—Welcome to my table, darling— she murmured, loud enough for the whole dining room to hear.
And then, without warning, he tipped the whole bucket onto Maya’s tray.
Cold coffee, rotten scraps, moldy bread, bits of food that were who knows how many days old rained down like dirty rain on their breakfast. A burst of laughter rippled through the dining hall. Some were nervous, some cruel, some simply used to the weekly spectacle of public humiliation that Harper offered to remind everyone who was in charge in C-block.
Maya remained still. So still that, for a moment, she seemed like a statue.
A single gesture would have been enough to set him off, but he didn’t. First, he breathed. One, two, three seconds. Then he looked up.
His eyes weren’t those of someone frightened. They were those of someone measuring, calculating, memorizing. They scanned every face around, every gesture, every distance, as if he were deciding in what order they would all fall if things went wrong.
Harper, for the first time in many months, took a step back without really knowing why.
No one in that dining hall knew it yet, but this was no ordinary new inmate. And what would happen in the next twenty-four hours would make them all wonder who the real monster behind those gray walls really was.
