CAGED WOLF' inmate 0-7-7-4-1 (r18)의 모든 챕터: 챕터 41 - 챕터 50

POV: RickiThe count didn't care who'd betrayed whom. Four times a day the speaker crackled and the block went still, and Ricki Delano stood at his door same as always, said his number when it came, 0-7-7-4-1, present and accounted for, and the guard's pen scratched on to the next name like nothing in Ricki's life had cracked open three weeks ago. The building just wanted the number, and it wanted his voice steady when he gave it, because a shaking voice got you flagged for a psych eval, and more paperwork meant more days added to a sentence that already felt bottomless.He'd gotten good at avoiding Griff without making a thing of it. That was its own kind of skill, he was learning, the specific choreography of two men who used to eat every meal together learning how to occupy the same yard, the same cafeteria, the same narrow hallway between the Kennel and the commissary line, without ever quite sharing the same six feet of space. Griff would come out of the chow line and Ricki would

POV: RickiRebuilding trust in Valhalla looked nothing like the movies. It looked like a cigarette on his bunk one morning, and him smoking it even though he didn't smoke.It showed up the day after Griff told him about Kaia - lying on the thin gray blanket, slightly bent, like it had lived in someone's pocket first. No note. No Griff hovering at the bars waiting to be thanked.A cigarette was money in here. Two bought a phone call. Five bought a few nights of somebody watching your back, and there were men on this block who paid in other currency once the cigarettes ran out. Ricki had seen it happen in the laundry room his second week, a transaction nobody so much as blinked at. Bodies and smokes, weighed against each other like an exchange rate nobody questioned anymore.So the cigarette wasn't free. It was Griff putting something real on the table and asking for nothing back.Ricki didn't smoke. He'd never smoked. But that night he sat on the floor with his spine against the cold b

POV: LeonTwo days had passed since Griff finally told Ricki the truth about the ledger, and in that time Leon Church had spent fourteen years making sure nobody in this building needed anything from him that he couldn't price. That was the whole architecture of survival, as far as he'd ever worked out. He gave a man something he wanted, he took something in return, and the ledger stayed balanced. Balanced meant safe. He'd built an entire economy on that principle, one favor at a time, until he ran half the block without ever having to raise his voice or bare his fangs.The problem with Ricki Delano was that the kid needed something Leon had stopped believing he still had in him to give for free.He found Ricki in the yard that same week. Ricki stood at the fence line with his hands shoved in his pockets, eyes fixed on nothing in particular, carrying the specific stillness of a man hauling something he hadn't finished carrying. The chain-link threw diamond shadows across his face in t

POV: TexRicki's hands shook at evening count, just slightly, just enough for Tex to notice if she was already looking, which she was. He caught her watching and stilled them by force of will, jaw tight, eyes forward, the particular discipline of a man who'd learned that showing weakness in this building cost more than it saved. She logged nothing. There was nothing to log. She walked on anyway with the sight of it lodged somewhere behind her ribs.Loretta Redmond had married the warden of Valhalla twenty-two years ago, and she'd spent every one of those years learning the building's bones better than the man whose name hung on the door outside.Tex had worked here three years and was only starting to understand what that kind of knowledge cost.The break room smelled the way it always smelled, burnt coffee scorched to the bottom of the pot, someone's fish reheated too long in the microwave until the whole room reeked of low tide. The same six guards sat parked around the folding tabl

POV: RickiThe rust spots on the bunk slats above him had started to blur together, the fifth night in a row he'd lain here counting them instead of sleeping. His skin ran hot under the thin blanket, feverish in that low, grinding way that never quite broke into something a guard would bother logging. Three nights before this one, Mama Jules hadn't cried on the phone. She'd asked questions, careful and measured, and it was the questions she didn't ask that had kept him staring at those slats ever since.He got fifteen minutes on the block phone once a week if nobody else had claimed the slot first, standing at a metal unit bolted to the wall, the cord too short to let him turn his back on the hallway. A guard stood somewhere behind him, close enough to hear every word. A recorded voice cut in every few minutes, reminding whoever was on the other end that the call originated from a correctional facility and could be monitored. He'd stopped hearing that part months ago. It had become fu