Jack felt the meat of Mountain’s fingers close over his neck. He heard every tooth of a zipper coming undone.

“Aw, Christ, Mountain,” came a voice, “couldn’t you pick someone else?”

Mountain ground himself against Jack. “Shut up, LeGrande. This ain’t your business.”

“Sure it is. St. Bride’s got a bet going with a bunch of us. He says he can get every answer right on Jeopardy! before the brains who are playing do. There’s a can of coffee in it for each of us if he screws up.”

Jack took small, shallow breaths through his mouth. He had made no bet with Aldo or anyone else in the pod. But he’d spend his life’s savings on coffee, if that was what it took to get this monster off his back.

“We get to place our commissary order tomorrow-if he’s stuck in the infirmary tonight, thanks to you, we won’t get our coffee for another week.”

Jack’s arms were released. He scrambled upright to find Mountain buttoning his jeans and looking at him speculatively. “I seen that show. Ain’t no one smart enough to get them questions all right.” He crossed his arms. “I don’t want coffee if you lose.”

“Fine. I’ll buy you a chocolate bar instead.”

Mountain’s hands were on his shoulders in an instant, drawing him to his feet. “You get those answers right tonight, then tomorrow I’ll leave you be. But you play again next night, and the next. And the minute you fuck up, you’re mine.” He touched Jack’s jaw, the pads of his fingers soft. “You lose that game, and you come to me like you want it.”

Jack froze. He watched Mountain leave the barn, then his legs gave out beneath him. Pants still down around his knees, he sat in the straw, trying to draw in air.

“You okay?”

Until he’d spoken, Jack had completely forgotten that Aldo was standing there. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and nodded. “Thank you.”

“The only thing Mountain likes more than a piece of ass is new entertainment.” A bright flush worked its way up Jack’s neck and face as he righted his clothes. “It’s no big deal,” Aldo said, shrugging. “We’ve all been there.”

Jack felt himself begin to shake uncontrollably, a delayed reaction from what had nearly happened. In jail, you gave up everything-your possessions, your job, your home. The thought that any man might take even more from an inmate-something as irreplaceable as dignity-made Jack so angry his blood ran faster.

He could not let Mountain Felcher win.

Jack won. And like Scheherezade, he gained a reprieve for several nights. His days took on a frenetic quality: he’d work eight hours, then grab as many books as he could from the prison library and carry them to his bunk. He read before dinner, during dinner, after dinner . . . until the familiar strains of the television game show filled the common room. He went to sleep thinking of the ingredients in a Tom Collins; he woke imagining the history of the Sino-Russian War. But soon, he wasn’t doing it alone. Prisoners who at first were angry that they hadn’t gotten the coffee they’d expected had come to root for Jack, having realized that self-esteem packed just as much of a high as caffeine. Eager to help, they took books out from the library, too, and fashioned questions for him. They’d quiz Jack as he brushed his teeth, bused his cafeteria tray, made his bunk.

After a week, all of Grafton County Correctional Facility knew about Jack’s bet with Mountain Felcher. The guards wagered with each other, a pool for the day that Jack would eventually stumble. The maximum- and medium-security pods followed his wins through the jail grapevine. And at 7 P.M., every TV in the prison would be tuned to Jeopardy!

One night, as had become the custom, Jack sat to Mountain Felcher’s left, his eyes riveted on the television screen overhead. The leading contestant was a woman named Isabelle with wild curly hair. “Quotable Quotes for six hundred,” she said.

The historian Cornelius Tacitus said these beings are “on the side of the stronger.” The other inmates stared at Jack, waiting. Even the correctional officer on duty had given up on his crossword puzzle, and he stood nearby with his arms crossed. Jack felt the response bubbling up from his throat, easily, carelessly. “The angels.”

In the next breath, he realized he’d given the wrong answer. “I meant-”

“The gods,” said the contestant.

A bell rang and $600 showed up in Isabelle’s account. The common room grew so quiet that Jack could hear his pulse. He’d grown so sure of his skill that he hadn’t even stopped to think before he spoke. “The gods,” Jack repeated, licking his dry lips. “I meant the gods.”

Mountain turned to him, eyes flat and black as obsidian. “You lose,” he said.

Out of sympathy, the others left Jack alone. When he threw up in the bathroom, when he stalked in silence to the cafeteria, they pretended not to see. They thought he was terrified past the point of speech, and it was something they could understand-by now, everyone knew that the forfeit of the bet was Jack’s free will. It was one thing to be raped; it was another thing entirely to offer yourself as a sacrifice.

But Jack wasn’t frightened. He was so angry that he could not utter a word, in case his fury spilled out. And he wanted to keep it inside him, glowing like a coal, hoping to burn Mountain Felcher and scar him as deeply as Jack himself was sure to be scarred.

The night that Jack lost the bet, Aldo’s voice drifted to him as he lay on his bunk. “You just do it, and then you put it behind you and never let yourself think about it,” Aldo said quietly. “Kind of like jail.”

Jack stood in the shadows of the barn, watching Mountain’s arms bunch and tighten as he lifted another bale of hay onto the stack he was making in an alcove. “Cat got your tongue?” Mountain asked, his back still to Jack. “Oh, no. That’s right. I got your tongue. And the whole rest of you, too.”

Mountain stripped off his work gloves. Sweat gleamed on his forehead and traced a line down the middle of his T-shirt. “I had my doubts about you paying your debt.” He sat on a bale of hay. “Go on, drop those pants.”

“No.”

Mountain’s eyes narrowed. “You’re supposed to show up wanting it.”

“I showed up,” Jack said, keeping his voice even. “That’s all you get.”

Mountain jumped him and set him in a headlock. “For someone who thinks he’s so smart, you don’t know when to shut your mouth.”

It took all the courage in the world, but Jack did the one thing he knew Mountain wouldn’t expect: He went still in the man’s hold, unresisting, accepting. “I am smart, you asshole,” Jack said softly. “I’m smart enough to know that you’re not going to break me, not even if you screw me three times a day for the next seven months. Because I’m not going to be thinking what a tough guy you are. I’m going to be thinking you’re pathetic.”

Mountain’s grip eased, a loose noose around Jack’s neck. “You don’t know nothing about me!” In punishment and proof, he ground his hips against Jack from behind. Denim scraped against denim, but there was no ridge of arousal. “You don’t know nothing!”

Jack blocked out the feel of Mountain’s body behind his, of what might happen if he pushed too hard and sent the man over the edge. “Looks like you can’t fuck me,” he said, then swallowed hard. “Why don’t you just fuck yourself instead?”

With a roar that set three sparrows in the rafters to flight, Mountain wrenched away. He had never tried to force someone who had given in yet refused to give up. And that one small distinction made Jack every bit as mighty as the bigger man.

“St. Bride.”

Jack turned, his arms folded across his chest-partly to make him look relaxed and partly because he needed to keep himself from falling apart.

“I don’t need you when there’s a hundred others I can have,” Mountain blustered. “I’m letting you go.”

But Jack didn’t move. “I’m leaving,” he said slowly. “There’s a difference.”