Sven walks me back through a different route. More doors. More scratch marks.
"Panel review is in six weeks," he says. "Your placement is temporary until the Review Panel evaluates your case. Until then you stay Red. You follow my rules. You attend programming when told. You eat when told. You sleep when told."
"And if I don't?"
He stops. Turns. Looks down at me — and it's a long way down from six-foot-whatever to five-foot-nothing.
"Then I will make you. And I'd prefer not to. Not because I care about your comfort. Because the incident report takes forty-five minutes and I have better things to do."
I believe him. Sven isn't performing authority the way COs in juvie do. He's telling me what will happen with the same energy someone uses to tell you the stove is hot. Not a threat. Physics.
The hallway opens into a wider space — a junction where Red House connects to something else. Windows here, real ones. Through them, the enclosed yard. The one with the tall fencing I saw from the van.
There's someone in it.
And my entire body notices before my brain catches up.
He's pacing the fence line — not walking, pacing, the deliberate repetitive circuit of something caged. Long stride,fluid, almost lazy, his body eating up the distance with an ease that comes from being built specifically to cover ground. He's tall and lean in a way that isn't thin. It's the leanness of something that has been carved down to exactly what it needs to be. No excess. No waste.
His shirt is too small, riding up on one side, and I can see the cut of his stomach — defined, hard, lines that don't come from a gym. Survival, maybe. Starvation, maybe. My mouth goes dry looking at them.
That's — not ideal. That is not an ideal response to a man pacing a cage in a containment facility.
His hair is dark and too long, falling across his face in tangles that say nobody's touched him in a long time and he'd take the hand off anyone who tried. When he turns, I get the jaw. The cheekbones. A mouth that has no business being on a face that hard — full, soft-looking, the one part of him that isn't sharp edges and angles.
He is, objectively and inconveniently, the most dangerous-looking beautiful person I have ever seen. And no one has ever made my thighs press together from fifty feet away.
Noted. Moving on.
I don't move on.
He reaches the far end. Turns again.
His head comes up.
He's still too far away for me to see his eyes clearly, but I feel the moment his attention finds me. It's physical. A pressure behind my sternum — heavy, specific, directional, like something reached across fifty feet of cold air and pressed a thumb into the center of my chest. Heat floods my body, races up my arms, hits the back of my neck. My breath catches. My fingers curl against my palms.
He stops pacing.
He was mid-stride. Heading east. And he stopped, dead, like someone cut his strings. His whole body reorients toward the window — toward me — and he goes still in a way that isn't calm. It's the stillness of something that just found what it was looking for.
A heat pulses in my left wrist and I grab it instinctively.
Sven's hand closes on my arm. Hard. Hard enough that I stumble.
"Don't." One word. And the voice behind it isn't angry or commanding. It's afraid.
He pulls me away from the window. I let him because my legs have opinions about where they want to go and those opinions don't align with my survival instincts.
"Who is that?"
"Nobody you need to know."
"He stopped. He was pacing and he stopped when he —"
"I know what he did." Sven's grip is closer to a restraint hold than a guide. "You will not approach that resident. If you see him in common areas, you move the opposite direction. Not a suggestion."
Four rules now. The fourth is the only one that scared him enough to touch me to enforce it.
