I stare back at the file.
“I don’t want to read it,” I say quietly.
“You might want to.”
“I don’t,” I repeat, sharper this time. “If there’s a reason, if there’s something behind what she did, then I want her to be the one to say it. I want to hear it from her. She owes me that.”
Cain leans back in his chair again. Nods once. “Fair enough.”
He doesn’t push; that’s the thing with Cain. He knows how to push you without ever making you feel it. He knows when to hold his ground and when to give you room to fall apart.
“I’ll keep the file,” he says, sliding it into a drawer. “When you want it, it’s here.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do if she lies to me again,” I say, quietly. “If she stands in front of me and makes me believe something that’s not true…”
“Then don’t let her lie,” Cain replies. “Look her in the eye. Ask the question. Let her answer. But be ready for the truth.”
I nod once. “You ever been in love, Cain?”
He smirks, almost fondly. “You know the answer to that.”
I lean in closer to the desk and look into his eyes. “Thanks for always having my back, even when you couldn’t.”
“I just wish I got you out earlier, I was late to protect you?—”
“If it wasn’t for you I think I would have died in there.” I stop talking when Cain smiles, because that smile only means one thing. “What?”
Cain leans back in his chair, voice calm. “Every person who hurt you, you’ve been killing, one way or the other. All your targets, every name I handed you, they were connected. They were linked to the men who made your life hell in prison. Some were brothers. Fathers. Uncles. Bankrollers. Facilitators. I never told you, but now they’ve all paid for it.”
At first, I just blink, his words don’t quite register. They echo, ringing in my ears.
I sit up straighter. “What… what the fuck did you just say?”
Cain doesn’t blink. “You heard me.”
My stomach twists, not from guilt, but from this unfamiliar weight of something hot and cold all at once crawling through my chest. I can’t believe this is what he has done for me.
“You’re telling me, every target, everyone I’ve taken out since I got out, they were connected tothem? To the ones who—” I don’t finish. I can’t. The air in the room shifts whenever I think of that place, I feel sick.
“Yes.” Cain nods. “Every last one of them.”
“You’re fucking serious?” I ask my voice quite still shocked with what he’s saying. “Youorchestratedit?”
“I mapped them out after the first week you were inside,” he says evenly. “While you were bleeding. While they were hurting you and no one lifted a finger. I started tracing lines. Who was protecting them. Who was helping them. Who was celebrating what they did.”
I grip the edge of the desk, knuckles white, breath ragged, the man has more information about my time inside than I do. I’m not even surprised he looked it all up, I just didn’t think he'd do anything with the information.
I remember the punches. The boots. The stabbings. The guards who walked away like I was trash bleeding out in the corner of a cell. I remember thelaughter. I remember waking up in the infirmary with broken ribs and bile in my throat, wonderingwhy the fuck no one came for me.
But someonedid.
Cain did.
“You handed me a fucking hit list,” I whisper, eyes burning. “And I didn’t even know it.”
“You didn’t need to know,” he says. “You needed focus. You needed purpose. But you deserved justice, Hayden. Even if it came with blood.”
“I killed them,” I mutter, like the weight of it just settled. “Ikilledthem. Without even knowing they were linked to what happened to me.”
