he roared, in the kind of voice that, outside these walls, had once made debtors wet themselves from fear.
Robert gave no answer. He only kept chewing his bread, staring past everything, as though the huge body blotting out the light in front of him were nothing more than an irritating fly.
That indifference did what no insult could have done. It cracked Michael’s pride straight down the middle.
He shoved him.
The tray jumped into the air. Soup splashed across the old man’s spotless prison uniform, staining the fabric in ugly streaks.
And then time seemed to stop.
The tattoo that froze the prison’s heartbeat
As already said, the old man rose slowly. But this was the moment when the story slipped into something darker. What he revealed when he rolled up his sleeve was not merely a tattoo.
The cuff of his gray uniform slid back, exposing his left forearm. The skin had loosened with age, but the ink remained a deep, merciless black, as if it had been driven into him only yesterday.
It was not a skull.
Not a naked woman.
Not one of those ordinary prison markings men wore to pretend they were legends.
It was an intricate geometric symbol: a two-headed serpent devouring an hourglass.
Michael had no idea what he was looking at.
Everyone else in the cafeteria did.
That mark belonged to a group known as the Timeless Ones. Back in the 1980s, they had not made their name through smuggling or petty theft. They were cleaners.
Cartels called men like that when someone needed to disappear without a trace—no noise, no witnesses, no body left where questions could grow.
They were ghosts.
And Robert had not been just another soldier among them.
The two heads of the serpent made that clear.
He had been the founder.
Up in the control tower, the captain of the guards went white as chalk. He snatched up his radio and barked an order rarely heard inside a maximum-security prison:
“Nobody fires! Repeat, nobody gets involved! If anyone lays a hand on the old man, we’ll all be dead by morning.”
Michael, still blind to the fact that he was standing in front of death itself, tightened his fist, ready to finish what he had started.
It was the kind of punch that could have shattered the skull of a man Robert’s age.
“I’ll teach you respect, you useless old bastard!” he shouted.
Then he swung.
A missile made of muscle, bone, and rage tore through the air toward Robert’s face.
What followed belonged to a speed no one in that room was prepared to understand.