Trapped Together

Chapter 5: Trapped Together

The door had no lock.

Samuel threw his weight against a rusted filing cabinet, dragging it in front of the frame with a scream of metal on concrete that felt loud enough to bring the whole ceiling down on them. It wouldn't hold for long. Nothing in this forgotten wing had been built to hold anything back.

"That name," Ryan said, voice shaking despite every effort to keep it steady. "That was Daniel's file. That was my brother's name on that wall."

"Not now."

"You don't get to say not now. Not after that." Ryan grabbed Samuel's arm, forcing him to turn, forcing him to look at him instead of the door. "You said you'd give me answers. You said later. It's later, Samuel. Tell me what my brother was doing in a room full of medical equipment that shouldn't exist."

Something pounded against the door from the other side, once, testing the cabinet's resistance. Samuel's eyes flicked toward it and back to Ryan, torn between two forms of danger that both demanded his full attention.

"Daniel came to Blackridge eight months before you did," Samuel said finally, the words clipped, forced out of him like a confession he'd been holding back too long. "Not as a prisoner. As a contractor. Records auditor, officially. He was here investigating financial irregularities in the prison's funding."

"You're telling me my brother was inside this building and I never knew?"

"You weren't supposed to know. Nobody was." Samuel's jaw worked. "He found something he shouldn't have. Medical files that didn't match patient counts. Deaths recorded as transfers. He came to me because he'd heard rumors I was already asking questions of my own."

The pounding on the door grew harder, more rhythmic, someone throwing their shoulder into it with real force now.

"And then he died," Ryan said. "Car accident. That's what they told our mother. That's what the police report said."

"The report was falsified." Samuel's voice cracked on the last word, the first real crack Ryan had seen in him since the riot began. "I didn't find that out until after. By the time I understood what really happened to him, it was too late to do anything but keep digging quietly, from the inside, and hope I could finish what he started without ending up the same way."

Ryan's chest tightened until breathing hurt. "He didn't die in an accident."

"No."

"They killed him."

Samuel didn't answer, which was answer enough. The silence between them stretched taut, broken only by the escalating assault on the door, wood splintering somewhere along the frame, the cabinet beginning to shudder under repeated impact.

"And you knew," Ryan said, voice dropping to something dangerous. "You've known this whole time. Every day you looked at me in that cell block, every time you 'protected' me from a beating I didn't ask for, you knew exactly who I was and exactly what happened to my brother, and you said nothing."

"I couldn't say anything. Not without proof, not without risking exposing everything before I had enough evidence to bring the whole operation down. The second Voss suspected I knew, both of us would have vanished the same way Daniel did."

"That's not an excuse."

"I'm not offering one." Samuel met his eyes, and for the first time, Ryan saw something raw underneath the composure, something that looked dangerously close to guilt. "I requested your case file the day you arrived. I made sure you ended up in my block specifically so I could watch over you while I figured out what you knew, what Daniel might have left behind. That was the plan. Watch. Wait. Protect from a distance."

"And now?"

"Now the plan's dead, same as everything else in this room, because Voss's men are about to break through that door and none of it matters if we don't survive the next five minutes."

The cabinet lurched forward another inch as the door gave further, a gap widening at the top just enough for a flashlight beam to slice through and sweep across the ceiling.

"There has to be another way out," Ryan said, scanning the room with fresh urgency, sweeping past broken gurneys and shattered monitor screens until his eyes caught a grate set low into the far wall, half hidden behind a collapsed shelving unit. "There. Ventilation shaft."

Samuel followed his gaze and nodded once, already moving. "It'll be tight."

"Tighter than a bullet. I'll manage."

They shoved the shelving aside together, metal scraping against concrete loud enough to draw a fresh wave of pounding from the door, the cabinet sliding another few inches with every impact. Samuel wrenched the grate free and gestured Ryan through first without hesitation, a decision that told Ryan more about the man than any words could have.

"You first," Ryan said instead. "If this leads somewhere and I get stuck, you're no use to me on the wrong side of a jammed vent."

"I'm not leaving you exposed in a room they're about to breach."

"Then we're both wasting time arguing about it."

The door shuddered one final time, the cabinet toppling sideways with a crash, and the gap widened enough for a man to squeeze through. A flashlight beam cut across the room and found them both crouched at the grate, and Griggs's voice rang out triumphant from the doorway.

"Nowhere left to run, Warden."

Samuel shoved Ryan into the shaft without another word of argument, following immediately behind him, the metal walls scraping against their shoulders as they crawled forward into absolute darkness. Behind them, gunfire cracked against the shaft's opening, the sound deafening in the enclosed space, sparks flying off metal inches from Ryan's head.

"Keep moving," Samuel shouted over the ringing in Ryan's ears, "don't stop, don't look back."

Ryan crawled faster, lungs burning, palms scraped raw against rusted metal, and just as the shaft began sloping downward into a darkness he couldn't see the end of, the passage behind them collapsed in a shower of debris and gunfire, sealing Griggs and his men on the other side and trapping both of them in a narrow steel artery leading straight down into whatever waited beneath Blackridge Penitentiary.