"Don't move." Gage's voice goes flat and hard. "Don't fucking move."
Casey thrashes, tries to throw Gage off but gets nowhere. Gage has fifty pounds and a decade of training on him, and Casey isn't going anywhere.
"Hope." Gage's eyes find me where I've slid down the wall. "Hope, are you hurt? Talk to me."
I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
Seven years. I've been doing this for seven years—walking into facilities that make other monitors request transfers after a week—and I've never once stopped to think about why it's so easy for me. I put it in the asset column. The monitor who doesn't flinch. The woman you send into Ward C because she'll sit across from a man who killed eighteen people.
Casey stuffed a pillowcase. He timed his movement privileges to my route. He stood in this corridor and told me he loved me, and I stood here talking to him about checkpoints.
"Hope." Gage's voice is sharper now. "I need you to answer me. Are you hurt?"
"I don't know," I say. The words feel distant, disconnected from my mouth. "My head. I hit my head."
Then, from past the security checkpoint—a crash. Metal on metal. Shouting, more than one guard, their voices pitched high and panicked. Another crash, heavier, and the unmistakable sound of a body hitting a wall.
Gage's head snaps toward the checkpoint. "Oh shit," he says, quiet, to himself. "No, no, no—"
The security door bows inward—he hits it at the hinge side, not the center.The frame buckles, bolts shearing, and Jude comes through it before the noise stops. He's breathing hard, blood on his knuckles and his shirt, and his eyes find me against the wall before he's fully through the doorway.
He crosses the corridor in two strides and drops to his knees in front of me.
"Hope." His hands cup my face, tilt my head, checking fast and thorough even though his fingers are shaking. "Talk to me. Are you—did he—"
"I'm okay." My voice sounds wrong. Too calm. "Gage stopped him. I'm okay."
His hands stay on my face for one more second. His eyes move over me—the red mark across my collarbone from Casey's forearm, the spot on the back of my head that's already swelling. Then they shift to Casey, pinned under Gage's knee, and everything in him goes still.
"I saw him." Jude's voice is flat. "Through the checkpoint window. I saw him put his hands on you."
He stands. Walks to Gage. Grips the back of Gage's shirt collar and lifts him off Casey with one hand, setting him to the side with a control that's worse than the violence that got him here.
"I don't want to hurt you," Jude says to Gage. Quiet. Almost polite.
Gage looks at him. Looks at me against the wall. Looks at Casey already trying to scramble to his feet.
"Make it quick," Gage says, and steps back. "Make it hurt."
Jude picks Casey up by the front of his shirt and hits him. The sound is flat and heavy and Casey's head snaps sideways before he hits the floor. He tries to crawl and Jude hauls him up again.
"She told you to stay back." He hits him again. I hear the wet crunch of it connecting with Casey's nose, hear the cartilage give. Casey's head bounces off the linoleum.
Jude follows him down. Each hit is well placed—not rushed, not sloppy, every one of them landing exactly where he means it to land. Casey stops trying to get up after the fourth. Stops making words after the fifth. The sounds coming out of him aren't language anymore.
I watch from the floor with my back against the wall and my head still buzzing from the concrete, and I feel nothing. No horror. No urge to look away. Just the same flat calm my brain gives me for everything, the same silence where something else should be.
Gage is watching the corridor behind us, his body half-turned toward the checkpoint, listening.
"People coming," Gage says. "Jude. That's enough."
Jude doesn't stop.
"She's watching." Gage's hand closes on his shoulder. "That's enough."
Jude's fist stops mid-swing. He looks at Gage's hand on his shoulder, then back at me. His chest is heaving. Casey's blood is on his knuckles and his shirt and the floor behind Casey's head.
He lets Casey drop.
