Page 222 of Craving Venom

“There was a guy,” Terry starts, rubbing the back of his neck. “His name was Stewart. He was a real piece of shit. He ran benzos and powdered fentanyl through the kitchen delivery routes. I was part of his crew. Not for long, but long enough to see how he ran things. He trusted me because I played the good soldier. We made drops. Collected. Cleaned the money. I was in deep. Just not in his pocket. He figured I was helping him expand, but the truth was, I was laying groundwork. Feeding him just enough ideas to steer him. ‘We should move a shipment through the old basement,’ I’d said. ‘No one checks that corridor.’ And he bought it.”

“Because he was stupid,” I add, “and desperate for a shortcut.”

“So once Stewart bought the basement idea, I started making noise. Quiet at first, enough to get the right eyes on me. I told one of the corrupt guards, Jensen, that I’d seen Stewart pocket something during a kitchen run. That I heard whispers about amove coming. I played it carefully, too scared to snitch, but too scared not to.”

“Terry let the right people overhear him,” I interject. “Made it seem like he was stuck between loyalty and fear. Just scared enough to be useful.”

“Exactly. I staged two conversations with Stewart, close enough to the corridor cameras to catch the audio, just far enough that it couldn’t be dismissed as coincidence. ‘We do it this week.’ ‘Don’t fuck this up.’ ‘You sure no one patrols the lower halls?’ Shit like that.”

“And Jensen took the bait?”

Terry smirks. “Hook, line, and fuckin’ detonator. He pulled me aside two days before the escape and asked if I wanted protection. I told him I just wanted out. That I’d go with him if he needed proof. We took the lower stairwell near the defunct boiler chute. No patrols, no cameras. I told him Stewart was moving product through the crawlspace behind Storage 9. The dumb fuck still thought he had the upper hand.”

“He had a gun on me the whole time, but the second we passed the outer sensor ring, I doubled back. Got him right in the throat with a crowbar we’d stashed in the conduit panel. He went down hard, so much so that his skull cracked the floor and rolled into one of the slabs.”

“You mean…theslabs.”

“Yeah. The motion sensor slabs.”

Mark’s head jerks toward me. “That should’ve triggered the blast, right?”

“It did,” I smile. “Exactly like we planned.”

“Zane mapped out every sensor radius,” Terry explains.

I nod. “Every dead angle. Every cable route. Every slab tied to the foundation pressure plates. I found the schematics when I traced the old construction records my grandfather kept in his study. This place wasn’t built clean. It was retrofit.”

I drag a finger across the edge of the table, tracing invisible lines.

“They planted those sensors after the west wing was added. Not to trap inmates. That wasn’t the point. They were meant to warn guards as an early alert if anyone got too close to the dead zones.”

“Dead zones?” Mark asks.

“Sealed-off tunnels. Abandoned sublevels. Places the prison buried and forgot about. Places we didn’t.”

“So when the guard hit one—”

“The slab lit the first detonator. Security thinks it’s just an anti-tamper response. A scare tactic. But we’d buried our own explosives in the crawlspace days earlier. C4 wrapped in shrink foil, placed right above the vent plate. The pressure sensors blew the alarm, then ours followed. Took out everything in a ten-foot radius. Ceiling dropped. The blast hit the far wall. Took Jensen’s body with it.”

Mark stares at Terry. “But how did you survive?”

I answer before Terry can.

“There’s a bomb shelter.”

Mark’s brows shoot up. “In the basement?”

“In the foundation,” I correct. “Old Cold War vault. Never logged in any modern schematics. My grandfather built it into the original design—paranoia, legacy, whatever the hell you want to call it. Reinforced steel, rubber-lined seals, seven-inch-thick walls. No air vents, just an internal oxygen canister rigged to a manual valve.”

“Only room for one,” Terry says. “And I curled up inside it while the entire sublevel burned.”

“And nobody knew?” Mark asks.

I shake my head. “Not the warden. Not the guards. Not even the architects who drew up the later blueprints. It was never meant to be used. Which made it perfect.”

Mark lets out a shaky breath. “You buried a man. Lit your own explosion. And vanished through history like smoke.”

“Survival’s just death with better planning.”

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