Italian Mafia Boss, My Cell

Chapter one: Intake

The van smelled like bleach and old sweat, and Isabella Marchetti had been staring at the same rust stain on the floor for the last forty minutes, trying not to throw up.

Three weeks ago she had been sitting behind a desk on the fourteenth floor of Hallway & Struss, running numbers on a shell company nobody wanted her to find. Now her wrists were cuffed to a metal ring bolted into the van's wall, and every bump in the road sent pain shooting up through her shoulders.

She kept telling herself this was a mistake. Somebody, somewhere, would realize the account discrepancies she'd flagged weren't hers. The jury had believed six years of doctored records over one auditor's testimony, but surely an appeal, a lawyer, someone would fix this.

The van doors opened onto grey light and a wall of sound: shouting, distant clanging metal, a dog barking somewhere behind a fence topped with razor wire. Blackrock Correctional rose up in front of her like something built to swallow people whole.

"Move," a guard said, hauling her out by the arm.

She stumbled onto asphalt. Her legal shoes, the ones she'd worn to her own sentencing because some idiotic part of her had wanted to look presentable, slid against loose gravel. A second guard shoved a folder into another guard's hands, muttering something about overflow and the east wing being over capacity again.

Inside, the intake room was fluorescent-lit and freezing. They took her fingerprints. They took her photograph. They took the small gold cross her mother had given her, sealing it into a plastic bag with a label that reduced her entire life into a six digit inmate number.

"Strip," a female guard said, bored, gesturing toward a curtained corner.

Isabella's face burned, but she did it, because there was no version of this where dignity was optional anymore. The search was clinical and humiliating in equal measure. When it was over, they handed her a set of grey scrubs that smelled of industrial detergent and didn't fit.

"You're lucky," the guard said as she filled out paperwork, not looking up. "New policy. Overcrowding. You're going into the mixed block instead of general pop."

"Mixed block?"

"Coed pilot program. Cost cutting measure. Don't ask me, I just work here." The guard slid a clipboard toward her. "Sign here."

Isabella signed without reading it. What choice did she have?

They walked her down a corridor with concrete walls the color of old teeth, past cell after cell where faces pressed to bars to watch her pass. Someone whistled. Someone else laughed, low and ugly. She kept her eyes forward and her spine straight, because if she let herself feel any of what was happening to her right now, she thought she might come apart completely.

"Cosa cell has an opening," one guard said to the other, low, like it was something significant.

The second guard actually stopped walking. "You're joking."

"Overcrowding's overcrowding. Warden signed off."

"Cosa not gonna like that."

"Cosa doesn't get a vote."

They didn't explain further, and Isabella didn't ask, though something in the exchange made the hair on her arms rise. They stopped in front of a cell near the end of the block, separated slightly from the others, close to the guard station in a way that felt deliberate.

The guard rapped his baton against the bars. "New cellmate, Cosa."

For a moment there was nothing. Then a voice came from the shadowed back corner of the cell, low and even, the kind of voice that didn't need to be raised to command a room.

"I don't have a cellmate."

"You do now."

The cell door slid open with a mechanical shriek. Isabella's legs did not want to move. The guard put a hand between her shoulder blades and pushed, not gently, and she stumbled forward across the threshold as the door slammed shut behind her with a finality that echoed down the entire block.

She turned. The guards were already walking away, boots striking concrete in unhurried rhythm, leaving her alone with a stranger she couldn't yet see clearly in the dim light.

A shape shifted in the corner. Unfolded itself from the shadows with the slow, deliberate movement of someone who had never once in his life needed to hurry for anyone.

"You shouldn't be here," the voice said.

Isabella opened her mouth to respond, and that was when he stepped into the strip of light falling through the bars, and she finally saw the face that half the block had gone silent for.

Her breath caught somewhere in her throat and refused to move.