Page 29 of Infamous

Ironside’s mouth twitches - half amusement, half approval. He hides his tells well. But not well enough. He wears his power like a second skin. I wear mine like a haunting.

“Why the interest in the kid?” I ask. “Don’t tell me you got yourself thrown in here just to do a welfare check.”

He studies me. “You don’t talk like the men in here.”

“That’s because I’m not like the men in here.”

“Fourteen women would say otherwise.”

I laugh, low and sharp. The wolves on the yard glance over, then look away again. No one interrupts Ghost.

“Tell me, Ironside,” I say, folding my arms. “Do you really believe what you read? Or do you know better than to trust the stories they sell the sheep?”

Something shifts in his expression - small, but real.

“Everyone’s guilty of something.”

“No.” I meet his eyes, then look back at the kid. “Not the kid.”

Understanding passes between us. Not pity. Not belief. Just two men who’ve both buried truth under a mountain of lies.

The siren blares. Lockdown. The yard begins to empty. Guards shout our names.

Neither of us moves.

We stand there, watching each other through the noise, until the last of the crowd is gone and the silence swallows the yard whole.

In prison,hope is a poison.

It seeps into the cracks, kills men from the inside out. You see it in their eyes - the ones waiting for parole, for appeals that never come. They die faster than lifers because hope strangles slower than any shiv.

I cut that rope years ago. No appeals. No mercy. Just time. Time thick as cement, pressing on your lungs until you forget how to breathe. Until you’re a ghost long before you’re dead.

And then Ironside walks up and dangles something I haven’t tasted in a decade.

A chance.

He doesn’t posture. Doesn’t waste words. He just lays it out between us - clean, sharp, lethal.

“There’s a transfer coming,” he says, voice low. “I need him taken care of.”

I don’t blink. The cage doesn’t change what you are; it just strips the lie away.

He studies me like a gambler sliding his last chip across the table. Confident. Dangerous.

“What makes you think I’m your man?”

“Because you’ve got nothing to lose,” he says. “And everything to gain.”

A slow grin cuts through me. “Such as?”

He drops it like a match into gasoline.

“A way out.”

Freedom. A word I buried long ago.

Ironside says it like it’s already written.