Chapter 2
Chapter two
Bleach. That's the first thing. And underneath it, copper — old, scrubbed, not quite gone.
Sven walks ahead of me.
The hallway is narrow. Fluorescent lights, half of them buzzing. Concrete floor with a rubber coating that squeaks under my shoes.
Every door in this hallway is reinforced. Not wood with a lock — metal, heavy gauge, bolts on the outside. Steel frames. Recessed hinges, which means they can't be popped. I know this because I've popped non-recessed hinges in two facilities and a group home in Tacoma.
These doors are designed to keep something in rooms that's trying very hard to get out.
And the scratch marks.
Long, deep grooves in the metal, clustered around the bolt plates. Not fingernail scratches — something harder, sharper, dragged with force. Some painted over. Some not. The unpainted ones are newer.
I stop walking.
"Keep moving," Sven says without turning.
"What made those marks?"
"Keep moving."
I keep moving. I also keep looking. The scratches aren't just on the doors. They're on the walls near the floor, on the rubber baseboards, on the edge of a window frame.
We pass an open door. Small room. Single bed, bolted to the floor. No sheets. A mattress that looks new, and underneath the new-mattress smell, that copper tang again. Stronger. A stain on the wall near the headboard.
"That's not yours," Sven says. He's stopped at a door at the end of the hall. "This is."
Same layout. Bed, bolted. Desk, bolted. A narrow window set high — too high to see out of from the bed.
On the bed: folded clothes. Dark red. Shirt, pants, socks. Heavy fabric — not comfortable, functional. Next to them, black rubber-soled boots. Next to that, a clear plastic bag with a toothbrush, soap, and a comb.
That's it.
"Change," Sven says. "Leave your current clothing on the bed. It will be collected."
I've been stripped of my clothes in intake before. Every facility does it. Take away what someone came in with, give them what you want them to wear, and you've already won the first negotiation without saying a word.
"Turn around," I say.
His expression doesn't change. "You have four minutes. I'll be outside the door." He steps out. The door stays cracked. Enough to hear me.
I change fast. The red clothes fit close enough. Long-sleeved shirt, high-necked, thick. Pants with no pockets, no drawstring — elastic waist. Nothing I could use as a weapon. These were designed by someone who spent time thinking about what a person in crisis might do with a drawstring.
The boots are good. Sturdy. Warm. The only piece of this that was chosen for my benefit.
I look down at myself. Red. Head to toe.
I look like a warning sign.
"Done," I say.
Sven opens the door. Eyes sweep me once — checking compliance, not checking me out. Nods.
"Rules. One: you don't leave this wing without me or authorized escort. Two: no physical contact with any resident. Three: alarm sounds, you get on the floor, hands behind your head. Don't move until you're told."
He delivers all three like a man reading terms and conditions. I nod, file them, and follow him toward lunch.
The cafeteria is at the end of the hall through double doors that require Sven's thumbprint.
The room is bigger than I expected. Long metal tables welded to the floor. Benches instead of chairs, also welded. Food in heavy plastic bowls.
There are maybe twelve guys in here. All in red.
No girls.
In every facility I've been in, there were always girls. Not a lot. The ratio was usually bad. But there were always a few. Someone to nod at in the hall. Someone who understood the specific math you do when you're outnumbered by people bigger than you.
Here, nobody. I'm it.
Sven walks me to a table at the far end. One bowl of soup, a roll, a protein bar, a cup of water.
The room is watching me. Not all of them — some are eating, some are staring at their tables like it's the only safe place to look. But enough of them are watching that I feel it on my skin.
It's not the way men usually look at me. I know that look. Inventory. What can I take. What will she do if I try.
This is different. Some look confused. Some shift in their seats like they can't get comfortable. One — big, maybe twenty, tattoos climbing his neck — inhales deeply when I pass and his whole body goes rigid. Jaw clenches. Fingers curl into the metal bench and I hear the stress on the weld points.
Sven's hand closes on my upper arm. Steers me to the far table without breaking stride.
"Sit. Eat. Don't look at them."
"Why?"
"Because your attention is a variable I haven't controlled for yet."
That's the most honest thing he's said to me. And the most terrifying.
I eat. I watch from my periphery because I've never once done what I was told.
The whispers start about three minutes in. Low voices, mouths barely moving, eyes cutting toward me and away. I catch fragments. New transfer. Girl. Red House. And then, from a table near the middle — a voice that doesn't bother to whisper.
"That's her? That's murder girl?"
Sven's head turns. Fast. The room goes quiet.
"Eat your food, Torres," Sven says.
Torres — stocky, dark-haired, built like he's been fighting since he could make a fist — looks at Sven. Looks at me. Calculates odds. Decides against them.
He eats his food.
But the word's out. Murder girl. They know about the file, the red tag, the body.
In juvie, a reputation like that buys either fear or challenge.
Here it buys something I can't read. Torres didn't say it mocking.
He said it like murder was a category and I'd just been sorted into it alongside the rest of them.
Like they all had a body in their file.
Sven walks me back through a different route. More doors. More scratch marks.
"Panel review is in six weeks," he says. "Your placement is temporary until the Review Panel evaluates your case. Until then you stay Red. You follow my rules. You attend programming when told. You eat when told. You sleep when told."
"And if I don't?"
He stops. Turns. Looks down at me — and it's a long way down from six-foot-whatever to five-foot-nothing.
"Then I will make you. And I'd prefer not to. Not because I care about your comfort. Because the incident report takes forty-five minutes and I have better things to do."
I believe him. Sven isn't performing authority the way COs in juvie do. He's telling me what will happen with the same energy someone uses to tell you the stove is hot. Not a threat. Physics.
The hallway opens into a wider space — a junction where Red House connects to something else. Windows here, real ones. Through them, the enclosed yard. The one with the tall fencing I saw from the van.
There's someone in it.
And my entire body notices before my brain catches up.
He's pacing the fence line — not walking, pacing, the deliberate repetitive circuit of something caged.
Long stride, fluid, almost lazy, his body eating up the distance with an ease that comes from being built specifically to cover ground.
He's tall and lean in a way that isn't thin.
It's the leanness of something that has been carved down to exactly what it needs to be. No excess. No waste.
His shirt is too small, riding up on one side, and I can see the cut of his stomach — defined, hard, lines that don't come from a gym. Survival, maybe. Starvation, maybe. My mouth goes dry looking at them.
That's — not ideal. That is not an ideal response to a man pacing a cage in a containment facility.
His hair is dark and too long, falling across his face in tangles that say nobody's touched him in a long time and he'd take the hand off anyone who tried.
When he turns, I get the jaw. The cheekbones.
A mouth that has no business being on a face that hard — full, soft-looking, the one part of him that isn't sharp edges and angles.
He is, objectively and inconveniently, the most dangerous-looking beautiful person I have ever seen. And no one has ever made my thighs press together from fifty feet away.
Noted. Moving on.
I don't move on.
He reaches the far end. Turns again.
His head comes up.
He's still too far away for me to see his eyes clearly, but I feel the moment his attention finds me.
It's physical. A pressure behind my sternum — heavy, specific, directional, like something reached across fifty feet of cold air and pressed a thumb into the center of my chest. Heat floods my body, races up my arms, hits the back of my neck.
My breath catches. My fingers curl against my palms.
He stops pacing.
He was mid-stride. Heading east. And he stopped, dead, like someone cut his strings. His whole body reorients toward the window — toward me — and he goes still in a way that isn't calm. It's the stillness of something that just found what it was looking for.
A heat pulses in my left wrist and I grab it instinctively.
Sven's hand closes on my arm. Hard. Hard enough that I stumble.
"Don't." One word. And the voice behind it isn't angry or commanding. It's afraid.
He pulls me away from the window. I let him because my legs have opinions about where they want to go and those opinions don't align with my survival instincts.
"Who is that?"
"Nobody you need to know."
"He stopped. He was pacing and he stopped when he —"
"I know what he did." Sven's grip is closer to a restraint hold than a guide. "You will not approach that resident. If you see him in common areas, you move the opposite direction. Not a suggestion."
Four rules now. The fourth is the only one that scared him enough to touch me to enforce it.
"What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing that concerns you."
"Then why did he stop?"
Sven doesn't answer. He walks me back. His hand doesn't leave my arm until my door is in front of me and the bolt is ready to turn.
"Hey. Murder girl."
The voice comes from down the hallway. Behind Sven's back, which means whoever's talking has no self-preservation instinct whatsoever.
Sven's grip tightens. But he doesn't shut it down. Which tells me this one is tolerated, if not exactly allowed.
The guy is leaning against the wall about ten feet past my door. Arms crossed. One foot kicked up behind him. A posture I recognize because I've used it — casual on the outside, coiled underneath.
He's my age. Maybe a year older. Brown skin, sharp jaw, close-cropped hair. Lean muscles. Face that's objectively good-looking and absolutely knows it — dark eyes. A mouth I look at a beat too long and he catches me doing it.
He's assessing me the same way I'm assessing him. Threat level. Entertainment value. And then his gaze drops — quick, barely a flicker — down and back up. A look that says I see you and I'm letting you catch me looking.
"Torres already called dibs on the nickname," I say. "You'll have to get creative."
His smirk widens. Not warm. Interested.
"I'm Leo."
"I don't care."
"You will." He looks at Sven. "Relax, big guy. I'm ten feet away and fully clothed."
Sven's jaw works. "Two minutes."
"I only need one." Leo looks back at me. Those dark eyes are sharp — sharper than the smirk suggests, calculating behind the performance. "You're the first girl they've ever brought in here. You know that, right?"
"I figured it out when nobody in the cafeteria could remember how to eat."
"Yeah, that's not just because you're hot." He says it matter-of-fact. An observation. "Torres nearly ripped his bench out of the floor when you walked past. You notice that?"
"Hard to miss."
"Good. Keep noticing." His eyes cut to Sven, who's radiating the specific energy of a man whose two-minute clock is ticking. Leo pushes off the wall. Rolls his shoulders. The performance slides back on like a jacket.
"Welcome to the freak show."
He saunters off. Sven watches him go with an expression I can't quite read.
The bolt turns behind me.
I sit on the bed. Back against the wall. Knees up.
I run the inventory.
Feral Academy. Red House. High containment. No girls, all in red. A man in the yard who paces for hours and stopped when he saw me. A boy named Leo who talks like everything's a joke and watches like nothing is.
Both of them are unreasonably attractive and I noticed within an hour of arriving at a facility with electrified fences. My priorities are a mess.
Six weeks until the Review Panel.
Six weeks in a building where the doors are reinforced from the outside and the scratch marks are everywhere.
I press my thumb into my left wrist. That weird heat hasn't gone away. Great, I already have cooties from this place.