Chapter 1
Zane
The prison gates open as if the bastards have changed their minds about letting me go.
They groan first.
Metal dragging against metal, teeth grinding through rust, the whole thing shuddering in protest, as if it resents this as much as I do. As if it already knows something I don’t. The hinges scream, and the sound crawls up my spine and buries itself there, familiar in the worst fucking way.
Seven years of that sound.
Locks, latches and heavy doors swinging shut behind me. My body still braces for it. Still waits for the clang that means you’re not going anywhere.
For seven years, freedom was something other people had. Something I remembered in fragments.
Wind on my face. Grease under my nails from a car engine I was working on at eighteen, thinking I was building something toward a life. The smell of rain on hot concrete. A rooftop at dusk, rusted tin burning through my jeans. A girl with fire in her eyes and a mouth sharp enough to make me bleed, who laughed once and cracked something open in my chest that I spent seven years trying to seal shut.
Now the gate is open, but I don’t move.
My boots remain planted on the cracked concrete.
The air is different out here.
It comes at me from all sides, with no walls to break it, and my lungs don’t know what to do with that much of it. I breathe in slowly. Chest tight.
The officer beside me clears his throat. He’s impatient, ready to tick me off his list and move on to the next poor bastard.
“You’re free to go, Rivera.”
Free.
The word feels off.
I roll it around in my mouth and let it sit on my tongue.
That word should crack something open inside me. It should mean air. Space. A world big enough to breathe in without measuring the distance between your bunk and the door out of habit, out of instinct, out of the particular brand of paranoia you develop when you’ve been caged long enough.
It should feel like relief, but instead it sounds like a trap. A trick dressed up as mercy that watches you walk out just to clock how long it takes before you crawl back.
I glance at the officer. There isn’t much left of me that knows how to smile politely. Prison carved that shit out early, stripped me down to bone and bad temper, then handed me back the kind of silence people mistake for control.
I step forward, the sun hitting me full in the face.
Fuck. It’s too sharp.
My eyes burn, and for half a second I almost laugh, because that would be the fucking joke, wouldn’t it? To survive seven years inside only to be taken out by sunlight.
My skin feels too tight over my bones. My shoulders are broader than they used to be, my arms harder, my chest thickened from years of pushing iron because the alternative was letting my thoughts eat me alive.
I used to fight because rage needed somewhere to go. In prison, rage became routine. Push-ups until my muscles shook. Pull-ups until my palms split. Sit-ups on cold concrete while the night pressed its ugly mouth to my ear and whispered her name.
Skylar.
No.
Not here.
You will not fall apart at this fucking gate. Not with the officer standing two feet away, pretending he isn’t watching. I didn’t survive seven years with her ghost lodged beneath my ribs just to fall apart before I even make it to the fucking parking lot.
