All Chapters of The prison where I found you: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

For two days, I sifted through the rumors in the courtyard and traded half my tobacco ration with a canteen worker for a name. Elias. He wasn't a thug. He didn't carry a knife, didn't run an illegal gambling ring, and didn't worship Vance or Kael. He was a shadow: a quiet, inconspicuous inmate serving a twenty-year sentence for murder, who spent his days sweeping the chapel corridors. That made him infinitely more dangerous. A man without a purpose could be bought by anyone. During the afternoon break, I found him sitting alone at a cement table near the chapel wall, mending a torn boot. I approached him and followed closely. "You stole something from my pocket." Elias didn't stop sewing. His face was a gray blotch, expressionless and weathered. "I don't know what you're talking about, Accountant." “You gave Graves my note,” I said, bending over the concrete, my voice a raspy whisper. “Who paid you to put it under my mattress?” Elias pulled the waxed thread tighter; the leathe

The copper-and-oil smell of the sub-basement hit my throat as I crouched in the dark, my eyes fixed on the fresh scratches lining Room 17’s padlock.A heavy boot sounded behind me. I didn't jump. I knew the weight of that tread.Kael stepped out of the shadow of the steam pipes. His jaw was set like granite, his gray eyes dark and bruised from the lingering poison of our argument in the library. He didn't look at me directly, nor did he apologize. He simply pulled a thin, curved piece of hardened steel from his wristband and bent down beside the door.“Hold the light,” Kael growled softly.I held the narrow flashlight beam steady on the lock. We didn't talk. We didn't exchange assurances. The fragile, toxic truth was that we didn't trust each other not anymore. But we were both standing on the edge of a precipice, and whatever lay behind this steel door was pulling us both down.CLICK.The heavy lock popped open in Kael’s calloused hand. He eased the iron latch back, the metal groanin

The heavy steel door of the dining hall slammed open, the deafening clang of hundreds of metal trays on the stone floor ripping through the air. I entered the hall with my head bowed, my fingers frantically tracing the contours of the folded paper hidden beneath the lining of my jumpsuit.SUBJECT: HARD – PRE-ARRANGEMENT SURVEILLANCE.The words echoed in my head. I sat alone in a corner seat, staring blankly at my cold food. The noise around me seemed miles away. I was no longer just fighting for survival; I was trying to piece together a life that had been silently and subtly shattered by an unseen hand long before I had even put on that orange jumpsuit.On the other side of the room, at his usual table near the heavy steel beams, Kael sat alone.Normally, there was a tense, nervous atmosphere at his table; the inmates kept their distance out of sheer fear. But today, the atmosphere was different. Kael wasn't sitting upright, his eyes not scanning the floor with his usual razor-sharp

I folded the razor blade into the bloody note and hid it deep under the lining of my boot. The threat burned at my heel with every step I took down the floor. My hands trembled incessantly, but I clenched my teeth and kept my mouth shut. If I showed Kael the note, he would burn this entire block down. He would simultaneously launch a war against Graves, the cartel, and Captain Miller—and whoever had the razor blade would slit his throat in the dark before they found it. So I said nothing. I kept my head down while washing in the morning, my eyes darting nervously to every shadow, my pulse racing every time an inmate came too close to Kael. Kael noticed immediately. At breakfast, he sat across from me, his stormy gray eyes following my restless, paranoid movements. He saw me flinch when a tray fell, saw me shift my body to cover his blind spots. He wasn't pushing, but the air between us grew suffocatingly thick, filled with a dark, unspoken tension as he realized I was building anot

The small infirmary behind the Sector 2 laundry was silent, save for the low, rhythmic hum of a fluorescent light on the ceiling. Kael's jaw was as hard as iron, his knuckles white, as he wrapped a fresh gauze bandage around my palm. His hands, usually so steady with a blade or key, still trembled slightly and erratically.Suddenly, Kael stood up and pulled a heavy, steel-reinforced pipe from under the sink. His stormy gray eyes darkened, deadly and utterly merciless."He's still lying in the lower supply corridor with a broken knee," Kael growled in a deep, terrifying voice. "He won't see the sunrise."He turned and walked toward the heavy door, ready to execute the man who had drawn my blood."Don't kill him," I said.The order echoed through the small room like thunder. Kael froze, his back to me, his shoulders tense beneath his blood-stained jumpsuit. Slowly, he turned and looked at me with a mixture of anger and disbelief."He tried to ram a rusty nail into your chest, Hart," Ka