Page 414 of Power Play

Then I put her name into my skin where no one could see it.

It was the most honest thing I’d done since I forced her to say goodbye.

I didn’t get the tattoo because I believed we would find our way back to each other. Hope had nothing to do with it. Charm belonged to the part of my life that changed the man I was, and leaving her didn’t mean I could pretend she’d never existed. She reached places inside me no one else had found. She loved me before I let El Cuchillo tore through everything we were, and I needed some part of her to remain with the man leaving Kimball Falls even if she never touched me again.

Six weeks of silence should’ve made it easier.

It hadn’t.

Charm hadn’t called. She hadn’t sent a message through Bliss or Aura, and Briggs’s phone no longer lit up with updates about whether she slept, ate, cried, or made it through another day without falling apart.

Her silence was different from mine. I used silence to make her feel the door closing.

She’d finally stopped knocking.

It didn’t hurt less now that her pain wasn’t constantly placed in front of me. I only didn’t have to watch it anymore. There was a difference, and I’d learned to hate it.

Rider spun the label on his beer without drinking it. Easton sat with one arm stretched across the back of Aura’s chair, his fingers resting against her shoulder. Bliss stayed close to Cade while Briggs occupied the seat beside mine.

Nobody had said much since I arrived because they were worried. Every motherfucker at the table was trying to hide it, and none of them was doing a good job.

“I’m moving to Milwaukee,” I said. “I’m not entering witness protection.”

Rider stopped turning the bottle. “Good to know. I was about to ask whether we’re allowed to keep pictures.”

“You don’t have any pictures of me.”

“I have hundreds.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“Most of them are shirtless.”

“That’s worse.”

A few smiles appeared around the table, but they didn’t last. Rider couldn’t drag us away from the reason we were there for longer than a few seconds.

Easton leaned forward. “We can drive out whenever you need us.”

“I know.”

“It isn’t far,” Cade added. “We already looked.”

“I know.”

Briggs watched my face. “You keep saying that.”

“Because you fuckers keep telling me things I know.”

“We’re making sure.”

“You’ve been making sure for six weeks.”

Briggs didn’t blink. “You broke four bones in your hand, drank enough mezcal to put yourself into a coma, disappeared to East Harlem, and came home three days later without telling any of us where you’d been. Excuse me if I’m still making fucking sure.”

The hospital confirmed the obvious that night: my hand was broken badly enough to require a specialist and surgery, but the specialist couldn’t see me until later that week. I’d already fucked up every part of my life that mattered, and there was only one place I could think to go while I tried to make sense of it.

I went home.