Chapter Four Razor
Chapter FOUR
Razor
The crying was pissing me off.
It wasn’t loud exactly. Nor even hysterical and, trust me, there’d been a few of those floating round the wing at night. But this was the steady, leaking kind. Breath catching, nose pulling in air too fast, the sound of a man realising too late that this place wouldn’t bend around him.
I ignored it for as long as I could.
Then, for the first time in fuck knew how long, I slammed my palm down on the rail of the bunk below.
“Hey,” I said. “Shh. I’m trying to fucking read.”
Silence.
A sniff. Another.
Colin shifted on the bottom bunk, the mattress squeaking under his weight. “Sorry.”
I tucked one arm behind my head and reopened my book.
Jack Reacher was mid-monologue, about to break someone efficiently and without remorse.
It wasn’t great literature, but it was familiar.
Predictable. Men like Reacher survived because they understood systems and violence and when to keep their mouths shut. I could work with that.
I kept reading.
“How do you…” Colin broke through again. “…stay so calm?”
I closed my eyes.
For fuck’s sake.
Just because I’d spoken didn’t mean I wanted a conversation. It didn’t mean we were doing this now. I opened my mouth to tell him exactly that, but the word that came out wasn’t the one I’d planned.
“Survival.”
It wasn’t even mine. I’d just read it. Reacher had said it two lines earlier. But it fit well enough, and that was good enough for me.
Colin went quiet again.
We were on lockdown. Some scrap had kicked off at lunch, the usual territorial nonsense, and now the entire wing got punished for it.
Six by six. Lights too bright. Air stale.
Time dragging until someone decided it was night.
Colin wasn’t coping. I could hear it in the way he breathed.
Too fast. Too shallow. Panic disguised as politeness.
I told myself not to care.
Then after a minute, he said, “Do you ever get used to it?”
“No.” I turned a page. “You just learn what not to react to.”
That seemed to settle him. Or at least redirect the noise in his head.
His breathing slowed. Not much, but enough so I could finish the chapter without sound effects at least. I didn’t look down at him.
Didn’t soften my voice. Nor tell him it would be alright.
But I didn’t tell him to shut up again either.
That seemed to count for something because Colin slid out of his bunk, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and leant on the wall facing me as if trying to make himself smaller.
I pretended not to notice. Kept my eyes on the page.
Tried to, anyway.
I’d never been a swot. No bookworm, for sure.
But there were only so many ways to fill time in a box, and this was one of the quieter ones.
Somewhere along the line I’d stopped skimming and actually started reading.
I was invested now. Not in whether Reacher won, because he always did, but in how.
That was the point, wasn’t it? Not the outcome. The way you got there.
Christ. I’d turned poetic.
Four walls and too much time did that.
“I have a wife.” Colin bowed his head. “And kids.”
I inhaled slowly, chest rising. Then I turned the page but realised I hadn’t read the last paragraph properly. Turned it back.
“You got anyone on the outside?” Colin peered up at me.
Jesus. Effing. Christ.
“A wife?” he tried. “Girlfriend?”
“No.” That part was easy enough.
Colin nodded, as if he’d half-expected it. “Anyone you miss, then?”
I tried to keep reading.
Didn’t work.
Because he’d opened the door I’d spent eight weeks barricading. Of course, there were people I missed. Keeley. Maisie. Even Lennon, with his constant disappointment. Mum. At least the version of her that used to exist.
But the one I missed more than was sensible?
Yeah.
That was someone who didn’t fit neatly into any box Colin was offering. Not a name I could say in here. Not even a shape I wanted to give much air to. Thinking about him was dangerous. Like touching something hot just to prove it could still burn.
I turned another page, letting the silence do the work.
But I must have given myself away because my shoulders went tight, and the pause stretched half a beat too long.
Colin caught it. I wondered, not for the first time, what he’d been on the outside.
Counsellor, priest, someone used to holding silence without rushing to fill it. He let it sit. Let me wrestle with it.
“Eats at you, doesn’t it?” he sighed. “Not getting to explain.”
I glanced down at him then.
He wasn’t fishing. Wasn’t angling for gossip or leverage. Just naming something he already knew.
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
Colin tilted his neck. “Do you think they think about you?”
I huffed out a breath that might’ve passed for a laugh in another life. “They’d be better off not to.”
I turned the page again, more to keep my hands busy than because I was actually reading, but the lights cut out without warning and a low hum rippled through the wing, followed by the usual chorus.
A few shouts, a laugh, someone swearing.
Then the sound folded in on itself and thinned out. Darkness pressed close.
Colin shifted below me, the mattress creaking.
I lay still, staring at a ceiling I could no longer see, listening to the prison settle around us. And in the dark, with the book closed on my chest, I thought of him.
The one I missed most of all and felt guilty for it.
I had no right to miss Tristan Hale-Fitzroy.
None at all.
* * * *
Morning unlock came with the usual crash of sound.
Keys first. Then the rattle of doors, one after another, metal on metal, the whole wing waking at once. Shouts carried down from the landing. Someone laughed too loudly. Someone else swore. The smell of boiled shit drifted up from below.
I swung my legs off the bunk and stood, shoulders stiff, ribs aching from sleeping wrong and too long. Swear they’d cut the lights early last night, just to remind us who owned the hours. Colin was already up, pacing the narrow strip of floor as if he’d been waiting for permission to exist.
“You going down?” He peered up at me, hopeful.
The bloke was old enough to be my old man, yet there he was, looking to me as if I was the difference between coping and not.
Maybe I had that look. I’d been playing parent since I was a kid, keeping Keeley fed and steady, learning early how to be big and intimidating.
Or maybe Colin was just terrified and mistaking proximity for safety.
Either way, he had the wrong idea.
I grabbed my cup.
The door slid open and the wing spilt into motion. Men poured out in clumps, stretching, yawning, jostling for position. No one looked rested. Everyone looked hungry. Colin fell in beside me, walking with me as if he thought last night had meant something. That our little chat had made us friends.
It hadn’t.
I nudged him subtly with my elbow, not looking at him. “Stick back.”
“What?”
“Don’t walk with me.”
He frowned, confused. “I thought—”
“Don’t.” I gritted my teeth. “For your own good.”
And it was.
As much as it might’ve been nice to have another human to talk to who didn’t look at me like a problem to be solved or a threat to be measured, I couldn’t risk it.
Not for me. I could take whatever came. Had been taking it my whole life.
But him? Standing near me would paint a target on his back, and I wasn’t carrying that on my conscience as well.
Sometimes I wished the thing would leave me entirely. Make this simpler.
Colin slowed automatically, letting a step open between us.
It was the right move. Then the press of bodies thickened, and he drifted back in again, instinct overruling sense.
He was new. He didn’t yet understand how visible closeness was in a place like this.
Or who watched me. All the fucking time.
I glanced sideways and caught him.
Ghost.
He stood on the opposite landing. Dressed.
Awake. Clocking everything. He slid his gaze from me to Colin and back again as if checking the edge on a blade.
Then he tipped his head. Interested. Learning now that I had a cellmate who wasn’t hard.
A bloke he could fold away without anyone asking questions.
Harris had been big. In for domestic violence.
We’d never spoken in the eight weeks we’d shared, but his size alone had done the job.
A buffer. A statement. A reason to think twice.
Now I didn’t have one.
Shit.
The stairs ahead were a choke point. The only way off the landing.
Everyone had to pass through them, whether headed for breakfast, the showers, or anywhere that wasn’t a cell.
Men funnelled towards them in loose, impatient knots.
Shoulders clipped. Elbows nudged. Voices rose and fell in jagged bursts, noise swelling, collapsing, swelling again.
The screws posted at the top and bottom of the wing barked at us to keep it moving. They watched the flow, not the faces. This stretch was about momentum, not detail. Which meant it was always where things happened. And where I couldn’t afford to miss a single shift in the room.
Someone clipped my shoulder and kept walking. No apology.
Across the gap, Ghost pushed off the rail.
I kept him in my periphery as he merged into the stream on his side of the wing, falling into step with the men heading towards the stairs opposite us. From there, it was a matter of timing. Both landings fed into the same stairwell. Everyone ended up in the same place. And he would be right by me.
Colin drifted closer again. I could feel his fear coming off him, thick and electric, like a living, breathing thing. So I stopped short before the stairwell entrance, forcing him to check his step.
“Walk behind me,” I mumbled. “Or not at all.”
He swallowed. “I just—”
“Behind,” I snapped.