Chapter Eleven Razor
Chapter eleven
Razor
Seg ran on a schedule designed to erase you.
Lights snapped on too early to call it morning, too harsh to pretend it was anything else.
Breakfast came through the hatch without a word.
Lukewarm porridge in a plastic bowl. One slice of bread tasting of cardboard and burnt plastic.
I ate it anyway. Not eating gave them another reason to watch me closer, write me up and take something else away.
Then nothing.
Hours of it.
Fuck knew how many days crawled past since Tricky had walked out and left me with something I didn’t trust. Hope was a liability in here.
I could’ve marked the wall, kept count, but I’d seen how that ended for some poor bastard before me.
Scratches gone crooked. Lines turning into spirals. Same as the bloke who’d made them.
So I didn’t count.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling instead, tracing cracks in the paint as if they might spell something out if I looked long enough.
My ribs throbbed in a steady, dull rhythm.
Less knife, more reminder. Shoulder still wrong.
Knuckles stiff, skin tight and healing ugly.
I flexed my fingers, feeling the pull, the protest.
“Days, not weeks.”
His voice kept slipping into the silence whether I wanted it or not.
I’d played the meeting over and over, because what the fuck else was there to do in here?
The way he looked when they brought me in.
The way he’d stayed, fought, made them bring me up.
When he’d cleaned my wounds and let me, for the briefest moment, touch him.
What he must’ve done on the outside to make that happen.
To put himself opposite me, alone, and say he’d act for me.
That took something.
Bravery. Or stupidity.
Either way, it took balls.
And yeah…when I thought about him too long, the inevitable happened.
I was glad of the solitude then. Though it wasn’t helping my hand to heal.
The hatch rattled open again. Water. Pills.
I didn’t take them. Pain kept me present.
Reminded me where I was and why keeping my head straight mattered.
So I did a few press-ups until my shoulder protested.
Then moved onto squats until my legs burnt.
Finished by shadowboxing the air, pulling punches before they landed.
I wasn’t trying to win anything. I was reminding my body it still belonged to me.
By the time they took me out for yard, the sky was the colour of dirty tin.
The yard was a cage. Concrete underfoot. Wire overhead. One officer watching from a distance as if I might suddenly sprout wings. I stood still for most of it, head tipped back, breathing cold air for it to scrub me clean.
“Think of the lake.”
I could see it if I tried. The water flat and grey, stretching out far enough for me to stop buzzing. Tricky on the bank, skin shiny and gold, pretending he wasn’t watching me as if I’d disappear if he blinked. Pretending I wasn’t the sort of man who could sink himself if left alone too long.
That memory was the only clean one I had.
Everything else was tainted. Grit under fingernails, Hackney asphalt, blood on concrete, a long trail of stupid decisions I’d convinced myself were inevitable. Even my childhood was threaded through with it. Noise. Violence. No way out.
But the lake…
That weekend in the Chilterns, wherever the fuck that was, had been different. Quiet. Space. A stillness I’d never known how to ask for, offered anyway by someone who’d known I needed it before even I knew myself.
Thing is, I’d got no frame of reference. No blueprint. No family dynamics to tell me what love looks like. The only role models I had growing up were hard men on the street, flashing cash and gear, telling me if I did what they said I’d have everything they had.
Only they never actually had any of it.
The cars were hired. The phones were nicked. The clothes lifted off someone else’s back. They made it look legitimate. Earned. But it was all smoke and mirrors and bullshit, and by the time I realised I was in too deep to walk away clean.
So yeah. Knowing what love felt like? That wasn’t something I understood. Not in any way that counted. But there’s a lot of time to think in segregation. And sometimes, when the noise finally drops away, I could see the lies for what they were. And the quiet things for what they could be.
If I hadn’t fucked it all up.
But my hour pondering that in the breeze was up, and it was back in the box.
I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, but sleep wouldn’t come. It kept looping instead. The realisation settling heavier every time.
This had been a setup.
Cormac had known. Maybe someone had clocked me easing back.
Maybe something I’d said, or hadn’t done, had reached him sideways and curdled into suspicion.
Either way, he’d guessed I wanted out and that maybe I was a liability because of that.
Pretty Poison had never been about expansion.
It had been a test. Give me something traceable.
Tie it to my hands. Then organise a drop and see whether I carried it like a good soldier or flinched.
If I’d walked in with the real thing, clean of him and scrubbed of ownership, and the feds turning up had genuinely blindsided everyone, I’d still be here. No question about that. But I’d be here with his blessing.
Backed. Protected.
Ghost wouldn’t be circling. No one would.
Because everyone would know I’d gone down loyal.
That I’d taken the hit the way I was supposed to.
Even if Cormac himself had been the intelligence, even if the whole thing had been a loyalty test dressed up as bad luck, the outcome would’ve been the same.
Money on my books. Goods coming in through the right hands.
A defence team paid for and waiting, ready to get me to that Spanish villa.
Not the kind found on legal aid lists, but the kind he’d bought years ago for men like me — men who did what they were told and didn’t flinch when the net closed.
But that wasn’t what was happening.
Cause I hadn’t done what I’d been expected to.
I’d taken an empty duffel into that warehouse instead.
Filled with dead weight and empty bags. I’d cleaned every line back to me and the poison because I wasn’t planning to sell it.
I’d been planning to walk. I’d been laying the groundwork quietly, carefully, making sure there was nothing left that could stick once I stepped away.
The plan had been simple. If the feds didn’t turn up, if the buyers took the bag, I’d have taken the money straight back to Cormac and told him I wanted out.
Clean. Final. Cash in hand, leverage on my side.
Proof I could still deliver and proof I didn’t want to anymore.
Plus, he’d have both the poison to sell and the money to bargain with.
It wasn’t loyalty. It was a trade.
And if the feds did turn up, there’d be nothing on me. No product. No possession. Just presence and a name. Not enough to bury me, not enough to justify this.
I’d gambled on that.
On being careful enough. Being two steps ahead. The idea that restraint might count for something.
I’d been wrong.
Cormac hadn’t wanted restraint. He’d wanted obedience.
And the moment I didn’t bring what he expected, the moment I proved I was backing away, I’d failed the only test that mattered.
But it hadn’t stopped with him. He had voices in higher places than I’d accounted for.
People who didn’t get their hands dirty, who didn’t need to.
People who could offer him something better than loyalty in exchange for sacrificing me.
Clean lines, untouched networks, a future that stayed intact.
I’d been the price.
A problem removed.
A lesson delivered.
“You should know him in your line of work.”
And if all of that was true, then being on the outside was just as dangerous as being in here.
Maybe more. Not just for me, either. For anyone connected to me.
Because the second they decided I might talk, that I might trade information instead of quietly taking the fall for the drugs, for Kyan, they’d stop hedging.
They’d go all in. Silence the risk. Tie it off clean.
That was how this ended if I stayed boxed like this. Or if I walked free without protection.
Either way, the people I cared about were in danger.
I needed out.
And if I got out, I needed someone I could trust. Someone who wasn’t owned, or scared, or already bought.
I dragged a hand over my face.
Who the fuck did I trust anymore?
Normally, it would be Tyler. My second had been loyal to me since day one.
But Cormac had sorted that, hadn’t he? Made me deliver a lesson so hard to him that his loyalty would drift, especially if Cormac dangled him my position in front of him.
Tyler would grab that with both hands. He’d always wanted it.
And as I hadn’t heard from him, via letters or any of the other less legal routes into the walls, I had to assume he wasn’t mine anymore.
I was on my feet before I’d fully decided and banged on the door. Once. Twice. Again. It took a while. Everything in seg took a while. Eventually footsteps, then the hatch slid open, and a guard poked his head in. “What?”
“I need a phone call.”
He looked at me as if I’d asked for a fucking massage. “You’re in seg.”
“I know.” I swallowed. “Cheers for the location pin. It’s legal-related.”
That made him pause. “Wait there.”
“Where the fuck else am I gonna wait?”
The hatch slammed shut. Somewhere down the line, he’d ask someone who’d ask someone else. No one made a decision in here unless it’d been passed along like a rumour and signed off by someone who’d never once stood inside these walls.
I paced. Three steps. Turn. Three steps back. My shoulder screamed. I ignored it.
Eventually, the door unlocked. “You get one call.”