“How?”
He leans back in his chair, slow, tired, and stubborn as hell. The way he gets when the conversation is over in his mind, even if nobody else has caught up yet.
“Because I’m not paying him to spare you the consequences.” His gaze holds mine, steady and unshakable. “I am paying him so those men don’t own you until you die. If you go back into that ring for them, that debt never ends. They will find another fee. Another loss. Another reason you owe. Men like that don’t collect money, Zane. They collect people.”
I say nothing because I know he is right. Somewhere beneath the part of me that kept telling myself I could handle it, that I could fight my way out the same way I fought my way in, I knew it all along.
“You think I haven’t seen men get owned by people like Ricky? You think this is new?” Rainer shakes his head. “The faces change. The suits get better. The threats sound cleaner. But it’s the same old shit. They get one hook in you, then another, then another. Next thing you know, you are standing in a ring untilyour body gives out and they are still telling you there is more to pay.”
The lamp on the desk hums between us.
Rainer points to the tin. “You keep that.”
“I don’t want to keep it.”
“I don’t care.” He drops his hand. “You have a life trying to happen, Zane. Do not hand it back to the first bastard who comes to collect it.”
Chapter 20
Skylar
By the second time I check my phone, I tell myself I am not checking it.
By the fifth, I tell myself I am checking the time.
By the twelfth, I accept that I am a pathetic woman with a fully charged phone, a caffeine problem, and a heart that apparently has learnt nothing over the past seven years.
Zane said he would call.
He hasn’t.
That’s the problem or at least it’s the one I’m willing to admit to myself as I sit on the couch with my third cup of coffee going cold beside me and my phone face up on the cushion.
He has texted, though.
A few words here and there.
Enough to confirm he still has functioning thumbs and has not been hit by a bus, but the texts are short and clipped. One-word answers. Responses that arrive just long enough after I send something to tell me he read it, sat with it, and chose the smallest possible thing to send back.
Zane:Fine.
Zane:Yeah.
Zane:Later.
Those kinds of answers that technically say nothing is wrong yet somehow manage to say everything is wrong at the same time, which I do not particularly appreciate him deploying on me after I told him I loved him and that I was not running.
The thing behind my ribs gets heavier.
Yesterday morning, he left with my mouth still warm from his. He kissed me after he got dressed. Then again when he was about to leave and rushed back into the room, because neither of us has ever been able to end anything properly when our mouths are involved.
Cassie yelled from her room that if we started again, she would call animal control.
Zane smiled against my mouth as I almost died of embarrassment.
He looked at me before he walked away, and there was something in his face I didn’t know how to handle. Open,certain, and entirely unguarded. The face of a man who has stopped trying to manage what he shows me and has apparently decided to let me see all of it.
“I’ll see you later,” he said.
