Chapter 21 DAYS passed, maybe weeks. The concrete walls didn’t bother counting. Alejandro had stopped marking time. The calendar on the wall remained untouched. Meals came and went. Guards rotated. The lights never really turned off. But he was no longer sitting still. He had begun to listen. The inmates around him weren’t saints, they were thieves, smugglers, con artists, but they talked. And when Alejandro listened, he started to hear patterns. Names. Events. Whispers about politicians, bribes, and shady deals—including some too familiar to ignore. “Diego Chan?” one inmate said one evening while playing cards. “That guy’s everywhere. His company’s got half the justice system in their pocket.” Alejandro stiffened from where he sat nearby. “You know him?” he asked casually. The guy—lean, tattooed, mid-forties—looked over at him. “Why? You got beef with Diego?” Alejandro smirked bitterly. “Something like that.” The man, whose name was Rocco, leaned in. “You’re Alejandr

Chapter 23The days inside the prison grew darker, not because the lights dimmed, but because the eyes around Alejandro sharpened. Trust was a rare currency in jail, and Alejandro had run out of it the moment news about his betrayal to Diego reached the wrong ears.Alejandro had always been a man of instinct. He knew how to read people—the twitch of an eye, the sudden silence of a room, the way someone gripped their utensils during lunch. Lately, he noticed the change. The shift. People didn’t just avoid him now. They studied him.Conversations stopped when he entered the mess hall. Inmates who once nodded in greeting now turned their backs. It wasn’t fear he saw in their eyes. It was a calculation. Like they were measuring him. Weighing him. Waiting.He sat at lunch beside Rocco, the only person who still gave him the time of day. Rocco had been inside for years. He knew how the system worked. How things moved under the surface.“You feel it too?” Alejandro asked without looking at h