I sat down at a card table in the first building before I started. Found a chair, positioned it facing the door, and waited for them to come to me. When they did, I handled them. When they stopped coming, I went looking. Every room after that, I cleared from a seated position when I could find a chair. Sitting changed the angles, forced targets to come down to my level or stay in predictable sight lines. It told them I had all the time in the world. They had none.
The team pulled me out. Two of them holding my arms while the third checked my vitals, trying to decide if I was injured or in shock or just done. I wasn't either. I was finished, and there was no one left to kill, and the girl's body was still cooling in the third room, and none of it touched me.
The report ran forty-seven pages. Documentation that ends careers and starts court-martials and puts men in military prisons for the rest of their natural lives. It never saw a courtroom.
The Chadwick name carries enough weight to turn official reports into sealed files and disciplinary hearings into medical discharges. My father—Frederick, who I wouldn't kill for another eight years—made phone calls. Moved money. Reminded certain people that the family's political donations had been generous and could become less so.
Honorable discharge, medical grounds. Sealed record. Subject demonstrates symptoms consistent with combat-related psychological trauma.
The official story is that I broke under stress. That the horrors of war damaged my mind. That I'm a victim of my service rather than what the government armed, trained, and lost control of.
The people who read the full report before it was buried are still out there. Forty-seven pages that describe in clinical detail what I can do when nobody stops me. Kent knows about the record. One of the threats we plan around, a leverage point that could surface if the wrong person decides I'm worth more exposed than contained. A problem for later, and Kent has a plan for it.
I surface. Footsteps in the corridor, heavy and even. I know that cadence anywhere.
The slot opens.
Gage's face appears in the narrow rectangle.
"You alive in there?"
"Disappointingly."
His eyes move over what he can see of me, the position of my body on the mattress, the way my hands rest at my sides, the IV line running from my arm. He's checking for injury, for deterioration, for any sign I've given up the fight.
"Rick's out," he says low. "Medical leave while they figure out what to do with him. Both arms, the leg. He's looking at six months of physical therapy minimum."
"Shame."
The word comes out flat, but the satisfaction underneath is cold and clean. Rick will never work security again. Not with the nerve damage I left in those joints, not with the way his hands will shake every time he reaches for restraints.
"That why you did it?" Gage says. "What he said about Hope."
I consider the question. Consider lying, or deflecting, or giving him the answer that would make this conversation simpler. But Gage has been where I've been, not the same wars, not the same missions, but the same understanding of what a man becomes when the rules fall away.
"Yes, partially."
"What's the other part?"
"Sooner or later I was going to break him. What he said about her just made it sooner."
The slot closes, and his footsteps fade down the corridor. The chemicals drag me back under and the cages keep coming.
The prisons came after they caught me. Eighteen dead over six years, and Frederick was the last. The trial made national news, and then the prisons started. General population lasted a week. I killed inmates. They moved me to solitary. I killed guards. They transferred me. Same result, every facility.
They kept moving me. Every time I adapted, every time the guards started relaxing around me, transfer paperwork appeared and I'd be on a bus to a new facility. Leavenworth had the best food and the worst security rotation. Pueblo had a guardwho left the supply closet unlocked on Thursdays and never understood why inventory kept coming up short.
The supermax in Florence had concrete that sweated in the summer and walls thin enough to hear the man next door praying at 0200 every night for six months until he stopped, and nobody told me why. The federal psychiatric unit held the ones too dangerous for regular prison but not insane enough for the hospitals, and I broke out of that one. They caught me in the loading dock, thirty seconds from a maintenance van and the outside world.
That's when Greenridge entered the conversation. The place they put men when they've run out of cages strong enough. Not a prison. A locked psychiatric ward with no release date, with chemical restraints that prison couldn't authorize and security protocols borrowed from facilities that don't officially exist. They thought the drugs would be enough. They were wrong, but I've let them believe otherwise, let them settle into the assumption that I'm contained. Eight years of patience in rooms identical to this one.
I surface. Kent's face in the slot, and even through the sedation I can read what's running behind his eyes. He's taking in what they've done to me, building the argument for how to use it.
"Disproportionate punishment," he says quietly. "Documentable. They've had you in here almost two weeks on sedation levels that aren't in any treatment protocol."
Almost two weeks. Shit. That's how long I've been in this box.
"I noticed."
