“I’m not saying go back to him. I’m not saying let him explain himself or hand him your heart and ask if he wants another swing at it.” She holds my gaze and doesn’t let go. “I’m saying there is a part of you frozen in that visiting room. And you have been dragging it around for seven whole years, pretending it isn’t there.”
I close my eyes, because for seven years I told myself the past was locked away. Now I’m starting to wonder if I was the one in the cage this whole time.
Chapter 5
Zane
The fridge has been running on empty for almost two days now. It’s a cold little box of disappointment, just humming in the kitchen corner as if it has a right to judge me.
I stand in front of it with the door open, bare feet planted on the worn floorboards, one hand braced against the top of the door, staring at the sad remains of what Rainer stocked before he picked me up from those gates.
The bread and eggs are gone. The soup is a memory. The chips—the ones with the red label that I’d always reached for first since I was eighteen years old, and that Rainer always kept in the second drawer of his office—are gone too. Every last packet. Demolished sometime between getting out and whatever hour it currently is, consumed by a man who ate standing over the sink,without tasting a single mouthful, because apparently some habits don’t stay behind bars when you walk out of them.
They follow you home. They pull up a chair and make themselves comfortable.
I still eat fast. Still eat standing. Still sleep with one ear open for sounds that don’t belong, cataloging them before I’m even fully awake. Years of conditioning and two days of freedom, and still my body hasn’t figured out which to believe.
The fridge hums louder, as I stare at what’s left inside.
A wheel of cheese on the door shelf, wrapped tight in plastic. Something at the very back, wearing a green tint, that suggests it might have had ambitions of being food the last time I was a free man, but has since moved on to other projects entirely.
I close the door and step away.
Rainer locked up hours ago.
I heard the whole lockup routine from upstairs.
The roller door groaned down, metal complaining the whole way, as it does every time, as if it had never accepted that closing is part of its job. The side door slammed into place because it sticks now, worse than it used to. Then Rainer’s truck. The engine turned over twice before it caught, and then the sound of it pulling out of the driveway and moving down the street until I couldn’t hear it anymore.
Then nothing.
The workshop beneath me is quiet. The entire building is quiet.
Inside, it was never quiet. Not really. It had layers.
Men coughing in the dark. Someone praying under his breath in the bunk two cells down, every night without fail, the same words in the same order. Someone else talking shit to whoever was close enough to hear, because silence scared him more than any punishment prison could come up with.
Out here, the quiet is just… empty.
I’ve been sitting inside it for hours, perched on the edge of the bed with the lamp on and one of my old car magazines open across my knees. The page is turned to an article about restoring a model I couldn’t give a shit about. I’ve been staring at the same paragraph until the words stopped being words and became scratches of ink on paper that meant nothing. All I could think about was her. Skylar. Even the fucking air remembers her here.
I drag a hand down my face, as my stomach growls. Loud, demanding, and shameless. A rude little traitor operating on its own agenda, regardless of what the rest of me is dealing with.
“Yeah,” I say to it. “I heard you.”
It growls again.
“Needy bastard.”
I need to leave the workshop and find something to eat. The thought shouldn’t hit as hard as it does. It’s food. It’s a ten-minute walk, a transaction, and a walk back. Normal men do that shit all the time.
But normal men don’t have Griff slithering back into their lives the second the gate shuts behind them. Normal men don’t walk out of prison to find a debt waiting on the footpath like it never went anywhere.
His words move through my head the way all bad things do. Uninvited. Unhurried.
You owe us. That fight you bailed on lost us a shit ton of money.
My jaw locks.
