"And now?"
"Now you want something. So play their fucking game."
I lean back. The chair is bolted to the floor and the chain between my wrists clicks against the table edge.
Kent watches me long enough to see the answer before I give it.
I'll behave.
I know what it looks like. Keeping my face neutral. Sitting through Kennedy's sessions and feeding him the breakthroughs he puts in his papers. Walking the transfer corridor with guards who crowd me and mouth off and believe they're safe, and letting them believe it. Letting men like Dane breathe. Letting the ones who talk about her keep their limbs.
All of it for a woman who heard me describe fourteen kills, asked a follow-up question, and told me to eat the toast like I was a fucking toddler.
The coldest plan I've ever made. And underneath it, the thing I can't plan around—I want her in the room. Not for the case. Not for the court. I want the sound she makes when she clicks the pen, and the way she crosses her ankles when she sits, and the coffee-and-coconut smell that fills my cell for an hour after she leaves.
"When does Kennedy schedule the evaluation?" I ask.
The corner of Kent's mouth twitches. "I'll make sure it's this week."
He stands. Buttons his jacket. Then he stops.
"Jude."
"What."
"Be a good boy and don't touch the staff."
"Yes, Dad, I heard you."
He leaves. The guard locks the door behind him.
I sit in the bolted chair with the fluorescent light humming overhead, the aluminum taste still coating my tongue and the bruise on my spine where someone's knee drove in, and I think about her footsteps. The ones that don't speed up when they reach my door.
Tomorrow I'll do everything they've spent three years trying to make me do. I'll comply. I'll cooperate. I'll be the patient Hudson claims he wants and watch the confusion spread across his face when I give him exactly what he's asked for.
That should scare them more than anything else I've done in here.
Chapter 5
Hope
Jude's attorney has read my report three times.
I've been watching him do it. He turns the pages with one hand, the other flat on the conference table, and he doesn't look up. Kent Ashton. Blond hair pulled back in a man bun. Six-one and broad enough that his suit—which probably costs more than my car—pulls tight across the shoulders. A viking in pinstripes. Ridiculously attractive. I'm a professional, not a nun.
Blue eyes that haven't met mine since he sat down.
Every other lawyer I've briefed skims the summary and asks a few questions. This one is reading every line. His thumb runs along the edge of the page, back and forth, and his face gives me nothing.
I have three items highlighted in yellow. The escort deviation. Dane's prior use-of-force flag. The punitive dose stack with no clinical note and no attending physician's signature.
The facility's incident report sits in his folder too. I've read it. One paragraph.Unprovoked attack on staff during routine transfer.No mention of the escort route change. No mention of Dane's disciplinary history. No mention that the patient'smonitoring sessions—the only independent oversight in the building—were suspended the same day.
My version is four pages. I don't excuse what happened in that corridor. He tore a man's shoulder from the socket. Shattered his hand. But I also noted what the sedation logs show: preemptive doses logged with no incidents to justify them, administered long enough that his tolerance has outrun the protocol. And after the corridor—a punitive stack with no rationale, no reassessment, and seven days of solitary confinement for a patient whose behavioral baseline I'd been documenting as stable.
Kent flips back to the highlighted sections. Reads them again.
"The facility's report and mine describe two different events," I say. "Same corridor. Same patient. One version has context. The other doesn't."
