Chapter 4: No Contract

Julian's POV

The report came in at eleven forty, the way most of them did. Vincent's reports never came at odd hours. He'd learned early on that consistency mattered to me more than urgency, that a problem reported calmly at a set time was easier to solve than one shouted through a locked door.

I read it twice before setting it down. Not because it needed a second read. Because reading things twice was a habit that had kept me alive longer than most men in my line of work, and habits like that didn't get abandoned just because the information was simple.

Smith had completed the task. Clean. No mistakes, no hesitation once the instructions were clear, no attempt to negotiate the terms after the fact the way some of them tried, thinking desperation gave them leverage. It didn't. It never had, not with anyone who'd ever tried it on me.

Vincent stood across the desk, hands folded behind his back, waiting the way he always waited, patient in the specific manner of a man who'd learned patience wasn't a virtue so much as a survival skill. He'd been with me long enough that he no longer needed to be told when to speak and when to stay quiet.

"Thoughts," I said. Not a question. I didn't ask questions I didn't already have partial answers to.

"He's sharp," Vincent said. "Followed instructions to the letter. Didn't ask unnecessary questions during the task itself."

"Beforehand?"

"Asked about release timelines. Twice."

I didn't respond to that immediately. I turned Smith's file over in my hands instead, the one I'd requested the day he arrived. University transcripts. A psychology concentration he'd apparently excelled at before his life fell apart. A juvenile record that suggested someone who fought when cornered but rarely started the fight himself. An empty visitor log, save for one name that appeared with more consistency than the rest.

None of it told me anything about guilt or innocence. I hadn't asked for that. Guilt was irrelevant to what I needed from him.

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing specific. Kept it vague."

"Good." I closed the file. "Keep it that way."

Vincent shifted slightly, the closest thing to hesitation I ever saw from him. "He's going to keep asking."

"They always do, at first." I looked past him, toward the small window that showed nothing but a strip of gray sky and razor wire, the same view I'd had for longer than I cared to think about. "It stops mattering once they understand asking doesn't change anything."

"And if it doesn't stop?"

"Then we'll deal with that when it happens." I said it the way I said most things, flat, final, closing the subject before it had a chance to become a discussion. Discussions were for men who hadn't already decided what they wanted, and I'd made my decision about Smith the moment I read his first report.

What I wanted was simple enough. Smith had a mind that worked the way most men's didn't, methodical, observant, unwilling to accept an answer at face value. That kind of mind was useful in the specific, narrow way that most things I valued were useful. Not because I cared what happened to him beyond that. I didn't have room in my life for caring what happened to people, and I'd stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago.

There was also the matter of his psychology background, which I hadn't mentioned to Vincent yet and didn't intend to. A man who understood how people thought, how they broke, how they justified the things they told themselves they'd never do, was a man who could be useful in rooms I couldn't personally enter. Blackgate was a small piece of a much larger board, and I was always looking for pieces that could move places I couldn't. Smith didn't know it yet, but he'd already shown me more about how his mind worked than most men managed to reveal in a year.

"There's something else," Vincent said.

"Go on."

"He mentioned the professor by name. During a conversation with another inmate. Didn't say much, but he brought it up unprompted."

I set the file down again, slower this time. "What did he say?"

"Not much. Just that he didn't do it. The usual thing they all say."

I considered that for a moment. Most of them did say it, guilty and innocent alike, the words worn smooth from overuse until they meant nothing at all. But something in the way Vincent relayed it, some detail in his tone, made me file it away as worth remembering rather than dismissing outright.

Not because I cared whether Smith had killed his professor.

Because I made it my business to know things other people didn't, and this felt like the kind of thread that might, eventually, lead somewhere worth following.

"Keep an ear on that," I said. "Quietly."

"Understood."

I stood, walked to the window, looked out at the same strip of gray sky I looked at every day, and thought about how little any of it had changed in longer than I wanted to count.

"How long has he been asking about release?" I said, without turning around.

"Since the first task."

"Let him ask." I watched a guard cross the yard below, small and slow from this height, oblivious to everything that actually mattered inside these walls. "Give him enough work to keep him too tired to ask as often. Nothing that endangers him unnecessarily. Just enough to remind him what he agreed to. He'll understand the shape of it soon enough."

"And the timeline question, if he pushes harder?"

I turned back to face him, and whatever was in my expression made Vincent go still in the particular way he did when he already knew the answer wasn't going to be one he needed to write down.

Some men needed to be told things directly. Vincent had never been one of them. He read rooms the way other men read newspapers, quickly and without much effort, and he'd learned years ago that the things I didn't say carried more weight than the things I did.

"Keep using him," I said. "That's all he needs to know for now."