The thing about a secret this size is it doesn't sit still.

It moves. Changes shape. Grows teeth in the dark when you're not looking at it. I'd made the call on Friday. Saturday I'd lied to Danny's face about failing the job. And then I waited.

Three days of nothing.

Danny acted normal. Played cards in the common area. Laughed at the right moments. Smiled at guys walking past. That charming fucking smile, always in place, always warm. Like he hadn't murdered a pregnant woman and hidden the knife six months before.

I watched him from across the dayroom and felt sick every time he laughed.

Wednesday came. Library cart. Gibbins scrolling his phone. I pushed the cart tier by tier like always. Rico wanted an update on his love spell (working, he said — Michelle had called). Prophet Muhammad was still weighing the parole board working against his conscience. Old Man Petersen I skipped entirely. Told the guy at Cell 67 I had nothing new for him.

Business as usual. Routine. Normal.

Underneath it, my stomach was in knots.

The call was in. Crimestoppers had the location. Either they'd followed up or they hadn't. Either cops had found the knife or they hadn't. Either Danny was going down or my tip had disappeared into the bureaucratic void like a thousand other anonymous tips before it.

Nothing I could do but wait.

And try not to go crazy doing it.

Thursday morning. Count at six.

"Keyes, Danny. Cuff up."

Two guards I didn't recognize. Not the regular rotation. These guys had purpose in their stride — not the lazy shuffle of a Thursday morning escort. Full security. Hands already on cuffs before Danny even turned around.

The common area went quiet.

Danny looked up from his cards. Confused expression — genuine, from what I could see. Brow furrowed. Cards still in his hand. "What's this about?"

"On your feet. Hands in front."

"I didn't do anything—"

"On your feet. Now."

Danny stood. Slow. Hands up. Compliant. The confusion still there, real enough to fool anyone who didn't know what I knew.

But I knew.

I watched from the edge of the dayroom. Face neutral. Relaxed. Practiced.

The cuffs went on. Click. Click. Danny looked around — scanning the room like he was searching for someone. Anyone who might know what was happening. His eyes swept past me. Didn't stop. Didn't linger. Just another face in the crowd.

They marched him out. Full escort. Two guards, one on each side, hand-on-the-arm grip. Danny walked between them like a man walking to his own funeral and not quite understanding why.

The common area stayed quiet until they were gone. Then it erupted.

"What the fuck happened?"

"Who's that?"

"Danny Keyes. Someone said murder."

"Murder? Which murder?"

By lunch, the grapevine had it all. Or most of it. Double murder. Woman named Rochelle. Parkdale. Pregnant when she died. Anonymous tip led cops to the weapon — a knife, hidden in a balcony overhang one floor above her apartment. Prints matched. DNA matched. Body had been found weeks after the murder when the neighbors complained about the smell.

Life without parole. Pending.

Transferred to the violent offenders' facility eighty miles north. Gone. For good.

I ate my lunch and didn't taste it. Flaco sat across from me, watching.

"You hear?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Danny fucking Keyes." Flaco shook his head. "Guy was sitting right here two days ago playing cards."

"Yeah."

Flaco studied me. Those dark eyes, quick and observant. He was a good reader of people. Always had been.

"You know anything about this?"

"Nope." I pushed my tray away. "Just surprised as everyone. I gave gim back his money. I couldn’t make the leap like he wanted. That’s what was pissing me off last week. I’m not as good as I thought. Bugs me."

He didn't look convinced. But he let it drop.

The Kingsmen started talking on Friday.

Not loud. Not obvious. The way things always moved in here — quiet conversations in corners, coded language, glances that carried more weight than words. But I heard it. Because I was listening. Had been listening since Danny walked out in cuffs.

Someone inside had tipped off the cops. An anonymous call. Crimestoppers. That meant someone in Central North had information about Danny's crime and chose to hand it over.

Who does that? Who calls in one of their own?

Not the Brotherhood. Not directly — they had no reason to care about Danny's girlfriend. But Thor was Brotherhood-protected. And Thor did magic. And magic meant seeing things. Knowing things. And Danny had gone to see Thor.

The logic was prison logic. Simple. Tribal. Wrong, but airtight within its own framework.

Brotherhood took out one of ours. Through the system.

By Saturday afternoon, the tension was visible. Yard time. Kingsmen clustered tighter than usual. A few of them watching the Brotherhood weight pile with expressions that had shifted from the usual territorial wariness to something colder. More focused.

Flaco found me by the fence. His usual spot when he wanted to talk without being overheard.

"Kings are talking," he said. Low. Direct. "About Danny. About who snitched."

My stomach dropped. Kept my face neutral. "Yeah? What are they saying?"

"Brotherhood." Flaco didn't look at me when he said it. Kept his eyes on the yard. Casual posture. To anyone watching, two cellies having a normal conversation. "They think Brotherhood fed the tip. Through someone. Thor the witch being the obvious candidate."

"I didn't do it."

Flaco was quiet for a long moment. The yard moved around us. Kings on the basketball court. Brotherhood at the weights. The invisible lines drawn in concrete and blood.

"Okay," he finally said. Not an accusation. Not absolution. Just acknowledgment.

"Flaco—"

"I said okay, hermano." He turned to look at me. Face serious. "But be careful. Kingsmen are pissed. And when Kingsmen are pissed, they look for someone to bleed."

He walked away. Back toward his crew on the east side of the yard. I watched him go and tried not to think about what his silence meant.

The riot started on Tuesday.

2-Beta. Mixed territory — Latin Kings, Black Kingsmen, some Brotherhood members who'd earned the right to use shared common areas. The kind of space where invisible lines crossed and recrossed and sometimes — when the pressure got high enough — those lines became visible in blood.

I didn't see it start. Nobody on 3-Alpha saw it start. We heard it.

Shouting first. Then crashes — bodies hitting walls, chairs hitting concrete, the wet sound of fists connecting. Then the alarms. Electronic shriek cutting through the Pit, bouncing off four tiers of concrete and steel until it was everywhere, deafening.

3-Alpha locked down immediately. Guards slamming cell doors shut, radio chatter crackling — "All units to 2-Beta, all units to 2-Beta" — boots pounding on metal stairs somewhere below us.

Flaco dropped off the upper bunk. "What the fuck?"

"Riot." I was already at the cell door, looking through the observation slot. Could see the tier — guards running, inmates being shoved back into cells, the red emergency lights strobing.

"Where?"

"2-Beta."

Flaco's face went tight. "That's neutral territory."

"Kings and Kingsmen," I said. "Mixed."

"Brotherhood too." Flaco's jaw set. "This is about Danny."

He was right. We both knew it. The pressure had been building for a week. Danny's arrest. The anonymous tip. The suspicion landing on Brotherhood like a stone in still water, ripples spreading outward.

Someone on 2-Beta had sparked it. Maybe Brotherhood. Maybe Kingsmen. Didn't matter. The spark was just an excuse. The fuel had been building since Danny walked out in cuffs.

The riot lasted three hours.

We heard all of it from Cell 47. Shouting in English and Spanish. Crashes that shook the tier. Alarms cycling on and off. Guards' radios bleeding through the walls — fragments of orders, updates, numbers.

Then, around the two-hour mark, Werner appeared at our cell door.

"O'Reilly. Coming in."

Guard unlocked the door. Werner stepped in. Werner never stepped in. He summoned people to him. The fact that he was here, in our cell, meant something had changed.

"We need bodies," he said. No preamble. No pleasantries. "Brotherhood's taking a beating down there. Axel wants reinforcements."

"I'm not Brotherhood," I said. Reflex. Same deflection I'd been making for a year.

"You're Brotherhood-protected." Werner's eyes were hard. Blue and cold and completely serious. "Same thing when it matters. And it matters right now."

Flaco was on the upper bunk, watching. His face carefully blank.

Werner looked at him. "Kings guy. Stay put."

Flaco didn't move. Didn't respond. Just watched.

Werner looked back at me. "You in or you out, Thor. Right now."

If I said no — Brotherhood protection gone. Right when Kingsmen were actively hunting for someone to bleed. Which meant the next shower, the next yard time, the next moment I was vulnerable. Which in a lockdown situation meant every moment.

If I said yes — I fought for the Brotherhood. For real. Not protection tax, not magical services, not an arrangement of mutual convenience. I bled for them. And that changed everything.

No real choice.

"I'm in," I said.

Werner nodded once. "Let's go."

2-Beta was chaos.

Not the organized violence I'd seen in the yard — the calculated, purposeful brutality of faction politics. This was raw. Desperate. The kind of fighting that happens when months of tension finally crack open and everything spills out at once.

The common area on 2-Beta was a battlefield. Overturned tables. Broken chairs. Blood on the concrete — smeared, pooled, splattered. Inmates fighting in clusters. Guards trying to separate them, batons out, some of them getting hit in the crossfire.

Werner led a group of six Brotherhood members from 3-Alpha. I was at the back, heart hammering, hands shaking. Not from magic. From adrenaline and the simple animal knowledge that I was about to get hurt.

We hit the floor of 2-Beta and it was immediate. A Kingsman — big guy, shaved head, tattoos up his neck — came at Werner with a chair leg. Werner caught it, twisted it away, put the guy on the ground in three moves. Practiced. Efficient.

I didn't have Werner's experience. Didn't have years of prison fighting built into my muscle memory. But I had instinct. And I had rage — the cold, hard kind that came from carrying a secret that could kill me.

A Kingsman I didn't recognize swung at me. I ducked. Barely. His fist whistled past my ear. I came up inside his guard and hit him in the solar plexus. Same spot Brick had hit me in the shower, a year ago. The guy doubled over. I shoved him sideways. He went down.

Stayed down. Too winded to get back up fast.

I kept moving. Kept my back to a wall when I could. Kept my eyes on everything. The chaos was disorienting — noise, movement, pain everywhere — but somewhere underneath it, the survival instinct Flaco had taught me in my first week was doing its work. Eyes open. Always.

That's when I saw it.

Far corner of 2-Beta. Two Kingsmen had a Brotherhood enforcer on the ground. I didn't know his name — newer guy, maybe six months in, mid-twenties. White. Nordic tattoos, naturally. One of the lesser Brotherhood soldiers.

They were beating him badly. One held him down, knee on his chest. The other was hitting him in the face. Over and over. Not stopping. The guy on the ground had stopped fighting back. Blood streaming from his nose, his mouth. Eyes glazing.

Another ten seconds and they'd kill him.

I moved before I thought about it.

No magic. Too visible. Too many eyes. Too many people watching, even in the chaos. If I did something impossible here, every faction in Central North would know by morning.

So, I did it the stupid way. The human way.

I grabbed the guy doing the hitting from behind. Both arms around his neck. Squeezed. He was bigger than me — most guys were — but the angle was right and I put everything into it. He bucked, thrashed, tried to throw me off.

The other Kingsman — the one holding the Brotherhood guy down — turned. Saw me. Let go of his target and came at me.

His fist caught me in the jaw. Hard. Stars exploded. I felt my teeth crack together. The guy I was choking finally went limp — not unconscious, just enough. I let go, staggered sideways.

The second Kingsman was already swinging again. I blocked it with my forearm — pain shooting up to my shoulder — and countered with an elbow to his face. Felt cartilage crunch. He stumbled back, blood pouring from his nose.

Werner appeared out of nowhere. Put the bleeding Kingsman on the ground with one efficient move. A backhand that snapped the guy's head sideways. Down and done.

The Brotherhood enforcer on the ground was trying to get up. I grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet. He swayed. Blood in his eyes. But standing. Alive.

"You good?" I asked.

He blinked at me. Didn't know my name. Didn't matter. He nodded.

Werner looked at me. Something in his expression I hadn't seen before. Not the usual calculating assessment. Something closer to respect.

"Good work," he said. Short. Simple.

Then the guards hit us like a wave — riot response team, full gear, batons and shields — and everything dissolved into the chaos of being separated, sorted, pushed back to our tiers.

Warden Hutchins came on the PA at 6 PM.

"Attention all tiers. This facility is now under lockdown, effective immediately. All inmates will remain in their cells for twenty-three hours per day until further notice. Yard time will rotate, one tier at a time, sixty minutes maximum. Commissary and all programs are suspended. This order will remain in effect until I am satisfied that order has been restored. Anyone found outside their cell during restricted hours will face disciplinary action. That is all."

Groans echoed through 3-Alpha. Someone cursed in Spanish. Someone else slammed a fist against their cell door.

Two weeks, minimum. Maybe longer.

I was back in Cell 47. Flaco on the upper bunk. My jaw was swelling. Knuckles on my right hand were split and bloody. I cleaned them in the sink. Cold water. Stung like hell.

Flaco watched me from above. Didn't say anything for a while.

"You fought for them," he finally said.

Not a question.

"Yeah."

"My people were on the other side."

"I know."

Silence. The tier settling into lockdown quiet — quieter than normal, the sound of a place holding its breath.

"You saved someone's life down there," Flaco said. "I heard about it already. Word travels fast."

"Yeah."

"Brotherhood's gonna remember that."

"Yeah."

More silence. Flaco shifted on the upper bunk. Springs creaked.

"You know that changes things," he said.

I knew. Fighting alongside Brotherhood wasn't a transaction anymore. It was a commitment. Blood commitment. The kind that stuck.

"I didn't have a choice," I said.

"Everyone's got a choice, esse." His voice was quiet. Not angry. Just tired. "You just don't always like the options."

We didn't talk about it anymore that night. The lockdown pressed in around us — 6×10 feet, two men, 23 hours a day. The silence between us wasn't hostile. Just heavy. Like something had shifted and neither of us knew how to name it yet.

Day 5 of lockdown.

Guard came to Cell 47 at 8 AM. Not the usual rotation. This guy had paperwork.

"Diaz. Carlos Diaz?"

Flaco dropped down from the upper bunk. "Yeah?"

"You're being sprung. Early release order. Good behavior, overcrowding reduction." The guard held out the paperwork. "Pack your shit. You've got thirty minutes."

Flaco stared at him. "What? I got three months left."

"Good behavior credit plus overcrowding policy. It's all in the paperwork." The guard shrugged. "Take it or leave it, Diaz. Your call."

Nobody was stupid enough to leave it.

"I'll take it," Flaco said.

The guard left. Flaco stood there holding the paperwork, looking at it like it was written in a language he didn't speak.

Then he looked at me.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"Thirty minutes," I said.

"Yeah." He set the paperwork down on the bunk. Started gathering his stuff. Didn't have much. A few books. The deck of cards — dog-eared, worn smooth from a year of nervous shuffling. Some commissary items. A photo of his mother that he kept face-down on the shelf.

I helped. Handed him things. Folded clothes that didn't need folding. Filled the silence with small tasks because neither of us wanted to be the one to start talking about what was actually happening.

Flaco was leaving. Just like that. Out the door. Back to the world. Back to Jane-Finch and his mother and whatever came next.

And I was staying. Twenty-three hours a day in this box. Alone now. With a secret that could get me killed and a reputation that was tightening around me like a fist.

"You're gonna be alright, Thor," Flaco said. He was at the door now. Property box in one hand, the deck of cards tucked into his waistband. He looked at me the way he had on my first night — that same assessing warmth, that older brother energy that had kept me alive through the worst weeks of my life.

"You got the magic. Use it smart."

"Yeah."

"And stay away from the gangs." A pause. Something behind his eyes I couldn't quite read. "They'll eat you. Even the ones that say they're protecting you."

"I know."

"Do you?" He held my gaze. Steady. Serious. "Because from where I'm standing, you just bled for them. And now you're alone in this cell and they're gonna come back for more. They always do."

I didn't have an answer for that.

"Don't try," Flaco said. "Try to stay smart, try to keep your principles, try to not let this place turn you into something you're not. Don't try. Do it. Because trying means you're still deciding. And you can't afford to keep deciding in here. You gotta know."

"I know," I said again. Quieter this time.

Flaco nodded. Then he did something he'd never done before — stepped forward and hugged me. Quick. Hard. One arm around my shoulders, grip tight, then let go.

Rare in prison. Meaningful because of it.

"Take care of yourself, Thor." He used my real name again. Not hermano. Not pescado. Thor. Like it meant something.

Then he turned and walked out. Didn't look back.

I understood why. If he looked back, he'd cry. And crying in prison — even walking out of prison, even at the door — was something you didn't do.

The cell door closed behind him.

Cell 47 was quiet.

Just me.

First night alone was the loudest silence I'd ever heard.

No Flaco's snoring. No cards shuffling. No Spanish cursing when he stubbed his toe on the bunk frame in the dark. No "you okay, hermano?" after a bad night.

Just the sounds of the tier. Doors. Someone crying somewhere. The distant echo of the Pit.

I lay on the lower bunk and stared at the underside of the upper bunk — empty now. Flaco's mattress, bare. His spot. Gone.

He was the closest thing to a friend I'd had in here. Real friend. Not a client. Not an alliance of convenience. Someone who'd watched my back because he gave a damn, not because I was useful.

And now he was gone. Back to the world. Back to everything I couldn't have.

The loneliness hit harder than I expected. Settled into my chest like a stone.

But underneath it — quieter, but there — something else. An opportunity.

Twenty-three hours a day. Nothing to do. No clients to serve, no library cart, no yard time politics. Just me and the cell and the silence.

Time to practice.

I'd been learning magic in stolen moments — lights out, after count, between shifts. An hour here. Thirty minutes there. Never enough. Never uninterrupted.

Now I had nothing but time.

I closed my eyes. Breathed. Let the silence settle around me like a shroud.

And started planning what I was going to learn.