Page 10 of Monk

And I felt exactly the same as I had before. Maybe worse.

Empty. Hollow. Like I had just gone through the motions of being human without actually feeling any of it.

Ruby curled against my side, her hand sliding across my chest, as her fingers traced the tattoos that covered my torso. Her touch was light, exploratory, as if she were trying to memorize the patterns etched into my skin. The phoenix on my left pec. The skull wrapped in barbed wire on my ribs. The scripture I had gotten when I still believed in something. “Thatwas amazing,” she purred, her voice breathy and satisfied, still catching from the exertion. “You always know how to?—”

“Get out.”

She froze, her hand going still against my skin. “What?”

I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, my back to her. The mattress shifted as I moved, springs creaking in the quiet room. “I said get the fuck out.”

“But I thought…” Her voice had changed now, confusion mixing with hurt, with the first edge of anger.

“You fucking thought wrong.” I stood, grabbed my jeans from the floor where I had kicked them off an hour ago, and pulled them on. I didn’t bother with the button. The denim was rough against my skin, still holding the warmth of my body. “This was a fuck. That’s it. Nothing more. Now leave.”

I heard her move behind me. The rustle of sheets. The soft thud of her feet hitting the floor. The sound of her gathering her clothes, muttering under her breath. Words I couldn’t quite make out and didn’t care to.

“You’re such an asshole,” she said louder, making damn sure I heard her that time.

I didn’t respond. I just stood there with my hands braced on my dresser, white-knuckled, and stared at my reflection in the mirror mounted above it. The glass was smudged, fingerprints and dust obscuring parts of the image, but I could see enough.

Dark hair, longer than it should be, falling past my collar. Dark eyes that looked black in the dim light, hollow and empty. Ink covering most of my visible skin—arms, chest, shoulders, neck. A canvas of bad decisions and worse memories. Scars from fights I barely remembered, thin white lines cutting through the tattoos. A knife wound on my shoulder from a bar fight in Reno. A jagged scar above my left eyebrow from a broken bottle in Vegas. A face that looked older than thirty-six, harder thanit should have been, weathered by too many years of too much everything.

A stranger.

I had been looking at this stranger for seven years now. Ever since Lina. Ever since everything went to hell, and I stopped recognizing the man in the mirror.

Behind me, Ruby pulled on her dress. Some tight red thing that barely covered her ass, the kind of dress that screamed “take me home” from across a crowded bar. I heard the rasp of the zipper, heard her stumble slightly as she stepped into her heels.

She paused with her hand on the knob, standing there in my doorway like she had something important to say. Like she had figured me out in the many times we had done this dance.

“You know what your problem is, Monk?”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t move. Just kept staring at that stranger in the mirror.

“You’re dead inside. You fuck like you’re trying to feel something, anything, but you can’t. Because there’s nothing left in you. You’re just a shell pretending to be a man.”

The door slammed behind her, hard enough to rattle the frame, hard enough to make the mirror shake.

I exhaled slowly and turned away from the mirror, my reflection already fading from my mind like smoke dissipating in the wind.

She wasn’t wrong. Ruby had seen right through me, past the carefully constructed façade I wore like armor, straight into the emptiness that had taken root deep in my chest.

I walked back to the bed, my bare feet cold against the hardwood floor. As I sat on the edge, my phone buzzed on the nightstand. The vibration was sharp and insistent, cutting through the quiet like a knife.

I picked it up, already knowing who it would be before I even looked at the screen.

James Roberts.My WITSEC handler. My lifeline. My jailer.

I stared at the name on the screen, watching it ring once, twice, three times. Each vibration felt like an accusation, a reminder of everything I had lost, everything I had become in the years since I entered the program.

Then I set the phone back down and let it go to voicemail.

I didn’t want to talk to Roberts. Didn’t want to hear whatever bullshit update he had about the Marshals’ investigation or the latest threat assessment that kept me and my sister, Abigail, locked in this fucking program. Didn’t want to pretend that any of it mattered anymore, that I still cared about staying alive when living felt like this.

I just wanted to be left alone.

The phone buzzed again a moment later. A voicemail notification. Roberts was persistent, I’d give him that.