Incarcerated
Copyright © 2025 by T.K Wright
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the author's written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Vincenzo De Marco
I’ve waited a hundred years.
But I’d wait a million more for you.
Nothing prepared me for the privilege of being yours if I had only felt the warmth within your touch.
If I had only seen how you smiled when you blush.Or how you curl your lip when you concentrate enough
Well, I would have known what I was living for all along, what I was living for. Your love is my turning page.
Where only the sweetest words remain
Everything is a cursive line. Every touch is a redefining phrase: I surrender who I’ve been for who you are. Nothing made me stronger than your fragile heart.
...
You are still here, why?
My heartbeat pounds so loudly it drowns out everything else in the darkness. It does not feel like proof of life. It feels like an accusation, as if my body itself is asking a question I have no answer for.
That night comes every time I close my eyes. These are not memories or distant dreams, but vivid and agonizing replays. I see the way sudden flames bloomed against the cold rain. I hear the horrifying way twisted metal screamed as it folded in on itself like a dying beast. Isabella’s voice was hoarse and desperate, tearing itself apart as she screamed my name from inside the inferno. Her voice was louder than the shrieking sirens. Her voice was louder than gunfire and louder than anything that ever claimed to be holy in this world.
There is smoke in my lungs even now. I smell the foul stench of burning rubber. I taste iron blood coating my tongue, and the bitter taste never leaves my mouth.
I wake with my fists clenched tight and my nails biting deep into my palms. My breath is trapped somewhere between a scream and a prayer I stopped believing in months ago.
It has been four months and two weeks since my world ended. Four months and two weeks since Isabella was stolen from me, and since our unborn son died with her in the flames.
Rikers Island smells like mould, harsh bleach, and a stale iron stench of violence that never quite leaves the concrete walls. The New York legal system tried to bury me beneath its vast bureaucratic weight. Federal Agent Allison Parker brought the full hammer of the Southern District of New York down on my neck. The ambitious prosecutors at 100 Centre Street and the federal courthouses in Foley Square argued relentlessly that I was an extreme flight risk and an active threat to public safety. Under New York Criminal Procedure Law, they secured an order of remand without bail. They threw me into a high security block at Rikers while they tried to build a bulletproof Federal RICO indictment to lock me away for the rest of my natural life.
They thought a concrete cage would force a guilty plea. They did not understand who they were dealing with.
Uncle Remy and Ricardo spent months picking the prosecution case apart piece by piece. They filed aggressive Fourth Amendment suppression motions. They attacked the illegal search and seizure tactics Parker used when her agents raided the burned estate grounds without proper judicial oversight, successfully destroying the chain of custody on every piece of physical evidence. Remy battered the District Attorney office down until the grand jury RICO charges completely collapsed under their own weight. They left the state with only a minor weapons possession charge carrying credit for time served, strictly conditioned on mandatory court-appointed psychiatric evaluations before my discharge.
When I first arrived at this facility, the inmates tested me.
The first attempt came three days after my intake. A man with more unearned confidence than sense wielded a crude weapon fashioned from melted plastic and razor blades. He slipped in close during movement hour, aiming for a reputation rather than using tactical precision. He learned quickly how little a reputation mattered when I disarmed him, broke his wrist, and sliced his face open with his own weapon. The second attempt came a week later, when a coordinated group decided superior numbers would succeed where one man had failed.
They were completely wrong.
I didn’t need to call in favours. I made an example of every single one of them in open view, beneath the flickering fluorescent lights and in front of bored guards who understood exactly who I was and what intervening would cost them. After that brutal display, the message carried itself through the cell blocks. Silence is the most efficient kind of authority.
By the end of it, no one tried again. They learned my name in here.
Not De Marco. Not Don.
Víbora de la mar.
It followed me in on whispers, carried by men who saw me fight in the underground rings at the depths of the prison, where blood salted the floor and only the lethal survived. A serpent from the sea. Fast and deadly when provoked.
By the third month, my entire cell block ran on my unspoken rules. Men learned to read the shift in the air around me. They knew when to step aside into the shadows. They knew when not to look at me for too long. My body transformed as prison layered dense and hard muscle over my consuming grief. Black ink stretched deep into my skin, covering more of my chest and arms with detailed tattoos of weeping saints, ruthless sinners, old family vows, and names I would never forget.
Ricardo ensured the warden understood the full price of my comfort and cooperation. I do not have a cellmate to bother me or spy on my habits. I reside in a spacious private room at the quiet end of the high-security wing. The guards look the other way when my specialized deliveries arrive twice a week. I have my own working shower and a porcelain toilet instead of cold metal. A small fridge hums quietly in the corner, kept stocked with cold water, fresh fruit, and espresso. Heavy free weights and a leather punching bag hanging from a reinforced ceiling beam. A comfortable leather reading chair sits directly under the caged ceiling light, surrounded by orderly stacks of books on advanced psychology, military strategy, classical philosophy, and legal theory.
I read constantly in the silence of my room. I hit the heavy punching bag until my knuckles bleed and my shoulder joints scream in protest.
I sit up slowly on the edge of my bed, feeling the thick scabs across my bruised knuckles split open once more. Warm blood seeps free and trickles down my hand. I welcome the sharp sting because physical pain is honest. Physical pain never lies about what it is.
Nothing matters anymore in this broken world except her.
I carry Isabella inside me like an open wound that never closes. I repeat the only truth I have left, over and over in the quiet hours. Dolcezza.
Dr. Murphy calls my mental state latent homicidal ideation. These mandatory court-ordered therapy sessions are a strict condition of my release, personally signed off by Agent Parker herself in hopes of finding a reason to keep me locked away. Dr. Murphy is professional, highly observant, and far too young for a dangerous job in a facility like this.
"You have experienced compounded trauma," she tells me during our private session, her silver pen hovering over her clipboard as she watches my face. "You have loss layered on loss, and extreme violence reinforced by prolonged isolation and confinement."
I meet her sharp gaze across the small table without blinking.
"And yet, you remain remarkably functional," she continues in a quieter, more thoughtful voice.
"I am still breathing," I reply smoothly to her statement. "That is not the same thing as being functional, Doctor."
She shifts uncomfortably in her chair, suddenly far too aware of the small space between us and the absolute coldness in my posture. This version of me feels nothing for the living.
My family visited me whenever the legal team could arrange special clearance. Nonna brought blessed rosary beads and fresh Italian dishes, weeping quietly every time she saw the coldness in my eyes, desperately trying to pray me back into the soft man I used to be before the explosion. My father stood stoically beside her during every visit, looking like a man carved entirely out of disappointment and guilt. He could never bring himself to look me in the eye for long.
Victoria arrived fresh from her travels abroad, marching into the visitor center with sharp determination. She had cupped my face between her warm hands, looked directly into my soul, and promised me that she was home now to help clean up the blood and rebuild everything that had been broken. Damien and Ricardo visited most frequently, keeping the De Marco family's vast operations stable and profitable while I was locked away from the streets.
Everyone outside these high walls thinks the cage contained me. They do not realize that the prison only kept the city safe from what I am about to do.
