All Chapters of Red: Claimed by the Keeper in the Tower: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

POV RedThe courtroom smells like old wood, sweat, and something sharp that makes my stomach twist. I stand with my hands clasped together, trying to look innocent while my whole body shakes. I count the faces in the gallery to keep from screaming. Forty-three. I count them again. Not one of them looks at me like they believe I'm innocent.My roommate Becca is in the fourth row, her hand over her mouth, tears streaming down her face. She's the only one who still believes in me, but her faith can't save me. I learned that six days ago when the bail hearing went to hell."Murder in the first degree." The prosecutor's voice cuts through the room. "Premeditated. Calculated." He paints a picture of me I don't recognize—a monster who planned and executed the death of another human being. He talks about evidence, about motive, about how I carefully covered my tracks for months.My chest feels hollow, like someone reached inside and ripped everything out.I'm twenty-two. I'm a junior at Tulan

POV RedThe iron gate doesn't echo; it lands. It's a heavy, metallic period at the end of a sentence I didn't get to write. I file the sound away and walk.Inside, the fortress is a masterclass in inescapable geometry. Salt-crusted stone walls, three feet thick, curve inward at the top like they're trying to swallow the sky. Everything here has a purpose, and none of them belong to us. We're marched, twelve women in laceless shoes, across a yard of packed dirt. I blink against the sudden glare and start taking inventory: guard positions, the main gate, a smaller secondary exit, and the high stone tower. At the tower's narrow window, a silhouette stands. I can't make out a face, just the static shape of someone watching. I look away and keep moving.They lead us into a low building smelling of lye and damp rock. Inside, a woman named Céleste stands by a table with meager offerings: soap, a tin cup, a folded tan uniform, a blanket creased into permanent ridges. To the left, a guard name

POV RedThe communal bathing facility runs on a schedule dictated by supervision gaps rather than cleanliness. Three times a week, ten minutes each, under the sting of cold water and the same caustic lye soap used to scrub the stone floors.I enter on a Thursday morning with five other women. Two of them I recognize instantly, not by name, but by the way they occupy the space. They've been on this island long enough that it's become their entire universe, and in that universe, they're the architects of order. A new, visible arrival is a variable they intend to reduce.The taller one, blunt-faced with quick, predatory eyes, drifts closer than the space requires. She murmurs something to her companion, and the word "américaine" (American) floats free of the French, followed by "cheveux" (hair), and they laugh in the low, intimate way of people who have already decided something. I keep my face neutral, working the lye into my hair with methodical focus."Que bonito," (How pretty) the sh

POV RedThe dark here has weight to it. Back home in New Orleans, dark meant the orange bleed of streetlights through cheap blinds and the muffled comfort of a neighbor's television through the wall. Here it's stone and salt air and the sound of women trying not to be heard. A silence that isn't silence at all.I've been staring at the underside of the top bunk for two hours."You not sleeping," Nadia says from the shadows."Neither are you."I hear her shift, turning toward me across the narrow gap. I can't see her face but I've learned to read her by the quality of her stillness."Qué piensas," she says. "What you are thinking about?"I consider lying. I don't. "The evidence," I say. "I keep going back to it."First degree murder. Fifteen years. The prosecutor had a voice like calm water and he used it to describe a crime so brutal, so meticulously planned, that the jury had no choice but to see me as a monster. He painted a picture of a woman who lured a man to his death, a woman w

They lock us in our cells for two days. No yard hour. No workshop. Food pushed through the door slot by guards who don't make eye contact and don't answer questions. The facility has gone into the specific tense quiet of a place that is deciding what version of itself it's going to be on the other side of something bad. My first degree murder charge, my fifteen-year sentence, feels heavier than ever in the suffocating silence.Nadia and I don't talk much. There isn't much to say that isn't just fear dressed up as conversation and we're both past performing for each other.I lie on my bunk and stare at the ceiling and think about Masson on the laundry room floor and think about Girard's eyes in the yard and think about the fact that I have spent six weeks building a careful architecture of small protections and in one night it developed a crack I don't know how to repair yet.On the third morning they let us out.He comes down from the tower at nine in the morning.I know it's signific