Chapter Two Razor
Chapter two
Razor
“Slade!”
Bang. Bang. Bang.
I came up hard on the top bunk, heart moving before my head caught up. I’d learnt quickly in here. Wake fast, orient faster. Pretending to sleep was how you got tested.
Or worse.
I dragged a hand down my face, gritty with the remains of a night that hadn’t counted as sleep.
Be a fucking fool to sleep properly in here, even with the doors locked.
The silence never stayed silent long enough for that.
Somewhere down the wing someone shouted, the vibration bouncing off concrete and steel until it meant nothing and everything at once.
Below me, Harris grunted and rolled onto his side, turning his back. Bottom bunk privilege. He didn’t look at me. He never did.
We didn’t speak. At all.
Twenty hours a day locked in a box with another man without exchanging a word did strange things to your head, but it was safer that way.
I didn’t know whose side Harris was on. If he even had one.
But in here, not knowing was reason enough to keep my mouth shut.
Silence was a language everyone understood. And mistrust kept me breathing.
The key scraped in the lock. The door swung open.
I dangled my legs off the bunk, joints stiff, muscles tight from too much stillness and not enough space.
Dent stood in the doorway, one hand braced on the door, eyes doing a sweep of the cell as if half-expecting it to have transformed overnight into a drug den.
To be fair, night was when most of the contraband made it in via the drones.
Not in this cell, though.
I didn’t have those outside forces delivering for me anymore.
My cell was bog-standard. Designed for one man and quietly crammed with two. No photos taped up. No towels pretending to be curtains. No signs anyone planned to stay. We were both stopovers. Remand. Temporary. That lie we told ourselves to keep from splintering.
The mattress was thin enough for my back to remember every night in here.
My shoulders ached in a way they never used to.
I’d slept on worse, sure. On floors. Sofas reeking of old smoke and damp.
And on paper-thin things in my mum’s flat, letting Keeley have the bed because she needed it more than I did.
But this was different.
This pressed into me. Stayed with me. Reminded me every morning exactly where I was.
Maybe I’d just got used to luxury.
Knew I shouldn’t have let myself.
“You’ve got a visitor,” Dent said.
Dent was one of the easier screws to deal with.
He wasn’t soft. Fuck no. None of them were that.
But he was predictable, and in a place like this, predictability worked in an inmate’s favour.
Late forties, early fifties. A weathered face, lines cut deep around his mouth and eyes from years of squinting down corridors and through reinforced glass.
He didn’t posture. Nor savour the small humiliations the younger screws collected like trophies.
He was solid. Sound. A decent man who went home to his wife at the end of a shift and left the prison at the gate.
He didn’t take shit, though. But he also didn’t go looking for it.
He worked the wing with a kind of blunt respect.
Not for us, exactly, but for the job. Order only held if it was consistent.
I valued that. He ran his wing the way I had my line on the outside.
I preferred it when he was on shift. Even knowing full well that he hated criminals. Drug dealers most of all.
Men like me, in other words.
I stretched, feeling the pull along my spine, then hopped down and slid my feet into the plastic sliders by the bed. Cold bit into my soles. I raked a hand through my hair. Too long now. Untidy. Another small thing slipping out of my control.
“Who’s visiting me?” I asked, knowing better.
I hadn’t had a single visitor in eight weeks.
I didn’t want them. Couldn’t risk it. No way was I sitting across from my mum or Keeley in the visits hall with Ghost and his lot scattered around the place, watching, counting, cataloguing.
People thought visits were about comfort.
They weren’t. They were leverage. Proof I had shit to lose on the outside.
I needed to look as if I had nothing.
Even when the ache sat heavy in my chest. Even when my mouth went dry with the wanting of it. Conversation. Familiarity. A voice that knew mine. I daren’t show it. Wouldn’t ever show it.
Dent stepped aside and let me out. I kept my head down. Did what he asked. Obedient. Resistance was a performance that got people looking.
And the best thing I could be in here was invisible.
Even if I had a huge fuck-off target on my back.
“No idea.” Dent then led me out.
The door slammed shut behind us, the bang vibrating through bone. The corridors were already alive. Boots on concrete. Keys rattling. Voices ricocheting off walls stained with years of fingerprints and rage. Men pressed up against doors, faces at windows, eyes wasted or threatening.
“Slade!” someone called.
“Oi, Razor!”
I kept my eyes forwards. As always.
Looking was a mistake. Reacting was worse.
We passed the gym, the library, the yard doors.
Landmarks of a routine I’d built piece by piece over the last eight weeks.
I used the gym when it was quiet, lifted to keep the muscle I knew I’d need.
In here. Out there, if it ever came to it, which I doubted.
I trained for the long haul, and for the longer one waiting when they finally sentenced me.
I read when they let me, too. A habit I’d forgotten I’d once enjoyed. Who knew, eh? Razor Slade, drug dealer and gang enforcer, sitting with a book. Funny, that. But it kept my hands busy and my head steady, and that mattered more than appearances.
I walked the same routes at the same times. Ate fast. Left early.
I made myself dull.
Dull kept me alive.
Even so, right then, same as always, I felt Ghost lingering.
Same as every single fucking day of the eight weeks I’d been in here.
He lived in the space between my shoulder blades.
He was a pressure, a prickle, the sense of being assessed.
And when I snapped my gaze sideways, long enough to confirm it, there he was.
Leon “Ghost” Morris. Leaning over the railing on the opposite landing, loose-limbed, smiling at nothing in particular.
He’d been let out on rec early. Free to roam while the rest of us stayed behind doors. Odd at first. Now routine.
Ghost was top dog in here.
And he was watching me.
Then, as per, something skittered across the floor. Metallic. Light. It spun once before resting near my foot. A coin. I didn’t need to look to know what it was, or that it was meant for me. It was a test, see. And looking made it real. Not looking made it my choice. But I knew what it meant.
You’ve got a price on your head and I’m cashing in.
I looked away.
Someone had a sense of humour, putting me on remand in the same block as the man from the rival crew I’d ensured had got caught and put inside. That wasn’t chance. No admin error. Someone had known. Someone had signed off on it. Orchestrated it.
Someone who wanted me gone.
Dent kept walking, boots echoing as he steered me deeper into the block towards the interview rooms. This wasn’t a personal visit.
I knew that already. I had to agree to those and I hadn’t.
I don’t think I’d keep it locked up if I saw Kee.
Or Mum. Or, fucking hell, even Lennon. I’d probably break down.
And I’d spent eight weeks not thinking about Tristan for that reason. At all.
Which was a lie.
So I was thankful it was just my piss-poor defence team.
The guards sat me down and left. The door closed with a softer click than the cell door, which somehow made it worse. The room felt smaller because of it. Airless. Claustrophobic. I leant back in the chair and waited.
Eight weeks since bail refusal.
Eight weeks of waiting for something to change.
Eight weeks of learning how long I could sit with the idea that this might be it.
That this grey, grinding, watched existence could stretch out not for months but years.
Forever, if the wrong people wanted it that way.
I’d stopped planning. Stopped imagining anything beyond the next day’s routine. Hope was noisy. Hope got me noticed.
The door opened again.
Martin Ellwood came in first. I recognised the suit.
Charcoal, expensive without shouting. And the way he carried himself as if professionalism was a shield.
He’d been my solicitor since the night of the arrest. Out of his depth.
The man behind him was younger. Jonny Davies.
Junior associate. Brought along to take notes and look serious.
They sat opposite me.
No smiles. That wasn’t unusual. But nor did they soothe my fears either.
“Mr Slade.” Ellwood smoothed his tie, a reflex more than a necessity. “How are you holding up?”
I shrugged. “Still breathing.”
He nodded, as if that were a sufficient metric. To be fair, in here it was.
Ellwood opened the file, though I doubted he needed it. Whatever had changed since their last visit, they hadn’t shared with me yet, and judging by the way he avoided my eyes, it wouldn’t be good.
“Let’s be clear where we are.”
I let him talk.
Ellwood had been the duty solicitor on the night of my arrest, rolled over into representation because that’s how the system worked when your money wasn’t clean. And mine wasn’t. Every penny I’d ever touched traced back to Cormac O’Rourke and the empire he’d built on other people’s blood.
Cormac wasn’t paying for this. They were legal aid.
Which meant I was on my own.
The cash I’d squirrelled away when no one was looking was for Keeley and the baby. That was untouchable. She would have known to take it, hide it or use it the moment I hadn’t come home. I wasn’t burning their future on a defence for a verdict that was already written.