Chapter 51: Saturday Breakfast, The News, And A Very Big Mouth!

Oren lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling.

The room was quiet and the facility had settled into its late-night sounds and he had been lying here for forty minutes trying to sleep but he had been failing.

He kept replaying it.

It wasn’t the wall he’s been replaying. Not the hand in his hair.

The flashback came before he could stop it.

...

His watch had chimed at 3pm.

He had been halfway through buttoning his shirt when the message came through. It was very important since it came from the director’s office. Immediately, he finished buttoning, pulled the full uniform on, and walked there.

The director’s office was large and organised and full of the specific energy of a man who managed too many things at once and had developed a system for all of them. The director himself was behind the desk with three documents open and a phone pressed between his ear and his shoulder, writing something with his free hand.

He held up one finger without looking at Oren.

Oren stood at attention and waited.

The call ended. The director finished writing. He looked up and his eyes moved across Oren with the brief assessment of someone confirming a tool was in the right place.

"How are you settling in?" the director said.

"Fine, sir," Oren said.

"Any problems with the facility?"

"None I can’t manage."

The director nodded and opened his desk drawer and took out a sealed envelope and placed it on the edge of the desk. "Deliver this to cell block C, prisoner 1147. Place it on the bed if the occupant isn’t there. Don’t open it. Don’t discuss it with anyone. Don’t ask questions about it."

Oren picked it up and placed it under his arm.

"The person in that room," the director said, already looking back at his documents, "is none of your concern. If they approach you, be professional and move on."

"Understood," Oren said.

He left.

He arrived at 1147 and found it empty. He placed the envelope on the bed and left and went back to his duties and thought nothing more about it for approximately six hours.

Until Seo had appeared in the corridor and confirmed that the envelope had been for him.

And that Seo was the director’s son.

And that the envelope contained a complete file on prisoner 2525, Ruaan Calder, youngest son of the Caldwell family, currently serving two years at Blackmere for framing one Mara Crowe for a traffic accident he had caused himself.

Oren had read the file in the ten seconds it had been open before Seo took it back. He had a good memory. The kind that kept things without being asked.

...

He came back to the present as he continued staring at the ceiling.

The Caldwell family. He knew that name. Everyone knew that name. The oldest money in the country, the kind that had stopped needing to prove itself three generations ago. And the youngest son was currently eating grey cafeteria food in a black uniform two corridors from where Oren was lying.

He thought about Seo’s hand in his hair and the name that was said out loud in that specific tone.

’Our pretty and beautiful Ruaan.’

Seo wanted something from him. Oren could see the shape of it even if he couldn’t see all the details yet. Seo had shown him that file either to make Oren feel indebted or to make Oren see Ruaan differently. To transfer attention from Ruaan to him. He did that to create a rivalry or an interest or something that would serve whatever Seo was building.

Oren understood people who moved like that. He had grown up around them.

He thought about being pressed against the wall. And how he was glared at with broken glasses and very watchful eyes.

He was not into men.

He was a disciplined person with a clear understanding of his own preferences and he had never had cause to question them.

He thought about Ruaan against the wall in the shower block two nights ago.

He changed his mind slightly.

’Maybe, not all men. Just one.’

Then he changed it back.

He was not doing this. He was an officer. There was a code of conduct and section two and paragraph one and he had memorised all of it for a reason.

He sat up.

Harolin and Ruaan were a problem. A clear, visible, ongoing problem that was going to create issues for the facility and for the authority structure and for everyone who had to work in the same building as both of them.

He was going to fix it.

He clenched his fist on the mattress.

From now on, he was going to do everything in his power to put distance between those two. That was the professional choice. That was the correct choice.

He lay back down and stared at the ceiling again.

His mind immediately went to how soft and small Ruaan was against a wall.

"No," he said, to the ceiling. "Fucking no!"

He closed his eyes.

.

.

Saturday.

Ruaan walked into the VIP cafeteria and sat across from Cullen and adjusted his pants before he sat down fully and hoped nobody had noticed.

He had washed his underwear last night. It was still damp this morning. He had put it on anyway because the alternative was nothing and nothing was not a viable option for a breakfast meeting with Cullen Ray.

He was not thinking about last night.

He was absolutely not thinking about last night.

He picked up his fork and looked at the plate and started eating with the focused attention of a man who was definitely thinking about something other than what had happened in a comfortable room with an AC unit and a fridge while he had been pressed against someone who was technically his enemy.

He shifted in his chair.

Cullen was eating across from him. Finn was not here. Cullen had not mentioned Finn and Ruaan had not mentioned Finn and the space where Finn usually hovered went unacknowledged by both of them.

Ruaan chewed his eggs.

He thought about Harolin’s hands.

He adjusted his pants again under the table.

"Do you watch the news?" Cullen asked.

Ruaan looked up. "Not really. I prefer Netflix."

Cullen picked up the remote from the side table and turned on the screen mounted on the far wall. It was already on a news channel. Ruaan glanced at it without much interest and went back to his eggs.

The newsreader was saying something about infrastructure investment. Then something about a corporate merger. Then something about a charity gala next month attended by several prominent business families.

Ruaan ate his bread.

Then the camera cut.

A familiar building appeared on the screen. Glass and steel, the Caldwell group logo visible above the entrance in letters that Ruaan had seen every day of his life for twenty-six years. His father was stepping out of his car in his grey suit, the one he wore for press appearances, looking composed and unhurried the way he looked when he had already decided what he was going to say.

Reporters clustered at the entrance.

And right there, slightly behind his father’s left shoulder, looking well-fed and rested and wearing the coat that Ruaan had paid for.

Dominic.

Ruaan’s hand tightened on his fork.

The reporter was asking his father about quarterly earnings and his father was answering smoothly and the whole thing looked very normal and very fine and very much like Ruaan had never existed.

Then one of the reporters pushed a microphone forward and said, "Mr Caldwell, there are reports that your youngest son is currently incarcerated at Blackmere Correctional Centre. Do you have any comment on that?"

The world went quiet. Ruaan frowned deeply when he heard that question.

"Turn it off," Ruaan said.

"I don’t want to," Cullen said. "These rich people just do whatever they want. I’m sure his son is being tortured in there somewhere. I should probably find him if he’s in this branch."

On screen, his father paused for exactly one second. Just one. Then his expression stayed completely even and he said, "Ah yes. My son. Ruaan Caldwell is currently at Blackmere Correctional Centre. He deserves whatever came for him." He adjusted his cufflinks. "However, he is still my son. I will be here when he gets out."

He walked into the building.

The reporters kept talking over each other.

Ruaan’s hand came down on the table.

Not hard enough to break anything. Hard enough to be heard.

Cullen looked at him.

The top three looked at him.

The whole small room recalibrated.

Ruaan stared at the screen. His father’s face was already gone, replaced by the news anchor summarising the statement, but the name was still there in the lower third of the screen in clean white letters.

’Ruaan Caldwell. Blackmere Correctional Centre.’

Ruaan looked at his plate.

His cheeks were red. Not from embarrassment. Or maybe it was not only from embarrassment. Something else was also there, warm and uncomfortable. His father had said he deserved it and then in the same breath said he was still his son and he would wait.

He was being insulted and claimed at the same time.

That was extremely his father.

He rolled his eyes at the ceiling and then looked back at his food.

Cullen had not looked away from him.

Ruaan could feel it. The specific quality of Cullen’s attention, focused and reassessing, running back over everything it had already catalogued about Ruaan and checking it against new information.

Cullen leaned forward slowly.

His elbows were on the table. His eyes were on Ruaan’s face.

"Was that man," Cullen said, very carefully and very precisely, "your father, Ruaan?"

Ruaan looked at his eggs.

Fuck.

He looked at the juice.

Fuck.

He looked at the bread.

’Fuck fuck fuck.’