Chapter 2 Makenna #2
“Don’t? You were gone. Just gone. Not a fucking word, not a conversation.
Phone turned off, empty drawers and this—” He reaches into his kutte and tosses a stack of papers on the bed.
They scatter, but neither of us move to gather them.
I don’t need to look to know what they are.
I spent hours reading every line before I left them on the kitchen counter and walked out of the life we’d built for years. “You want a divorce?”
This time, I’m the one who flinches. That word is dirty—one that was never meant for us. Tears prick my eyes and I blink to stop them from falling.
“What was I supposed to do?” I ask, my voice barely carrying across the room.
“I don’t know, maybe pick up the fucking phone and talk to me?”
I laugh, but it sounds brittle. “Yeah, because that’s worked out so well for me in the past. I told you I was dying in this marriage and nothing changed.”
He stares at me, as if he can drag my thoughts from my head, understand how we got to this place.
“No.” It’s firm. Solid. A wall between us.
I blink. “No?”
“This isn’t over, babe.”
I guessed he’d say that, prepared for it, but all the rehearsed arguments I had with myself didn’t include him standing in front of me vibrating with fury and hurt. “That’s not your decision to make.”
The way he tilts his head is calculating, and that scares me more than anything he could say. He’s thinking. Planning. Strategising.
“You think you can stop me from dragging you back?” He walks toward me, and it takes all my strength not to shy away. “You think you get to decide when we’re done?”
I swallow the lump in my throat.
“Just sign the papers and let me go,” I say softly.
He stares at them scattered across the bed like they’ve personally offended him. Like he’s contemplating setting them on fire. “No,” he says, like it’s the only word he has left in his arsenal.
He moves so fast I barely register him until he’s in my space and my spine is pressed against the wall behind me. I don’t fight as his hands bracket either side of my head, caging me.
Don’t breathe him in, don’t get lost in those dark eyes of his. Eyes that have seen too much, done too much. Sacrificed so much for me.
“You’re not giving up on us. I won’t allow it.” He cups my face, soft compared to what’s dancing in his eyes. His chest stutters as he drags in ragged lungfuls of air. “We’ve been through hell together, you and me. There is no me without you. You’re mine, firefly.”
My own chest heaves as I try to hold my shit together, but I can’t. My eyes burn, my throat too. I want to collapse into the bed and cry until I’m exhausted.
“I’m not yours. I’m your dirty little secret.
I’m your Friday night booty call.” Every word pierces like a bullet.
I don’t stop shooting though. I can’t now that I’ve started firing.
I shove his chest. “You made me yours and then treated me like I don’t matter.
You made me believe in the fairytale, Zane.
” The sob rips out of me, painful and fractured, like my heart.
“Sign the papers, let me go and we can forget any of this ever happened.”
It feels as if the walls are closing in around me. I just want it to be over, for the pain to stop.
“You think I could forget any part of us?” The hoarse rasp of his voice makes my tears fall faster. No, I don’t. Because I couldn’t either. He captures a tear from my cheek, wiping it away. “You’re not leaving me, Makenna.”
“You can’t make me stay.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. He’s already calculating how to prove that statement wrong.
He puts his shoulder to my belly and hoists me up like I’m a sack of potatoes. I squeal as my world tips upside down and his arm bands around my thighs to hold me in place. My vision rolls and bile rushes up my throat as I slam my fists against his spine.
“Put me down!”
“No.”
“Zane! I mean it!”
He doesn’t listen. He moves. The air changes from warm to cold, the carpet becoming tarmac. I kick my legs, try to fight, but he’s like iron. Was he always this strong?
“You’re fucking crazy!” I’m pretty sure I’m shrieking, but I don’t care about causing a scene, and clearly, he doesn’t either. “You can’t just drag me around like this!”
“Hey!” A voice calls from somewhere behind us. “What are you doing, man? Let her go!”
Zane’s steps don’t falter, but his growl of irritation rumbles through my chest. “Stay out of it.”
The guy’s brave, or stupid, but I hear him say, “I’m calling the cops.”
Zane ignores him and lowers me to my feet at the side of my car. The world spins for a second and he grips my biceps until my brain recalibrates. As soon as I’m steady, I pull away from him, glaring.
His nostrils flare, but I don’t care if he’s pissed. I’m fucking furious.
“Are you out of your mind?”
He leans into my face. “My wife is trying to leave me. What do you think?”
That title used to warm me, but now it feels hollow. Borrowed. “Zane.”
“Keys.” I don’t move. “Now, Makenna.”
I close my eyes for a second, taking a beat to find calm I don’t feel.
“What are you going to do? Force me to stay with you?”
“If that’s what it takes.” He says this without a hint of irony. As if he thinks this is the best and only solution.
I drop my hands onto my hips, something ugly curling in my belly. “I’m not a toy you can pull out of the box whenever you’re bored, Zane. And I’m done playing this make-believe life with you.”
“What fucking part of this is make-believe? That part where I put my ring on your finger and gave you my name? The part where we’ve been living together as husband and wife for years?
Or maybe it’s the part where I’ve come inside you hundreds of fucking times.
” I should cringe at the way he says that, but the possessive edge to his words stirs something within me, something I’m trying to ignore, but my thighs clench, of course they do.
My traitorous body responds to him at the worst possible time.
“If you think I’m signing you away like you were nothing to me then you’re wrong. ”
“But I’m not yours. Not anymore.”
The world feels like it sucks in a breath and he goes unnaturally still. I don’t know if I should speak or keep quiet. I’ve never seen him look this angry before. “Don’t you ever fucking say that again.”
Right. He’s pissed. But so am I. “I say it how it is, Zane.”
He huffs, his frustration at this argument clear. “You shouldn’t have run.”
Of course he doesn’t acknowledge what I just said. I swipe at my wet cheeks, not bothering to hide my upset.
He stares at every tear, like he’s mapping them in his mind and when he speaks this time he’s not as sharp. “Hand them over.”
He holds out his palm and when I don’t give him what he wants he hooks a finger into my belt loop, dragging me to him, and reaches into my jeans pocket.
His touch gentle and every brush of him against me makes my body light up.
My skin heats, my breath hitching until he digs them out.
I take a second to catch my breath when he turns from me and opens the car.
I hate that he’s so embedded in my skin that even pissed off I can’t stop from wanting him.
“Get in.”
“I don’t want to.” I sound like a whiny brat, but I don’t care.
He takes a measured breath. “Either you sit your arse in the car or I’ll put you in it.”
I grind my teeth, glaring at him. “I fucking hate you right now.”
But I climb into the passenger seat, folding my arms over my chest. He reaches in, tugging the seat belt around me, like I’m something precious he needs to protect.
My throat clogs and neither of us speak as he clips it into place, his hand brushing over my thigh.
My heart twitches and I hold my breath until his hand moves away.
This close to him, I want desperately to touch him, to tell him I love him and to beg him to love me back, but I don’t move. I can’t.
He lifts his gaze, as if he knows what my thoughts are. “You can hate me as much as you want, sweetheart, but you don’t walk away.”
I know he’s only saying this because he doesn’t want to lose me. Nothing has changed.
“I’m not the one who checked out on us, Zane.”
“I’m still here.”
He is, but it doesn’t undo the weeks of loneliness or uncertainty, the nights I slept with him inside me and the mornings I woke alone. It doesn’t magically erase the pain that sits in my chest constantly now.
“You only came for me when I left.”
He looks like I’ve punched a hole in his chest and torn out his still-beating heart.
His jaw works for a second, like he’s trying to calm the eruption building inside him. Then he does what he always does. He ignores the painful truth. “Don’t move.”
He closes my door and heads into the room he just dragged me out of.
I consider running, but what would be the point? He’d catch me. I’ll never outpace him and I’m too tired to try.
I watch the door until he appears a moment later, my bag clutched in his hand. His eyes meet mine through the windscreen, as if he half expected me to be gone.
I fold my hands in my lap as the back door of the car opens and he puts my bag on the back seat. Then he gets in to the driver’s side and starts the engine.
Before he pulls out of the parking area, he turns to me.
“Run again and I’ll hunt you to the ends of the fucking earth. You’re my woman. My fucking wife and the only way we’re done is if I’m cold in the ground.”