A Man of Honor.

Chapter 70: Getting Schooled.

"When I was a boy, my father moved us from Russia to the Upper East Side. He was weak, my father—never stood up. One day, on the way to school, I was stopped by a gang of older boys. The leader said he wanted my lunch money. I told him, go fuck himself. He laughed, said he'd beat it out of me, so I spit in his face. He did beat me - they all did—and he took my money. Next day, same thing: Again I spit in his face, again we fought. But the third day, the kid asked me to join his gang. He was Charlie Luciano." ~ Myer Lansky, Boardwalk Empire.

The first thing I remember thinking about as I stepped off that bullhead and onto the grounds of Beacon was how fucking big it all was. Having grown up in Vale all my life, I figured I couldn't be impressed by such a thing. I grew up in the streets craning my head to look up at the skyscrapers that towered high above me casting the streets in shadows. My home was practically a forest of these steel and concrete structures.

But Beacon was big in a completely different way. The main tower, which also doubled as the CCT tower, rose high towards the clouds and the castle-like expanse below it stretched wide and the campus grounds stretched farther than that. I had to crane my head back and forth just to try and take it all in. Out here at the main avenue looking at these arches that we passed under, the statue of great warriors whose names I didn't know or care to ever know. I couldn't help myself but to try and take it all in.

This was going to be my prison for the next couple of days after all.

Sure it wasn't exactly a place with gray concrete cells and steel bars or fences topped with razor wire. But it was certainly a prison to me, and in many ways I was a lot more nervous about this prison than ever going to the regular kind.

I grew up hearing stories from all kinds of people that had spent time behind bars. I occasionally visited my aunt Lucia who was still in prison. I still needed to introduce her to Jaune, last time I had visited her was shortly before Jaune had gotten made. When I told her about Jaune she perked up, sensing things I myself hadn't figured out. Even though the most I had actually seen of prison had been on the right side of that glass, I was very intimate with what it was like.

Prison was something that I would avoid, but it didn't scare me. People with the right connections could live like royalty on the other side. Anything you wanted there could be yours as long as you had the people to help you smuggle things in. Of course that is if you bribed the guards to look the other direction. Everyone in the Family was safe when they went behind bars, the gangs usually worked for us, the ones that didn't usually wouldn't dare harm a made member while behind bars, and the rest of the psychos usually kept far away thanks to the guards and gang members on our payroll.

Going to prison only sucked because it meant you were just bored and stuck there. It wasn't scary, not in Vale's prisons, and not for our kind of people.

But this kind of prison scared the shit out of me. It was a prison where I couldn't be me, where my Family and my rep meant nothing. This place was the belly of the beast and thanks to Cinder, I was now right here surrounded by people that wouldn't hesitate to fight me if they knew who I truly was. And unlike most of the losers who ended up in normal prisons, these people weren't all shitty fighters making shivs out of toothbrushes. It felt like I was walking into a prison where everyone is a fucking guard, and they think I'm a guard too.

"Stop gawking." Cinder said under her breath as we walked side by side together. "You're standing out."

I wanted to tell that bitch to fuck off. I figured that a foreign student just off the fucking airship would probably gawk a bit arriving to this place the first time. Did she think I was that much of an amateur? Or did she take some kind of pleasure by telling me what to do? I suppose it didn't matter, there was no use arguing with her so I just looked straight ahead as we went through the doors.