Jailed Young Housewife Alternate Version

From behind the bars, Steve watched his wife give birth to Reggie’s child. It was a horror that stood even with death. Kaylah lay on the stained mattress, her body seized by contractions. Steve stood rooted, the iron bars framing the sight as they had every other.

The supply of cocaine and fentanyl was cut off once the pregnancy was confirmed—Torres wanted no defective product to raise. He switched her to methadone, which blunted the sharpest edges of the fentanyl withdrawal but did nothing for the gnawing absence of cocaine. She spent those first weeks trembling, her eyes hollowed out with a craving so raw it seemed to scrape her from the inside.

Now her legs were spread wide on the same mattress where Steve had watched her be drugged and raped night after night—before she started reaching for Reggie herself. Now she was adding her own stain to it.

Reggie stood beside her, holding her hand while she pushed. The baby was eight pounds, eight ounces—a healthy Black boy in every respect but one. Steve’s eyes caught on it immediately: the infant’s penis was already large, disturbingly like his father’s. For a dazed moment Steve mistook it for part of the umbilical cord.

The black box came back after the birth— vials, tourniquet, syringe.

“No, I don’t need that! Reggie’s my boyfriend. I’ve been doing everything he wants. Please, Reggie! Don’t let them stick me again!”

Kaylah put up a fight at first, wrenching against the man who pinned her arm, a low animal noise scraping out of her—but in a couple of days the struggle was gone.

The pregnancy hadn’t put much weight on her; what little it had, she shed in days.

Kaylah was loaded into the sedan’s trunk, limp and compliant from the last dose. Torres watched the lid close over her, a familiar twinge of possessive regret tightening his jaw. He’d grown used to the sight of her—broken, useful. But the pipeline never dried; there were always more.

Reggie walked free after the fine job he’d done assisting with Kaylah; he left without looking back.

Steve’s fate was the worst of all. He was handed over to López, accused of running Morales’ product, and in Juárez they took their time with him—nine days, by the count of the men who carried what was left out in a sack.

Kaylah and Reggie’s baby son stayed with Torres—a new project.

Kevin Miller and his wife Ashley stood in the two cells, wearing identical scrubs, the iron bars between them. The air tasted of rust and damp cloth.

Ashley stepped back from the wall, from the smell of rot and something older, worse. The single mattress in her cell was thin, blotched with stains—other people’s misery and suffering dried right into the fabric—and she shuddered...