Chapter 151: The Last Good Deed
Liam’s POV
The weeks following my sentencing blurred together in a haze of pain and humiliation. What had started as isolated incidents of violence had evolved into a pattern of torture. Every day brought new forms of cruelty, new ways for my fellow inmates to remind me of my place in the prison.
I was the man who’d had almost ran over his pregnant wife and also got an innocent woman murdered.
Even though I had tried to stop it. But it doesn’t matter. What mattered was perception, and in the eyes of everyone around me, I was something lower than dirt.
The beatings had become routine. Sometimes it was Thompson and his crew, sometimes it was other inmates I didn’t even recognize. They would corner me in the showers, in the yard, in the narrow corridors between cell blocks.
Each attack was more vicious than the last, as if they were competing to see who could inflict the most damage.
My ribs, barely healed from the last beating, were broken again. My left eye was swollen shut more often than not. I’d lost three teeth and could barely chew solid food.
The medical staff had stopped showing sympathy weeks ago, they’d seen too many inmates like me, men who’d committed crimes that put them at the bottom of the prison food chain.
But it wasn’t just the physical violence that was breaking me. It was the psychological warfare, the constant reminders that I was less than human.
Today, like every day, I shuffled to the cafeteria with my head down, trying to make myself invisible. The routine was always the same: get my tray, find an empty table in the corner, eat as quickly as possible, and get out before anyone noticed me.
But they always noticed.