Chapter 2
Jude
My fingers won't close.
I tell them to. They curl, slow, one at a time, each knuckle catching before it bends. By the time I have a fist the guard who shoved the tray through the slot is gone.
The dose doesn't sedate me. It disconnects my body from my brain.
I tell my hand to move and it gets there late, heavy, like the signal had to fight through something thick.
I reach for something and my arm follows a full second behind the thought.
Maybe two at peak load, right after the injection, when my tongue tastes like aluminum and my chest has to be reminded to breathe.
They think this stops me.
Their response to an alarm runs eleven seconds, door to door. The dose slows me by a few seconds. The math still works in my favor, but I let them believe otherwise. Eight years of patience. I can be patient longer.
The ceiling has cracks in it. I counted them before the injection and I'm counting them again because there's nothing else to do with a body that won't take orders.
Seventeen in the northeast quadrant. Twenty-three running parallel to the light fixture.
The drug pulls me under but I make myself look at each one, make myself stay present, because the alternative is letting them win.
Heavy. Thick. My chest rises and falls. I breathe because I make myself breathe.
The next morning the fog thins enough to sit up. My limbs feel like they've been poured from concrete but my hands close on command, for now that's enough.
Light footsteps in the corridor. Not a guard—too soft. Not Kennedy—there's no hesitation at my door, no fumbling with keys while working up the nerve to enter.
The lock cycles and she steps in, with Gage standing behind her.
Short. Dark ponytail. Blue eyes too light for her olive skin. She looks at me and nothing happens to her face.
I've watched people sit in the chair across from me since they locked me up.
Psychologists. Monitors. Students who lasted one visit and never came back.
They all go through it. The moment their brain catches up to what their body already knows.
Harlan, a young psychologist, sat down, met my eyes, went the color of old milk, and asked the guard to let him out.
He transferred out the next week. Every human being I've met has had that moment.
The part of them that knows what a predator looks like wakes up and they can't sit still anymore.
She pulls the chair closer to the wall, sits, crosses her ankles, then opens to a fresh page. She doesn't check the panic button on her belt or look at Gage for help.
"Morning. How are you feeling today?"
She sounds like she's making small talk in a break room. As if the man on this bed didn't break a guard's wrist eighteen hours ago.
I wait for a reaction. Breathing that speeds up despite every effort to control it. Hands that find reasons to grip the clipboard tighter.
Nothing.
She asks me four questions. Name, date, where I am, my comfort level. I give her single words because the dose still has my jaw on a leash. She writes them down.
"Okay. I'll let you rest. Looks like the drugs are still a bother for you."
She leaves at the same pace she came in. The lock clicks. I stare at the ceiling.
I give her a week.
She comes back the next day smelling like instant coffee and coconut lotion. First thing I've smelled in months that isn't bleach or sweat. I notice it more than I should.
She clicks her pen twice before she opens the clipboard.
"How are things today?"
"Fine."
"Good. I want to ask about your experience here. Your perspective on your current care, how the facility runs, anything you want on record. Sound okay?"
I push myself to sitting. The dose has loosened its grip enough that my arms obey on the first command.
They seem to be giving me a higher dose and it's taking me a few days to get through it.
"You want my perspective on current care.
" I keep my voice flat. "Want to start with the guard whose wrist I broke. "
Her pen stills for a second. Then: "Sure, go ahead."
"His name is probably on your clipboard somewhere. Officer Kyle. He reached across me for the restraint strap. Put his wrist right in front of me." I hold her gaze. "I don't think he understood how close that was. I'm not a friendly Labrador. They should know better by now. Kyle's a sloppy guard."
Her pen moves across the page.
"I took his wrist and bent it until it broke. He screamed." I pause. "He stopped after a few seconds. That's the part people don't expect. The silence after. That's the part I enjoy the most."
She turns the page. Her breathing hasn't changed.
"How long between the wrist injury and the restraint team arriving?" she asks.
She's asked about response time. Not why I did it. Not how it made me feel. Not whether I understand the consequences.
"Eleven seconds."
"Is that typical?"
"For this ward, yes."
She notes it. Looks up. "Thank you. That's helpful for my report." She checks her watch. "Anything else you want to flag about the incident?"
"No."
"Okay. I'll let you rest up, I don't want to overwhelm you in the first few days." She stands, tucks the clipboard under her arm. "See you tomorrow." At the door she turns. "Have you eaten today? Your tray's still full."
"I'm not hungry."
"Try the toast, at least. It's the only thing here that's hard to ruin."
She leaves.
I lie on the bed for a long time. I told her I broke a man's wrist and she didn't blink. I told her what the scream sounded like and her pen didn't stop.
Either she's the best actress I've ever encountered, or something in her is built different. She has no fear response.
By the third session, I push harder.
The fog has burned off by the time she comes in. My hands close on command. My head is clear. She might be faking but I want to be sure.
She sits and clicks her pen.
"Morning, Mr. Chadwick. Can you tell me if anyone's explained the rationale behind your current medication to you? Whether it's been reviewed?"
"Call me Jude. No one's explained anything. They don't need to. I know why they sedate me."
"Why's that?"
"Because they're scared of what will happen if they don't."
"Has the dosage changed since you arrived at Greenridge?"
"Yes. It always goes up. It takes me longer to recover each time."
"And no one's discussed that with you. No clinical review, no consent process."
I laugh, a bitter laugh. "No. I don't think they much care about my consent."
"Okay." She makes a note.
She is so fucking calm. Every word out of her mouth sounds the same.
Calm and steady. I've watched guards stammer through their briefings about me.
I've watched Kennedy fidget with his pen every time I look at him, that nervous clicking that tells me exactly how much I unsettle him.
This woman takes everything I give her and asks the next question.
"You've read my file."
She looks up from the clipboard. "I have."
"Then you know what I did to all the men I killed, all eighteen of them." I sit forward, elbows on my knees. "What the file doesn't say is that I sat across from every one of them first. Just like this. Had a little conversation. They were comfortable. Relaxed. They thought they were safe."
She doesn't look down at the page.
"The last psychologist they sent in here lasted ten seconds before he asked to leave.
The one before him made it through one session and put in a transfer request the same afternoon.
The one before her stopped coming and nobody replaced her for six months.
" I drop my voice. "I haven't decided what I want to do about you yet. "
She holds my gaze for a beat.
"Noted." She glances down at her clipboard. "Can you describe what the punitive dose feels like? The one they gave you after the incident with Officer Ryan?"
I just told her I killed eighteen men. That I haven't decided what to do about her. And she moved on to her next question.
I tell her. The lag between intention and hand. The aluminum taste. The ceiling smearing. She nods, asks whether the sedation produces the same symptoms or different ones. I tell her that too.
I'm talking more than I meant to. That hasn't happened in years.
"Thank you," she says when I finish. "No one's told me what the sedation actually feels like before. That helps."
She stands. Pauses at the door.
"The toast suggestion still stands. Tomorrow they're doing scrambled eggs and last time I saw them they looked like they'd been through a war."
She leaves.
I sit on the bed and replay it. Four sessions now. Everyone I've ever sat across from is terrified of me, for good reason. But she isn't.
The only other person who wasn't scared of me was my mother. She used to sit beside me in the back seat on long drives. Eight, nine years old. My father at the wheel, Elizabeth asleep against the window. My mother's hand on the leather between us. Close enough to feel the warmth. Never touching.
She knew what I was. Before the schools confirmed it with their tests and their careful language. Before the boarding school counselors started calling with concerns. She knew.
She never flinched. Never rearranged her face when I said something that sent other adults reaching for the phone. She'd just ask a follow-up question, as if it were anything a child might say. Why do you think you wanted to hurt him? What did it feel like when you did?
Elizabeth died at twelve. Cancer that moved faster than anyone expected. I stood at the funeral and felt the hollow where grief should go. My mother held my hand and I let her because she didn't expect me to cry.
My father started hitting her before I was old enough to stop it. By the time I was big enough, strong enough, I was six thousand miles away doing things for my country that I can't name in places that don't exist on official maps. She died before I got back.
A fall down the stairs, the report said. I read it in a tent that smelled like diesel. Sat there with the paper in my hands and nothing in my chest. My mother was dead. Frederick had killed her. I knew it before I finished reading. And I was on the other side of the world, unable to bring her back.
The diplomat's daughter died three days later. So did everyone else in that compound.
Two people in my life have looked at me without flinching. My mother, who understood what I was and never pulled away. And a monitor with a clipboard who asked me what the drugs feel like.
I don't want to kill Hope Turner.
I figure it out on the fifth day, after she's left and the cell smells like coconut lotion and burnt coffee.
I want to open her up. Not her body. Her head.
The place where the fear should live, the part that's broken or missing or built wrong.
I want to find what lets her sit in that chair, know what I am, and ask if I'm eating or how I slept.
It doesn't make sense.
This isn't tenderness. I'm not built for it. I just want to know why she isn't scared. Everyone else is. She's not. I need to know why.
The sixth session, she asks about my childhood.
I tell her about the schools—the testing, the assessments, the concerned professionals who recommended increasingly restrictive environments.
She doesn't flinch when I describe the boy I hurt at the third boarding school, the one who stopped walking right afterward.
"Did anyone explain what the assessments found?" she asks.
"They explained it to my parents. My father explained it to me with his belt."
Her pen pauses. Just for a second. "That's not in your file."
"No. It wouldn't be."
She makes a note. I watch her hand move across the page and wonder what she's writing. What version of me exists in those neat, left-slanting letters.
"Same time tomorrow?"
"I have a thing at ten, but I can probably move it."
"Was that a joke?"
"Was it funny?"
The corner of her mouth twitches. She doesn't let herself smile, but I see it. I'm still thinking about it after she leaves.
Three years they've drugged me to keep me from wanting anything. It worked. The chemical fog dulled everything—hunger, anger, the edge that used to keep me sharp. They buried me in sedation and thought they'd won.
But the dose doesn't do what they think it does.
It slows me down. Blurs the edges. Makes my body heavy and uncooperative. But it doesn't kill what's underneath. The wanting is still there.
It's been buried so long I almost forgot what it felt like.
I lie on the thin vinyl mattress after she leaves and I keep track of it: her voice when she says my name. The pen click before she opens the clipboard. The smell of her that stays in my cell for an hour after she's gone.
Fixation. That's what I tell myself. The need to understand her. I'm fixated on the puzzle she presents. The woman who doesn't react the way everyone else does.
But there's more to it than that, and I know it.
This has nothing to do with understanding.
I want her to come back. I want her to keep coming back.
I want to know what she sounds like when she's not being professional, what her face looks like when she laughs for real, what it would feel like to say her name out loud the way I keep saying it in my head.
The dose doesn't do what they think it does. It buries everything.
Not this.
Not her.