck. “In here, you’re nobody. You’re just meat for the grinder. Got it?”
The first few months were a blurred streak of violence and silence. The facility wasn’t built to rehabilitate; it was built to break. Seth remembered the hours spent out in the yard under the pouring November rain, standing at attention until his legs stopped shaking and turned into dead wood. It was his punishment for refusing to name the dealers in Block C.
Water trickled inside the collar of his blue jumpsuit, but he remained motionless, eyes locked onto the barbed wire set against the leaden sky. He thought of Riley. Of his hands clamped over his ears. He wondered if his little brother was still terrified of him.
The cold became his only companion. The cold of the cell, the cold in the eyes of the other inmates trying to figure out if he was prey or predator. They got their answer fast. During his first cafeteria fight, when a guy twenty pounds heavier tried to snatch his tray, Seth didn’t use words. He used the guy’s head, slamming it straight into the edge of the metal table.
Two weeks of solitary followed. Fourteen days in a windowless concrete box. It was in that total darkness that Seth first feared he’d lose his mind. He could hear the whistle of the belt in the air. He could see his father’s swollen, bloodied eyes.
He started counting. One, two, three. He would run his hand over his shaved head, feeling the short, almost non-existent stubble for hours. A obsessive, mechanical habit, trying to grasp onto any tiny shred of control. It was the only way to keep the monster from taking over and driving him to smash his own skull against the wall until he died.
Only in the final months did something change. Professor Franky was the only one who entered that hole without a uniform or a nightstick. He brought him an old 35mm film Nikon. “Instead of using your hands to break people’s faces, Sinclair, use them to frame the world. You might just find out there’s something worth saving. Including yourself.”
Thanks to his clean record near the end and Franky’s push, he got conditional release six months early. Eighteen months. A year and a half of solitude, beatings, and ice.
When he finally stepped through the heavy exit gates, gripping his duffel bag and the camera strap, Seth Sinclair was almost nineteen. He wasn’t the boy he used to be. He was something else. Something forged in fire and tempered in ice.
The rumble of the train was a pounding pulse, a metallic rhythm struggling to keep time with Seth’s thoughts. The cars sped along, slicing through the freezing Boston air, while the urban landscape outside the dirty window blurred past like a fast-forwarded film.
Eighteen months.
Until recently, Boston had been nothing more than a hazy memory trapped behind concrete walls. Seth had never expected to actually return—not like this, with a worn-out duffel bag, hair slowly growing back over his head, and a piece of paper in his pocket detailing his weekly parole check-ins. A piece of paper that burned hotter than a lit cigarette pressed against his skin.
He ran a rough palm over the back of his neck—a nervous tic. A habit born within the walls of Long Island, a leftover relic from those fourteen days in solitary, a way to prove to himself that at least one part of him was still under control.
What he couldn’t control, however, was the anger throbbing beneath his skin like a live wire. By some twisted stroke of fate—or maybe just some rich suit wanting to clear their conscience—he had landed a scholarship to Blackwood Academy. One of the most prestigious places on the coast. A marble paradise for people who had never known hunger.
Charity.
The word made him want to spit. How was he supposed to explain it to Jace, Gold, or Riky? How could he look the guys who grew up among the scrap metal of the garage in the eye, knowing he was going to sit at the same desks as silver-spoon trust-fund kids?
“A alley rat in a glass castle,” he muttered to himself, a bitter smirk tugging at his lips.
His thoughts kept bouncing off the train walls until the screeching brakes tore through the air. The train slowed violently, shuddering one last time before coming to a complete halt.
The doors opened with a heavy pneumatic hiss. Seth stepped out onto the station platform and stood frozen, ignoring the crowd elbowing past him. He took a deep breath. The air tasted like smog, rusted iron, and impending rain. It tasted like home. It tasted like the Mile.
Walking down the platform, the noise of the station faded, giving way to Professor Franky’s voice still echoing in his mind: “Someone decided to give you a chance, Seth. Don’t blow it, kid. You’re out now, but one false step and that cell will take everything back.”
In that hellhole, Franky had been the only one who didn’t look at him like a piece of meat. Seth paused among the commuters, tightening his grip on his bag’s straps. Someone believed in him. For the first time, he wasn’t just the “alcoholic’s kid” or the “delinquent from juvie.” He could actually step into that school, keep his head down, follow his parole conditions, and get that damn diploma.
Know your place, Sinclair. Don’t do anything stupid. Breathe, study, and disappear.
He let out a long breath, trying to stifle the cynicism telling him this scholarship was just a way for Boston’s elite to feel better about themselves.
He just needed to get home, kiss his mom and Riley, and try not to ruin everything before he even got started.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Hi everyone, welcome to the revised, definitive version of this story! We’re only at the beginning of Seth’s journey... and trust me, things are going to get wild. Kisses, J. Black 🖤
