Lahat ng Kabanata ng CAGED WOLF' inmate 0-7-7-4-1 (r18): Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

POV: RickiThe foreperson's hands shook worse than Ricki's.He clocked that first, before the word even landed. The paper trembled in the old man's grip like it weighed something. Ricki's own hands stayed folded on the table, still, because his lawyer had drilled it into him three times: don't fidget. Five months in county had already taught him that trick, how to sit like a man with nothing left to lose because he'd already lost the part of himself that used to move.The suit didn't fit right. Mama Jules picked it out, navy blue, off the rack from a store that didn't stock his size, and the night before trial she'd stood in the fitting room doorway with pins between her teeth, taking in the shoulders herself like she could sew him into someone the jury might believe. She'd missed one pin. It dug into his collarbone now, a small hard bite every time he breathed too deep.He was breathing too deep."On the count of murder in the second degree," the foreperson said, voice splitting on t

POV: RickiThey took his clothes first, then his name, then whatever was left of his composure, and finally, in front of everyone, a reading of exactly what he was.The clothes went the way everything went here: too fast to protest, too slow to survive without feeling every second scrape past. A guard walked him through it in the flat, bored cadence of a man who'd said the same four words to a thousand bodies before this one."Strip," the guard said, tone dead as a closed account.Ricki did it. His fingers fumbled the buttons of the handmade suit his mother pressed that morning, the one she'd sewn herself, the one that felt like armor for exactly as long as it took twelve strangers to come back with a verdict. Now it was just fabric a guard was already balling into a plastic bag like trash nobody would claim."Turn around," the guard said, not looking at him.Ricki turned. Behind him a second guard was already talking to the first, voice pitched for the room, not lowered for anyone's

POV: LeonLeon Church had run this block for fourteen years without raising his voice or baring his fangs, not once, and he meant to keep it that way. The Undercroft belonged to him at this hour, not because anyone had handed him keys - not officially, not on paperwork the Compact would ever recognize - but because fourteen years of quiet transactions and quieter silences had a way of staking claim. A room became yours if you sat in it long enough and nobody had the guts to make you leave it.He sat at the low table that served as his desk, a battered ledger open in front of him, pages gone soft at the edges from years of thumbing. No computer. No terminal the administration could subpoena or crack open. Just paper, and a memory that didn't need paper's help. Somewhere down the tier a woman was laughing too loud, the kind of laugh that meant a guard had just walked her cell block and made a comment about her mouth, the kind of laugh that bought her an easier night if she kept it up lo

Four counts a day, and Valhalla stripped every man down to a number. Ricki's was 0-7-7-4-1, the only name this place bothered learning.The first count landed before dawn, a flashlight blade cutting down the row, a voice barking digits in a flat institutional rhythm. No names. No eyes met. Just the metal-on-metal clank of cell doors getting checked one by one like a man could be inventoried the same as a crate. Ricki learned fast to be on his feet before the beam hit his door. The half-second of hesitation on his first morning had cost him a comment he had no interest in hearing twice. His right hand still throbbed where it had cracked against the bunk frame the night before, a dull heat that wouldn't fade the way a bruise should. It simmered low under the skin, patient, like it hadn't decided yet whether to leave."0-7-7-4-1," the guard barked, tone bored as a man reading grocery totals, already moving before Ricki finished answering.After count came the dosing line, and it taught R

POV: RickiLeon Church didn't ask for favors. He offered them, which meant a man owed him before he'd agreed to a damn thing.Ricki traced the route from the code scrawled on the note: corridors he'd never walked, a laundry room gone dead quiet for the night, a narrow stairwell reeking of bleach and mildew and something underneath both he couldn't name and didn't want to try. Night shift changed the building's whole grain. Fewer guards. Longer stretches where the only sound was his own feet against concrete, the silence pressing in closer with every turn, thick enough that he found himself listening for something that wasn't there. Nobody watched him pass. Nobody was supposed to.Leon sat exactly where Ricki somehow knew he'd be, at a low table with a worn ledger shut in front of him, one lamp throwing warm light instead of the flat fluorescent glare that washed out everywhere else."Delano." Leon finished whatever thought had him occupied, setting his pen down with unhurried precisio