Chapter 8: Collateral

Miles's POV

The bunk above me creaked twice, then went quiet in a way that felt wrong.

I'd learned to notice things like that by now. The rhythm of this place had a pattern, footsteps and breathing and the particular groan certain metal frames made under certain weights, and anything that broke the pattern was worth paying attention to. I stayed still, eyes open in the dark, listening, my hand drifting toward the edge of the mattress where I'd started keeping a sharpened toothbrush handle, useless against anything serious but better than nothing.

Nothing.

A shuffle of feet somewhere near the end of the row. A low voice, too quiet to make out words. Then silence again, thick and complete, the kind that made the hair on my arms stand up even though I couldn't have said exactly why.

I told myself it was nothing and tried to go back to sleep. I almost managed it.

The morning brought no explanation, just a different guard on the block than usual, someone I didn't recognize, and a strange, charged quiet among the other inmates that reminded me of the day after a fight nobody wanted to talk about. Men moved a little faster than usual on their way to breakfast, eyes down, conversations shorter and quieter than the day before. I asked the man two bunks down what happened.

"Nothing happened," he said, too fast, eyes sliding away from mine, his hands busy with his tray like giving them something to do would make the conversation end sooner.

I let it go. I'd learned that too, when to push and when pushing just marked you as someone who noticed too much.

---

Vincent found me during work detail, folding laundry in a room that smelled permanently of bleach, steam rising off industrial dryers along the far wall, and fell into step beside me without announcing himself the way he usually did.

"You slept fine last night," he said. Not a question. He kept folding as he said it, eyes on the fabric instead of on me, like the words carried less weight if he didn't bother looking up.

"I heard something. Above my bunk."

"You did."

I stopped folding, the shirt in my hands forgotten. "What was it."

"Someone attempting to get close enough to do something you wouldn't have woken up from." He said it exactly the way he said everything, flat, unbothered, like he was describing weather rather than an attempt on my life. "It didn't get that far. Never had a chance to."

My hands had gone still on the fabric in front of me. "Someone tried to kill me last night. While I was asleep. And I didn't even know."

"That was the point."

"The point of what?"

"The point of doing this job correctly." Vincent picked up a folded shirt, inspected it with mild disapproval, refolded it, his movements precise even for something as mundane as laundry. "You weren't meant to know. Knowing would have kept you awake worrying about a threat that no longer exists. There's no benefit in that."

Something hot moved through my chest, anger with nowhere useful to go. "That's not your decision to make. What I get to know about my own life."

"It is, actually." He set the shirt down, finally looking at me directly, gray eyes steady in a way that made it hard to look away first. "As long as you're inside these walls and working for Mr. Hayes, decisions about what protects you and what doesn't belong to us. Not to you."

"That's not protection. That's control."

"They're not always different things." He said it without heat, without any attempt to soften it, the same way he delivered everything, which was somehow worse than if he'd tried to argue the point.

I wanted to argue with that. I couldn't quite find the hole in it, which made me angrier than if he'd simply been wrong.

"Who was it," I said instead. "Last night."

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"It matters to you emotionally. It doesn't matter to your safety, which is the only thing I'm required to care about." Vincent went back to the laundry, unbothered by my frustration in a way that somehow made it worse. "He's been dealt with. That's the end of the relevant information."

Dealt with. I didn't ask what that meant. I wasn't sure I wanted the answer, and some part of me suspected Vincent wouldn't have given it to me regardless. I thought about the man who'd hesitated in the laundry room a few weeks back, the one who never got back up on his own after the fight ended, and wondered if this was the same kind of ending, quiet and final and never spoken of again.

"I'm getting tired of finding out about the things happening to me after they're already over," I said. "Like I'm not even a person in this. Just something that gets moved around and protected without ever being told why."

Vincent paused at that, something almost thoughtful crossing his face, the closest I'd seen him come to actually considering what I'd said instead of simply managing it. For a moment he looked less like a man delivering instructions and more like someone genuinely weighing a point he hadn't expected to hear.

"That's a fair complaint," he said, which surprised me more than anything else he'd said all morning. "I won't pretend otherwise. But fair doesn't change how this works."

"Then what would change it?"

"Nothing, currently." He folded another shirt, precise, unhurried, the crease landing exactly where he wanted it every time. "Maybe something, eventually. That's not up to me either."

I didn't ask whose decision it actually was. I already knew, and saying the name out loud in a room full of other inmates felt like exactly the kind of mistake that got you noticed for the wrong reasons.

The frustration sat in my chest for the rest of the shift, useless and heavy, the specific kind of anger that had nowhere to go because every direction I pointed it led back to the same locked door. I'd survived something last night. I should have felt relief, gratitude even, the way you were supposed to feel when someone saved your life. I kept waiting for that feeling to arrive and it never quite did, crowded out by something closer to resentment that I couldn't fully justify and couldn't quite shake either.

Instead I mostly felt like a piece of furniture that had been moved out of the way of a falling shelf, useful enough to protect, not important enough to inform.

By the time the shift ended, Vincent was waiting for me near the exit, a folded slip of paper already in his hand, the same way it always was. The hallway had emptied out around us, other men filing past toward the mess hall, none of them sparing a second glance at the two of us standing there.

"Already?" I said. "I haven't even had a day to recover."

"You weren't hurt. There's nothing to recover from." He held the paper out, unmoved by my tone, his patience the kind that came from genuinely not caring how I felt about any of it. "The boss wants the job finished."

"Which job? The one I did four days ago, or a new one?"

"Does it matter?"

I stared at him, at the paper he was still holding out, waiting for me to take it the way I always eventually did. Somewhere down the hall a door slammed, sharp and sudden, and neither of us flinched.

"No," I said, and took it. "I guess it doesn't."

Vincent's expression didn't change at all.

"Read it tonight," he said. "You'll want the extra hours to prepare."