Dinner

POV: Ricki

Leon Church's idea of dinner was two commissary ramen packets, a blood-supplement shake he never touched, and a conversation that cut like a scalpel dragged slow across skin.

The Undercroft looked different at this hour. Lamplight replaced the fluorescent glare, throwing everything into amber and shadow, and someone had set the low table with a precision that felt ceremonial given how little sat on it. Ricki lowered himself across from Leon with the same unease a stray dog might feel slinking into a den that wasn't his, every nerve ending screaming *trespasser* into territory never built with him in mind. He smelled his own fear-sweat under the ramen steam, sharp and human and cheap, and beneath that, something else entirely: the cool, still scent that trailed Leon everywhere, old stone and old blood and something that had learned, a long time ago, to hold itself permanently in check.

"Eat," Leon ordered, tone flat as a slammed cell door, sliding one of the ramen packets across the table. "It's not much. It's what I have."

Ricki ate slowly, the salt hitting his tongue the same vivid, obscene way it always did now that the suppressants had stopped dulling everything to grey paste, and waited for whatever this dinner actually was underneath its costume of hospitality.

"Tell me about the night," Leon said, voice pitched low and even like a man reading off an inventory, no preamble, no softening. "Not the legal version. The real one."

Ricki's fork stopped halfway to his mouth. "Why?" he asked, wary.

"Because everyone in this building already thinks they know your story, and none of them asked you for it," Leon said, eyes giving up nothing. "I'm asking."

Ricki set the fork down. He hadn't told this to anyone, not really, not the full shape of it. Not even his lawyer, who'd only ever wanted the parts that fit neatly into a defense strategy, the parts that made for a good closing argument.

"We argued," Ricki said, testing each word before he let it loose. "My roommate. Stupid stuff. Rent, dishes, nothing that should've mattered. Then it wasn't stupid anymore, I don't even know when that happened, and something came up in me that tasted like metal in the back of my throat. Hot, like biting down on a battery." He stopped, swallowed hard enough to feel it click in his throat. "After that there's nothing. No memory. I woke up on the floor covered in blood that wasn't mine, and he was gone, and I didn't know how any of it happened."

Leon didn't flinch. He didn't lean back in judgment or forward in fascination, just absorbed it the way he absorbed everything, filed and weighed and held without comment, his face a locked door.

Leon went quiet for a moment, longer than his usual measured pauses, his fingers tightening slightly around the shake bottle he still hadn't opened, knuckles paling against the plastic. Ricki had the sense of watching a man decide something, weighing a door before choosing whether to open it.

"I don't tell people this," Leon said finally, voice dropping low, almost private. "I'm telling you anyway."

"Why?" Ricki pressed.

"Because you just handed me something you don't hand people either," Leon said, dry. "Seemed only fair."

"I killed someone too," Leon admitted, after a long quiet, voice sliding into something almost confessional. "Different circumstances. Same permanence." He turned the blood-supplement shake slowly on the table, not drinking it, just moving it in a slow circle, a habit Ricki was starting to recognize as a way of occupying his hands while his mind went somewhere heavier. "I remember every second of mine. Every sound, every smell, the exact weight of it in my hands." His eyes came back up, steady as a blade laid flat. "You don't remember any of yours. I've spent fourteen years wondering which is worse. I still don't have an answer."

Ricki hadn't expected that, the plain admission of it offered without asking for anything back, no price tag hidden underneath.

"You know the Compact Acts," Leon said, voice shifting gears, brisk now, businesslike. "Not the way lawyers know them. The way we know them in here." He tapped the table once, a hard little punctuation. "Inmates cite provisions the way you'd cite scripture. Compact v. Hargrove, ninety-day holding limits, administrative review triggers. It's not law up here. It's survival grammar. You learn the words or the words get used against you by somebody who already knows them better."

"Simms mentioned Hargrove," Ricki said. "The first postponement."

"Simms knows more law than half the guards on this block," Leon said, mouth curving faint, almost fond. "Doesn't surprise me he's already teaching you the language."

The room settled into a quiet that felt less transactional than anything Ricki had experienced with Leon before, and for one stupid, dangerous moment he let himself believe this might just be two men eating a bad meal together, nothing underneath it, no blade waiting in the folds.

Then Leon's tone shifted, and Ricki felt the surgery start.

"You need to understand something about your situation," Leon said, voice going hard and precise, each word set down like a tool on a tray. "Wolves protect their own. Vampires protect their own. Witches close ranks the second anything threatens the Scriptorium. Every species in this building has a structure, a hierarchy, somebody whose job it is to notice if one of their own goes missing or gets hurt." He leaned forward slightly, the lamplight catching the flat black of his eyes. "You have none of that. Unconfirmed means unclaimed. Nobody's responsible for you. Not the wolves, not the vampires, not the witches. You belong to no faction, which means, in this building, you belong to whoever decides to take you."

"Take me how?" Ricki asked, though some cold, certain part of him already knew the answer before he'd finished asking, the shower block rising up unbidden behind his eyes.

"However they want," Leon said, flat and unhurried, the same tone he might use to note the weather had turned colder. "Unconfirmed inmates get assaulted in this building more often than the reports ever show, because there's nobody with a reason to file the report. No pack to avenge it. No coven to make noise about it. It happens, and it gets absorbed into the silence the same way everything else does, filed under nothing, counted as nobody." He watched Ricki carefully as he said it, gauging the reaction, though nothing in his own face suggested this was news delivered for shock value. It was simply fact, stated the way facts got stated in this building, without weight, without apology.

Ricki's stomach turned cold, a fist of ice sitting low in his gut. He thought of the shower block, the hand flat against his chest, the wolf's mouth curving against his jaw as he said nobody's coming, fish. He hadn't let himself think too hard, until now, about how close that had actually come, or how differently it might have gone if Griff hadn't happened to be walking past at exactly the right moment.

"You're not telling me anything I haven't already brushed up against," Ricki said, quiet.

"I know," Leon said, eyes not leaving Ricki's. "That's why I'm telling you now, instead of waiting for you to learn it the hard way a second time."

They finished the meal mostly in silence after that, the weight of it sitting heavier than the food itself, the broth gone lukewarm and grey in the packet. When Ricki finally stood to leave, Leon offered him nothing: no place in the economy, no protection, no claim staked.

"You're interesting, Delano," Leon said, as Ricki reached the doorway. "Interesting is useful. It's also visible. And visible, in this building, is the most dangerous thing you can be."

Ricki paused at the threshold. "Is that a warning?" he asked.

"It's honesty. I don't do warnings," Leon said, tone unchanged, still even, still unreadable. "Your hearing. The first postponement had a form number. I checked."

Ricki turned back fully now, his chest tightening like a fist closing around something small and breakable.

"The second one won't," Leon said, flat.

Ricki opened his mouth, a dozen questions crowding behind his teeth at once, but when he looked at Leon again, the man had already turned his attention elsewhere, back to the ledger on the table, back to the shake he still hadn't touched, as if the sentence he'd just delivered carried no more weight than a comment about the weather.Ricki left without another word, the cold certainty of what he'd just been told settling into his chest like something that had always been there, waiting for him to finally notice it.