Brock Kniles ~upd~ | Ultimate |

He sat on the edge of his bunk, a man built like a failed fortress: broad shoulders slumped, knuckles a constellation of faded scars, and eyes the color of rusted chrome. At forty-seven, Brock had been inside for nineteen years—six for aggravated assault, thirteen more for the prison riot where he’d used a floor buffer cord to strangle a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who’d tried to claim his commissary. The Brotherhood never forgave him. The Latin Kings didn’t trust him. The regular cons just feared the hollow way he laughed.

Dunleavy, crying, took the letter. He tucked it into his waistband as the guards’ whistles shrieked down the corridor. brock kniles

Brock had felt something he hadn’t felt since he was nineteen, standing over his father’s unconscious body with a tire iron: hope. And hope in Rookwood was a death sentence. He sat on the edge of his bunk,

Tucked beneath his mattress was a composition notebook. Not the usual kind—no pornography sketches, no gang hierarchies, no escape plans scrawled in urine and Kool-Aid. Brock’s notebook contained poems. Sonnets, mostly. Petrarchan, Shakespearean, the occasional villanelle. He’d discovered Shakespeare in the prison library during his fifth year, smuggled out The Sonnets inside a laundry bag. For a man whose every waking hour was a negotiation for violence, the rigid architecture of fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, and a volta became his religion. The Latin Kings didn’t trust him

Brock stood up. He was slower than he used to be, his left knee shot, his right hand missing half its pinky from a fight over a bag of chips. But he still had the mass of a man who’d spent two decades lifting cinder blocks in a cage. He reached under his mattress—not for the notebook, but for the plastic spork he’d sharpened against the concrete floor for three months.

The rain over Rookwood Penitentiary fell in greasy, vertical sheets, washing week-old grime from the exercise yard’s cracked concrete. For the men in D-Block, the rain was a blessing—it meant no yard time, no shanks baked from melted toothbrushes, no forced hierarchy under the watchtower’s dead eye. But for Brock Kniles, the rain was an insult.

“Kniles,” Harlow said, flicking a shank made from a melted toothbrush. “Hand over the notebook. And the letter.”