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Stripped to nothing and folded down into the center of a chamber built from old wet rock, four corners I’ve been staring at long enough to know each crack in them by name, the cold wrung so deep into me that my lips have surely gone the blue of a drowned man’s.

My body trembles in long mechanical waves.

I haven’t bothered to notice in a while.

Noticing is a luxury, and I learned to stop spending on luxuries a long time ago.

My knees are numb. That’s a mercy, actually—they screamed for the first stretch of this, the stone grinding into bone, and now they’ve gone quiet under the same anesthetic chill that’s claimed the rest of me. The whole machine of my body has dialed down to a single low hum of suffering, steady and survivable, the kind of pain a man can live inside if he’s built the right rooms in his head to live in.

And here’s the part the staff will never understand, the reason their punishment is a gift I won’t thank them for:this is still better than the hole.

Solitary.

The dark box.

The enclosed nothing where the walls sit close enough to brush both shoulders and the lid of it presses down on the air until breathing feels like theft.

They think that’s the worse sentence. They think the cold-water chamber is the harder one, and they’re wrong, and I’d never correct them, because a man should keep the location of his own throat to himself.

Enclosed dark does something to me.

Reminds the animal part of my brain of a long, narrow place that begs a body to lie down in it and be still and let the earth close over—a coffin, if you want the ugly word, and I don’t, so I shove the thought back down into the pit I keep it in and weight the lid. Not tonight. We don’t do that tonight.

So I’ll take the water.

The water lets me see the corners. The water lets me kneel in the open with my eyes wide and my lungs my own. Freeze me to death in a room I can see the edges of, and I’ll kneel here grinning, because the alternative lives in the dark, and I’ve made my peace with cold the way I never could with black.

They brought me here in a transport rig with more restraints than a man has limbs, six guards and a sedative gun and a transfer order stamped with words like exceptional risk and no general population. The asylum took delivery of me the way you’d take delivery of something that ticks.

Signed for me.

Locked me down.

Decided a cold-water chamber and a few stress positions would teach me the shape of my new cage.

Cute.

As if a cage has ever been the thing that taught me anything except how cages come apart.

The water finds a fresh rhythm against the back of my neck, and somewhere past the numbness my body files a complaint I won’t be reading. Cold like this stops being temperature after a while and becomes a kind of pressure instead, a slow vise tightening behind the sternum, squeezing the breath shorter, narrowing the world down to the next inhale and the one after that. I’ve learned to ride it.

You ride the cold the way you ride a bad mount—loose in the hips, soft in the hands, never letting the thing feel you tense, because the second it knows you’re afraid it throws you.

I’ve lost count of the hours.

Time turns to soup in a place like this, thins out and loses its edges. But I haven’t spent the hours counting cracks or cataloguing pain or doing any of the dull penance this was designed to extract from me.

I’ve spent every frozen minute of it thinking about her.

That woman.

That impossible, candy-scented contradiction—perfection sitting at the absolute peak of insanity, a thing so finely made and so completely unhinged that the two facts shouldn’t be able to share a body and somehow do, seamlessly, like she wasassembled on purpose by someone with a cruel sense of art. She skipped into a quarter every other living soul in that hall had fled, dropped into a crouch at my feet, and dared—fucking dared—to counter me.

Nobody counters me.

Men who’ve heard a fraction of what these hands did in that prison go quiet and small and grateful for distance the second they catch my scent. She caught it, broke it down behind those mismatched eyes like she was taking apart a clock to see what made it tick, and then she drank my beer and told me it tasted better than piss.

They call it a riot in the files, which is a small and tidy word for what it actually was.