“I fucking remember.”
Her eyes shine, and she hates it. “You think I need you to prove you’d bleed for me? I already know that. I’ve always known that. That was never the problem.”
“Then what was the problem?”
“You never knew how to live for me.”
That one goes straight through my chest. Clean hit. No warning.
Her voice drops. “I thought you were going to hit him. I thought I was going to stand there and watch you fuck everything you have been trying to rebuild, and I could not… I could not watch that happen again.”
I stare at her.
She blinks fast, furious with herself. “And I can’t do that again. I can’t watch them take you away again because some asshole knew exactly which buttons to push.”
There are a hundred things I could say right now, most of them shit.
So I say the only true one I have.
“I am not asking you to forgive me.”
“Good.”
“I am not asking you to forget, Sky.
“Also good.”
I keep my feet planted in the kitchen because, for once in my life, staying still might matter more than swinging.
Skylar looks at me for a long moment.
Then she says in a lower voice, “You cannot do that to me again because you think prison happened only to you. It happened to me, too, Zane.”
The words hit hard enough to crack bone.
She swallows but doesn’t glance away. “You went inside and I was left out here with the pieces. God, I was so alone and broken, Zane. And so fucking scared all the time because I didn’t know if you were safe and I didn’t know if you hated me for it.”
I cannot move. I cannot speak.
I just stand here like a complete idiot, letting her words go through me and do what they need to do, which is take apartevery version of the story I have been telling myself that she was fine now that I let her go.
“So when I saw your hand around Damien’s throat, I thought you were going to leave me again.”
Fuck. That one guts me.
A tiny, broken breath leaves her. Her eyes search my face and I let her. I stand there and let her look at every ugly thing she already knows exists. The temper. The damage. The man who wants to be better but still has blood under his instincts and proof that wanting better and being better are not always the same fucking thing.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” she says.
“I love you,” I say.
Her whole body stills and the apartment goes dead quiet.
She stares at me as if I have just pulled the floor out from under her feet and she has not yet decided whether she is falling or flying.
“Don’t,” she whispers.
“I do.”
