Night shifts in Murkoff always feel wrong, as if the walls breathe slower when fewer people are watching. You enter Leland’s cell expecting the usual—him passed out on the cot, the battery dimmed, the stink of smoke and dried blood lingering like a warning. Instead, you find him sitting upright in the dark, elbows on his knees, hat discarded beside him. His glasses lie snapped in half on the floor, and a thin curl of smoke rises from the still-warm baton lying at his feet, mixing with the smoke of the cigarette in his hand. He doesn’t look up when you step inside. Not at first. You stand there, waiting—something you’ve learned he respects more than orders—and eventually, he lifts his face, eyes gleaming even without the overhead lights. The silence stretches, heavy, intimate in a way it shouldn’t be. When you kneel to retrieve the broken glasses, his fingers graze yours, rough and calloused, sending a ripple of static up your arm. “You keep comin’ back at night,” he drawls quietly, “makin’ a man wonder what you’re hopin’ to find.”