11. Zero Leverage
Chapter eleven
Zero Leverage
— Chase —
Sweat gathered at the tip of Chase’s nose, hanging for a brief second before dropping onto the blistering steel plate of the industrial steam press. It hit the hot metal with a sharp hiss, evaporating instantly into the suffocating, humid air.
Chase gripped the heavy iron handle with both hands, throwing his body weight forward to lock the press down over a pile of damp, gray prison blankets.
The heat radiating off the machinery was absolute agony.
The temperature inside the penitentiary laundry facility hovered around a hundred and ten degrees.
The massive space was filled with the relentless, grinding noise of industrial washing drums and the rhythmic clack-hiss of the steam vents.
His chest felt tight, the air tasting of heavy bleach, cheap detergent, and the sour, baked-in smell of three hundred sweating men.
He pulled the release handle. The press hissed, expelling a cloud of scalding vapor that blasted him in the face.
Chase pulled his hands back, coughing into the crook of his elbow.
He looked down at his fingers. For his entire adult life, he had paid a professional in a high-end salon seventy dollars a week to buff his nails and soften his cuticles.
Now, the skin across his knuckles was raw, cracked, and covered in glossy red burn scars from brushing against the exposed steam pipes.
His fingernails were jagged and yellowed.
“Hey. Wall Street.”
The voice cut through the mechanical roar, low and dangerous.
Chase froze. His stomach hollowed out, a sudden, sharp rush of fear cutting through the oppressive heat of the room.
He didn’t turn around immediately. He kept his eyes on the damp blanket, trying to force his heart rate down, desperate to project the effortless authority he used to wield on the outside.
He turned slowly.
Reyes was standing less than two feet away.
He was a massive, heavily tattooed enforcer for one of the block’s dominant groups, serving thirty years for armed robbery.
Reyes didn’t carry himself with the loud, desperate posturing of the younger inmates.
He carried himself with a terrifying, relaxed stillness that made it perfectly clear exactly where he stood in the hierarchy.
Two other inmates stood a few paces behind Reyes, blocking the narrow aisle between the humming washing machines. The single corrections officer assigned to the floor was ‘conveniently’ looking at his phone at the far end of the facility, entirely oblivious to this corner of the room.
“Your labor pay cleared this morning,” Reyes said, his voice a gravelly rasp.
He stepped closer, the smell of stale sweat and hair grease overpowering the scent of bleach.
“Nineteen bucks for the month. That means tomorrow at the window, you buy three books of stamps, two jars of instant coffee, and four pouches of mackerel. You hand the bag to my guy in the yard. You can keep a bar of soap for yourself.”
Chase closed his mouth, the muscles in his face tensing.
That nineteen dollars was the only currency he had in the world.
Earning it required standing in this blistering heat for ten hours a day, six days a week.
Without those stamps and coffee, he had absolutely nothing to trade for extra food or basic protection.
He swallowed hard, fighting the instinct to cower. This was just a negotiation. He had spent his entire career in mid-level finance outsmarting aggressive, alpha-male executives. He knew how to leverage a room. He knew how to talk.
Chase straightened his posture, rolling his shoulders back, and slipped into his ‘client voice’.
“Listen, Reyes,” Chase said, keeping his tone smooth and measured. “I understand how the ecosystem in here works. I understand you need your cut. But taxing my basic commissary is short-sighted. It’s a low-yield return.”
Reyes tilted his head, his dark eyes narrowing slightly. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Chase said, stepping slightly away from the heat of the press, feeling a flicker of his old confidence return.
“You have people on the outside moving money for you, right? I handled portfolios worth tens of millions of dollars. I know corporate tax loopholes. I know how to wash cash through shell LLCs so the feds can’t touch it.
Let me keep my commissary, and I will structure a holding company for your people on the outside.
I can double whatever your crew is bringing in. ”
Chase waited for the realization to dawn on Reyes’s face. He waited for the recognition of his value. It was the same pitch he had used to secure his job, his lifestyle, and his marriage to Wren. I am smarter than you, and I can make you richer.
Reyes stared at him for three long seconds.
Then, Reyes moved.
It happened so fast Chase couldn’t even raise his hands. Reyes stepped inside his guard and drove a heavy, standard-issue work boot directly into the side of Chase’s knee.
The joint popped. Chase let out a strangled, breathless shriek as his leg buckled instantly. He collapsed onto the wet, slick concrete, his shoulder slamming hard against the base of the scalding iron press.
Before he could curl into a fetal position, Reyes grabbed a fistful of Chase’s sweat-soaked uniform collar, hauled him halfway up, and slammed him backward against the steel casing of the machine. The hot iron seared through the thin cotton of the uniform, burning into Chase’s shoulder blade.
Chase choked, thrashing wildly, but Reyes’s forearm snapped up and pinned his throat to the press.
“You think you’re smart, suit?” Reyes whispered, leaning his entire body weight into Chase’s windpipe. The two men behind Reyes casually stepped forward, hiding the sudden violence from the rest of the room. “You think you’re in a boardroom?”
“Please.” Chase gagged, clawing uselessly at Reyes’s thick arm. The edges of his vision began to dim. The pain in his knee was blinding, a sickening, radiating throb that made his stomach heave.
“I don’t give a shit about your shell companies,” Reyes sneered, his spit hitting Chase’s cheek.
“You’re not a broker anymore. You’re a broke piece of shit who tried to burn a pregnant woman alive because you were too lazy to earn a real paycheck.
And you were too stupid to get away with it.
You have zero leverage. You have zero value. You are a piggy bank.”
Reyes leaned in closer, the pressure on Chase’s throat cutting off his air completely.
“Tomorrow at the window. Stamps, coffee, and fish,” Reyes instructed, his voice dead and entirely void of emotion. “If you try to pitch me some Wall Street bullshit again, I’m going to put your head inside that steam press and pull the lever. Nod if we have an arrangement.”
Chase stared into the cold, dead eyes of a man who could not be manipulated, charmed, or gaslit. The desperate belief that his intellect still made him superior to the criminals around him finally broke.
He nodded, a pathetic, desperate jerk of his chin.
Reyes let go.
Chase slumped back to the floor in a heap, coughing violently, dragging the heavy, bleach-scented air into his burning lungs. He curled onto his side, gripping his injured knee, tears of humiliation leaking out of the corners of his eyes and mixing with the sweat on the floor.
Reyes stepped over him, his boot missing Chase’s face by an inch, and walked down the aisle with his men as if nothing had happened.
Chase lay on the floor, the vibration of the massive washing drums rattling his teeth.
The physical pain was agonizing, but the absolute humiliation kept him pinned there. He had nothing left to hide behind.
He closed his eyes, and the memory of the county courthouse slammed into him.
He remembered the exact moment his senior partner had called to inform him that Renata Vance’s civil injunction had frozen his accounts, causing his retainer check to bounce.
He remembered the exhausted, indifferent public defender sliding the plea paperwork across the metal table.
“They have the body-cam footage and the perjured testimony on the record,” the public defender had said, checking her watch. “If you put this in front of a jury, they will bury you under the jail. Take the twenty years, Mr. Powell.”
Chase hadn’t even fought it. He had stood in an open courtroom, wearing waist chains, and had been forced to allocute.
He had been forced to state, out loud, into a microphone, exactly what he had done.
Every time he tried to use his executive charm to minimize the crime, the judge had cut him off and forced him to repeat it bluntly.
Wren had done this.
She hadn’t just survived the fire. She had stayed hidden, watching him play the ‘grieving widower’ for the cameras, letting him build the case against himself.
She had waited until he committed federal perjury, waited until he was at the absolute peak of his arrogance, and then she had finished it.
She had taken his money, his freedom, and his identity.
“Hey! Powell!”
The sharp bark of the corrections officer echoed down the aisle.
Chase opened his eyes. The guard was standing ten feet away, tapping his baton against a laundry cart.
“Get off the floor and finish the blankets,” the guard ordered, already turning away. “You’re holding up the line.”
Chase squeezed his eyes shut, a fresh, hot tear slipping down his cheek. He had nineteen years and four months left on his sentence. He gritted his teeth, forced himself up on his good leg, and limped back to the steam press.
— Sienna —
The harsh, chemically treated fabric of the state-issued khaki uniform chafed against the back of Sienna’s neck.