CAGED WOLF' inmate 0-7-7-4-1 (r18)의 모든 챕터: 챕터 31 - 챕터 40

POV: RickiThe dreams kept worsening, and the worst part was that they didn't feel like dreams at all. They felt like memories of a place he'd never been.Every night now, the same forest waited the moment sleep pulled him under: pine needles sharp underfoot, cold earth pressing up between bare toes, that same slow, ancient heartbeat sitting somewhere beneath his own ribs, patient, waiting to be recognized. He woke each morning gasping, sheets soaked through, his pulse hammering against his throat like something trying to get out. Twice now he'd caught himself running his tongue over grit he could have sworn sat between his teeth - dirt he had no way of explaining, gone by the time he checked his fingernails in the dim morning light, though the phantom sensation of digging, real and deliberate, lingered in his hands for hours afterward, an ache buried too deep in the joints to stretch away.His sense of smell had stopped being manageable entirely. He could track Griff through three co

POV: GriffMarcus Griffin had never felt guilty about reporting on inmates until Ricki started smelling like pack.Griff sat with his back against the cinderblock and catalogued the Kennel the way he'd done for six years: Dobbs favoring his left knee, bone grinding when he walked too fast. Fresh bruising on a new fish's collarbone, knuckle-shaped, rent already due.It wasn't complicated, what he did. Names, species, behaviors, the small vulnerabilities a man let slip when he thought nobody worth noticing was paying attention. He noticed the way Dobbs favored his left knee since the guards had worked it over with a baton three weeks back, bone grinding audibly when he walked too fast. He noticed the fresh bruising blooming yellow-green along a new fish's collarbone, the exact shape of knuckles, courtesy of whoever had decided the kid owed rent already. He catalogued all of it the same patient, unhurried way he catalogued the yard's shifting territories, and once a week, sometimes twice

POV: RickiThey put him in a concrete box with no light and no sound, and the worst part was the way his body settled into it, muscle by muscle, like a key finding its lock. The dark felt like home, and that terrified him more than the punishment did.A line from the poem had been circling his head all morning, unbidden, waking each month a little more himself and a little less certain what himself even meant, and he'd been trying, without much success, to shake it loose before it cost him his focus entirely. It started the way everything in this building started, small, deniable, easy to write off as procedure. A guard cut the yard's exercise hour short for no stated reason, herding a line of restless men back toward the block twenty minutes early. Ricki was exhausted, raw, the unspoken fracture from the corridor with Griff sitting in his chest like a swallowed stone. Something sharp slipped into his voice that hadn't been there a month ago."That's not procedure," he said, flat, wit

POV: LeonFour names on a list, one procedure code, one transferred clerk. Leon Church sat with the ledger open on his knee, and the fluorescent hum from the corridor outside the Undercroft buzzed at a frequency that made the fillings in his back teeth ache. The pattern wasn't a mystery he could solve from inside a cage. It was a machine, and machines didn't stop for the people who noticed them.His knuckles had split again, the skin along the second and third rows cracked and scabbed from three nights ago when he'd put a man's face into the shower wall hard enough to hear cartilage give. He flexed his hand now, watched the scab crease and hold, didn't bleed. The Compact's suppressant cocktail kept his healing sluggish enough that he still bruised like a man, still scarred like one, and the thought settled uneasily alongside everything else he'd learned tonight. Fourteen years of clawed strength, and the Compact could still make him mortal enough to erase, the same as any of the names

POV: RickiRicki had decided to find Odile first thing that morning, the calibration test Leon had mentioned sitting sharp and urgent in his mind since the night before, a plan that finally felt like his own instead of something the building had handed him. He was halfway to the dispensary, rehearsing what to say, when Simms caught him in the corridor with a small, deniable errand for the Undercroft, quick, nothing dangerous, the same kind of task Ricki had run a dozen times before.He told himself he'd go to Odile right after. He didn't know yet that the errand would cost him the version of that morning he'd planned.He hadn't meant to see the ledger page. He'd come down to the Undercroft to finish the task, and Leon had stepped away from the table for a moment, called off by some low-voiced exchange near the stairwell, and the ledger had sat there open, unattended, a folded page tucked between its pages catching Ricki's eye before he'd even decided to look, the paper edge yellowed a