CHAPTER 2 SHAWN—NEW FISH
Keys turning. Same sound that just closed a door on Jorge's whole night.
Shawn Wilson hasn't slept right in three weeks, and tonight isn't going to break the streak.
Intake was a single cell and a slot in a door—no cellmate, no conversation, just a caseworker's voice twice a day and his own thoughts doing laps.
Now the door swings open on something worse: a room built to keep him in it with a stranger he didn't get a vote on.
The CO doesn't bother with pleasantries. "New cellie, Delgado."
The man on the bottom bunk doesn't move.
Doesn't even open his eyes at first—like Shawn's not worth the effort of looking at yet.
Solid build. Forearms scarred up with old burns, ink gone soft at the edges the way it does after a few years.
Dark hair buzzed close. The kind of stillness that isn't calm, just controlled.
Shawn's had enough cellmates in his life—juvie, mostly, stuff that got him a caseworker instead of a real record—to know the difference between somebody who's dangerous and somebody who wants you to think they are. This one doesn't look like he's performing anything.
The door clangs shut behind him. Loud in a way it never stops being loud, no matter how many times you hear it.
"Top bunk's open," the man says. Doesn't look up from whatever he's staring at on the ceiling. "That's it. That's the tour."
"Cool." Shawn drops his bedroll on the mattress above without arguing. Arguing on night one is how you end up eating through a straw. "Got a name, or you just answer to Delgado?"
That gets him a look. Dark eyes, flat, assessing—the kind that catalogs height, weight, hands, exits, before it bothers with anything as pointless as a face.
"Jorge."
"Shawn."
Jorge doesn't offer anything back. Doesn't ask what Shawn's in for, which is either manners or a lack of interest so total it might as well be an insult. Shawn's not sure which he'd prefer.
"Just got moved over," Shawn says anyway, filling the silence because the silence is worse. "Three weeks in intake. Single cell the whole time."
Jorge doesn't react to that. Doesn't ask why the wait, why the transfer now, any of it. Shawn almost wishes he would—three weeks of nobody talking to him except through a slot in a door, and now somebody's in the room and still isn't talking.
He climbs up before he can say anything dumber. Lies back, knees drawn in, staring at a ceiling six feet closer than the one he had this morning.
Down the block a radio's running too much bass for the speaker it's coming out of.
Somebody's laughing too loud at something that probably isn't funny.
Under all of it, Shawn can feel Jorge's attention sitting in the room even with the man's eyes shut again—a weight that doesn't lift just because nobody's talking.
He's had cellmates size him up before. Usually it's fast—skinny white kid, no obvious muscle, worth exactly whatever's in his commissary or nothing at all. Shawn's built a whole survival kit out of making that read go fast and go boring. Don't linger. Don't matter.
This one doesn't read fast. This one just watches, and doesn't say what he sees.
Lights stay on another twenty minutes before the block goes to half-dark. Shawn lies there listening to a stranger breathe six feet below him, wondering what kind of man goes that quiet, that controlled, unless he's got a real good reason to.
He doesn't ask what the reason is.
He doesn't know yet that the reason has a face. That it looks like him, near enough—young, wiry, somebody's bad decision walking around on two legs.
He'll find that out soon enough.