The Yard Changes Hands
The arrests did not end with Briggs.
By evening, three officers and two inmate trustees had been removed from Housing Blocks B and D. Phone logs were seized. Commissary ledgers vanished into evidence boxes. Search teams opened walls, lockers and maintenance panels. Men who had spent years profiting from the quiet trade between staff corruption and inmate desperation found the floor moving beneath them.
Word traveled faster than any official memo.
By dinner, every man in the prison knew two things.
First: Gareth Knox had not crushed the woman in Yard C.
Second: the woman in Yard C had broken the back of a system that most people had been too afraid to name.
That night, in a temporary interview room lit by a humming fluorescent strip, Gareth sat across from Nina with his hands cuffed to a steel ring in the table. He looked smaller sitting down, though the room still seemed built around his size.
He cleared his throat. “You could’ve let me hang with him.”
Nina sat opposite, posture straight, burn mark pale under the light. “You testified.”
He looked away. “Doesn’t wipe anything clean.”
“No,” Nina said. “It doesn’t.”
He absorbed that. She did not offer false mercy. He respected her more for it.
After a long silence, he said, “My brother was thirteen when our mother died. Briggs’s people kept cash moving to him. Rent. Food. School. I told myself I had no choice.”
Nina folded her hands. “Everybody has a choice. Some are just expensive.”
Gareth nodded once, as if he had expected nothing gentler.
“Will they move him?” he asked. “My brother?”
“I already told the investigators where to find the financial trail,” Nina replied. “If your testimony holds, they can protect him.”
His eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again, some of the menace had burned away, leaving a tired, older grief.
“I’m sorry about your husband,” he said.
Nina looked at the metal table, at the scratches carved into it by years of waiting men.
“So am I.”
It was the first time her voice had thinned.
Gareth swallowed. “You gonna stay in general population after this?”
She gave a small shrug. “Depends how honest this place decides to become.”
May you like
A rough laugh escaped him, brief and humorless. “Then you’ll be busy.”
For the first time, the corner of Nina’s mouth shifted. Not quite a smile. But something alive enough to matter.
