“And then she was gone,” he finishes. “And I didn’t know what to do with it anymore.”
There’s no one here who needs that explained.
“They started leaning on me,” he goes on, the words coming faster now that he’s committed to them. “Told me to throw games or they’d expose everything. The pills, the prescriptions, all of it.”
From somewhere behind me, Jackson exhales in a way that sounds like recognition landing hard.
“That’s why Chicago,” he says. “Those goals.”
Zach nods once.
“I thought if I got clean, they’d lose leverage,” he says. “I thought if I cut it off, it would stop.”
It didn’t.
It led him straight back to them.
I don’t say it out loud. I don’t need to.
Lucian steps forward, his presence settling into the space between us before anything can tip.
“He fucked up,” he says, not looking at me when he says it. “That doesn’t make him your enemy.”
I don’t move.
“It gives us a line,” he adds. “So we use it.”
There’s a moment where it could go either way.
Then I let it go.
Not because I agree.
Because I don’t have the luxury of wasting anything that might get me to her.
“Message him,” Lucian says to Zach. “Set it again. We take him when he shows.”
Zach reaches for his phone. His hands aren’t steady, but they don’t need to be for this.
“I can do that.”
He types.
We wait.
The silence fills in around us, not empty but dense, the kind that makes the smallest sound feel out of place.
His phone buzzes.
He reads, then looks up.
“Already?” he says, reading it out as much for us as for himself. “You just had a supply.”
Zach exhales and types back.
“I need more,” he says under his breath as he sends it. “I used most of them.”
Another pause.
