Caged In (Caged Prison #1)

1

Sitting alone in the transitional cells, Jasper Marcelo—or, Izz, as most people call him—is contemplating his life choices.

Does he feel guilty for stealing? No. Does he regret transitioning from houses to pickpocketing? Yes.

Izz never should have tried it, never should have changed his tactics. He’s good at robbing, good at breaking in and getting out without drawing attention to himself. He never takes too much, only a few items, most owners chocking it up to them misplacing things. But then he had to go and screw it all up.

And he screwed up big time. He’s excellent with houses, exceptional with locks. He’s an idiot for changing to pick pocketing. Less than a dozen people, and two weeks after he started, he was caught. He should have just stuck to buildings, to what he is actually good at.

All of this is happening because he listened to Cole. Why did he have to listen? His friend is an impulsive reckless lunatic, he knew it, yet he still followed Cole’s instructions.

Izz had a good thing going. He was working—alas, a crappy, low paying job, but at least it was a job—and he was robbing on the side. He had no choice on the latter, he had to keep his sister in school. To help his mum keep a roof over their heads, to prevent them from starving or freezing to death. They needed their rundown apartment and the crappy heating. Most of all, they needed more money than what he and his mum were able to earn at their jobs. Their mum was working her terrible barber job, with an asshole boss, pulling in double shifts, for shitty pay checks. She was still paying off the countless doctors’ bills. His sister was recovering from cancer. After his father’s death, all the insurance money was used to pay for chemo and all her other meds and treatments.

Izz’s not going to be there for her birthday, in three months, she will be eleven. And he isn’t going to be there to help her, or their mum. Now that he’s in prison. With no way to provide for his family.

How are they going to stay in their little apartment? They’ll be evicted—be out on the streets, freezing in the snow, and there is nothing he can do about it.

I screwed up.

I failed them.

Why do I have to be such a mess? A terrible brother and a lacking son.

He rubs his hands over his face, trying to scrub away his emotions before they get the better of him. He isn’t sure about much in prison, but he knows crying will be a very bad, very dumb idea. If he falls down the emotional hole, he may as well slap a target on his ass with the words ‘Bitch Boy’ flashing neon pink.

He already has it bad. His petite features. His warm, tan coloured skin. His soft hazelnut hair—long on top, shaved short around the sides. Eyes a rare forest green, brilliant and bright, demanding everyone’s attention. He usually wore contact lenses during his . . . extracurricular activities. To keep his noticeable, and noteworthy, feature from becoming stuck in people’s memories.

He’s a mixed blood. He may as well have no race, with the amount of blood from multiple different races coursing through his veins. He’s basically a glorified mutt. A mix-and-match puzzle of genes scrambled together.

He’s not sure if it’s going to help him in prison or make him more of a target. Being all and none of the races at the same time. For some reason people still see race in today’s society, even with so many people like Izz in the world.

He hopes he can get by without anyone realising he doesn’t belong to an ethnic group—he has a few tattoos, dotted here and there, maybe he can join in with a tattooed prison gang—

If it’s not like the movies where everyone in prison is covered head to toe in ink . . .

He doesn’t have very many tattoos, only a few small ones. He wouldn’t get into the prisoner roles in the movies with his ink work.

A skull on his ankle, which he regrets now, worrying it will label him as a bitch boy or something, not that his petite features won’t do that already. He’s sure ankle tattoos are considered girly? For his sake, he hopes not.

He has another tattoo on the back of his neck, the date of his girl’s death. She was killed in a fatal car wreck with her family when he was thirteen. They knew each other from birth, lived right next door their whole lives. They were always talking about their future, playing families, and make-believe marriages. She will forever be close to him, he’ll never forget her. As soon as he hit fifteen and could find a decent artist to bribe, he had her birth date and death date permanently marked in his skin. His mum had not been happy, to say the least, but she understood why he wanted it so badly.

His third tattoo is vines and branches, interwoven with a snake skeleton that wraps around his biceps—well, his girlish biceps. He is muscled, just not overly so. He’s not a rough tough bad ass dude who people will take one look at and back off from, with zero contemplation on starting any fight. He’s more . . . delicately muscled. Skilled enough to hold his own in a fight, against one, who isn’t overly skilled in hand to hand—

Okay. Okay. He’s more of a run-the-fuck-away kind of fighter. When fight or flight kicks in, he picks flight. In prison, that’s not really an option. You can only run so far in this caged in Hell-hole. He’s been in this prison for the better part of three—or four—hours, and he already wants out of it. He has yet to meet the other inmates and already hates it.

So, in comparison to pretty much every inmate he has seen on television shows, Izz may as well call himself a clean-skinned push over, or whatever the term is that tattooed prison peeps use on non-tattooed peeps. Do they say peeps? Best he doesn’t say that out loud to them, to be on the safe side—

It’s not really them , now, is it? He’s a part of the them . An inmate. Someone society throws into the same bag of bad people, treating them—us—like we’re disgraceful, disgusting degenerates. A plague on society. Not worth caring about.

If only they cared enough to listen to our stories. To see the world through our eyes, live the world in our shoes. Sometimes, you don’t have a choice in what you do. Sometimes, life throws you under the waves and holds you down, and you find yourself taking drastic measures to pull free from the depths.

His ass is beginning to go numb, his mind blank with boredom—he needs something to focus on, to distract himself—

Izz jerks to his feet and walks over to the bars, squishing his face against the cold metal cage. He can’t see very far down the corridor. All he can see is more of the same—plain whitewash brick walls and a lumpy ass concrete floor. Like whoever they hired to lay the concrete hadn’t been interested in wasting their time smoothing things out. Criminals live here, after all. And who cares how they live—

Man, he has to get out of his head. His thoughts keep spinning into morbidity. Morbidity? Morbidly? Morbid? He’s not sure which is the correct term. Are they all correct? Does it matter?

A clank to his left catches his attention, he angles his head around in the tight space between the bars. The distraction is a good thing, he hates being left alone with his thoughts. Better to be surrounded by people and distractions, than alone.

He can hear heavy footfalls—boots thumping on hard ground, echoing off empty corridor walls. The jingling of keys tells him it’s a guard approaching.

Finally , I can get out of this stupid, boring, cell .

He’s not thrilled at the concept of meeting his new house-mates—cage-mates?—but he is going to die of boredom if he’s left here any longer. He needs to get out and move around, stretch his legs, interact with others.

Do they have an outdoor area with enough space to jog? Like a football court? He frowns as the thought crosses his mind. He hopes they have some sort of grassed area. Not sure he can last his whole sentence without access to fresh air. Being stuck inside a stuffy prison, all day, every day, for months on end . . . it’s a terrifying thought.

“Inmate,” a deep voice booms, announcing the guard’s arrival. “Turn around. Hands behind your back. Walk backwards to the bars.”

The guard’s a tall, hulking man, with long blond hair pulled into a ponytail. Weird that they would be allowed to grow long hair working in a prison. Wouldn’t it be, like, a safety risk, or something?

Izz complies. Excited at the prospect of leaving the tiny transition cell. Doing his best to keep his happy little jig to himself. Pressing his back to the barred door, and patiently waiting for the guard to finish cuffing his hands. He groans under his breath at how tight they’re fastened to his wrists.

It would be a bad idea to complain. Pissing off a guard on the first day, he can imagine isn’t a hot idea—

The cell door clunks open, without the guard touching it. Sliding away from the wall, removing the barrier between himself and the guard.

Must be electronic? Would explain the weird clunking noise he hears every time a door unlocks and opens. Some sliding, some opening like your regular push-pull doors.

His upper arm is grabbed in a crushing hold, and he’s dragged down the corridor—it’s a long corridor to be manhandled down, with an unflattering grey door awaiting their arrival at the far end.

More clunking—this time the blond guard pushes the door open—no sliding back for this electronic mass. Someone must be watching them from a control room? Surely the guard doesn’t have one of those sensors to open the doors? Like the dogs have in their collars to open those expensive electronic doggy doors. Those had made it very easy to break into someone’s house. He had a way with dogs, they all seem to love him—a happy, tail wagging bundle of joy, easily manipulated into opening their owners’ home for him.

The room beyond the grey prison door is small, with a glassed-in cubical off to one side—in what looks to be bulletproof glass. It’s extremely thick, like something you would find in a bear enclosure, thick enough to keep those fuzzy balls of teeth and claws locked away from people with nothing better to do than stare at them.

Behind the glass, a cheerful red-headed woman is putting some sort of pack together, as he’s pulled over to the cubical. The guard doesn’t say anything, he just stands there, holding Izz in place.

Izz watches the woman stuffing a pillowcase with a towel, toothbrush, toilet paper roll, soap, second set of orange prison assigned clothes—twins to the orange prison outfit he is currently sporting. And will be sporting for some time. He hates orange, his least favourite colour. Another way for them to stick it to him, he supposes.

“There you go, sweetie,” the red-head chirps, a smile gracing her lovely face. She slides the well-stuffed pillowcase under the slit in the glass wall. Offering it for him to take.

“Thank you.” Izz smiles back at her. Not sure how he’s going to pick up the offering, with his hands secured like they are behind his back.

The guard solves the problem. Grabbing the case, and shoving it behind Izz, where he has a split second to grab the cotton material before the guard lets go. He barely manages to grip it and save it from hitting the floor.

Do not snap at the guard, you do not want to go to solitary confinement on your first day . Izz grits his teeth. The least the guard can do is treat me like a human being and not garbage.

He’s led over to another door on the far side of the little room. More electronic locks clicking open, this door being another one the guard has to push open—

And they’re back in another boring white corridor. It’s a shorter distance to the door at the other end—in the same unflattering grey colour. Only change this time is the noises he can hear, muffled voices drifting out of the door’s seams.

Here we go.

Izz takes a deep breath as the next door is swung wide—

A bombardment of loud voices barrelling in, bouncing off the walls, drilling into his skull, spiking his anxiety. The hot air racing to follow, clogging his lungs, and prickling his skin in warning.

Prison life here I come .