Lying flat on his back, Donovan Caldwell stared at the empty upper bunk and counted his heartbeats. The prison was quiet now; a few men snored, others rustled in their cells, and the guy two doors down tapped the wall rhythmically, maintaining that maddening clicking noise. Donovan had thought it was some kind of code—maybe the inmate, Claude, was punching out some secret message to another con—but the truth of it was that Claude was just tapping out a drumbeat, the tempo of a song that ran through his head constantly.

At first, when Claude had been brought in and the sounds interrupted the inmates’ sleep, Donovan had been irritated. But over time he’d gotten used to the ticking. Now he almost found it comforting, which was saying something for this hellhole.

The smells in the cell block were the same as they had been that fateful, god-awful day Caldwell had been locked inside. Some kind of acrid cleaning solution used to wipe away the odors of sweat, testosterone, and yeah, fear. At first the collective smell of confined men had burned his nostrils, but like the clicking from Claude’s cage, Donovan had gotten used to the sharp ammonia smell of disinfectant mixed with the aroma of despair that clung forever to the walls of these cubicles.

Though it was long past “Lights Out,” a bluish-gray illumination slid through the hallways, a perpetual reminder that there was always someone watching.

He’d never gotten used to the half-light. Maybe no one did. He knew that some inmates tossed and turned on their bunks, though a few of the convicts, more than he would have thought, slept like babies through the night.

His head pounded, his heartbeat thudding with adrenaline as it raged through his body. Tonight was to be his last in this godforsaken place.

He thought of his sisters. Diana and Delta, gone for over a decade. Although the girls had been the light of his parents’ lives, Donovan felt nothing for the twins.

No grief.

No regret.

No anger.

His emotions for them were as hollow and empty as the polished floors of this prison. His sisters had deserved to die, even if they had died young. He’d never questioned that, but he’d never expected to be blamed.

In the next cell over, Henry was snoring like a buzz saw just as he did every night. The guy slept as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if the void of prison life didn’t bother him, as if he weren’t going to live the rest of his pathetic years in a tiny box, cut off from civilization, forced to reside in a community of robbers, thieves, rapists, and murdering SOBs. Then again, what did Henry care? He was in for taking an ax to his wife and her lover, a premeditated double homicide that had caught him two successive life sentences.

And yet the bastard slept.