Chapter 3 Makenna
THREE
MAKENNA
I stare out of the side window like a moody teenager. I don’t speak to him, don’t even look at him. I can’t. I’ll break if I do. The crushing silence filling the car is suffocating, and I let it smother us both.
He came.
Six days late, but he’s here.
His phone rings, muffled in his pocket. He doesn’t answer it. Doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
I cut my gaze to him. “Are you going to answer that?”
“No.”
Okay then… “What exactly is the plan here, Zane?”
He doesn’t answer. I’m not sure if that’s because he doesn’t have one, or because he knows if he shares it with me, he’ll freak me out.
He’s always believed his intensity is too much for me and that I need protection from his darker side, but he’s wrong.
I’m more worried about becoming a footnote in his life than what he keeps locked in a cage inside him.
“Are you just going to ignore me?” My words come out terse.
There’s a beat where neither of us move, and then he says, “You hungry?”
I blink. What the…? “You abduct me and then ask if I’m hungry? Do you treat all your kidnap victims like this?”
He growls low in his throat, more animal than man right now. “You’re not a victim. You’re my fucking wife.”
I scoff, unable to stop the nastiness from bleeding through the sound. “I’m not your wife. I’m a convenient pitstop between you playing with your biker friends and whatever you get up to when you’re not with me. I’m just the girl you fuck when you’re bored. Practically your fucking whore.”
He yanks the steering wheel so hard to the side, I gasp and brace against the dashboard. Holy fuck. The car skids, then jolts to a stop at the kerb.
I drag in a breath. Then another. My heart is thrumming like a drum beat. I barely have time to calm myself before he rounds on me.
“Don’t you ever fucking say that again.” I’ve seen Zane angry over the years, but this surpasses rage.
I don’t even have a word for what this is.
“You are not a fucking convenience or somewhere I park my dick when I’m bored.
And you sure as fuck are not my—” He breaks off every muscle twitching like he’s a frayed thread about to snap.
“Not my whore. Fuck me, Kenna. There’s no me without you.
Don’t you get that? You’re the only reason I fucking exist.”
It feels like he’s driven a knife through my ribcage. He doesn’t get to rewrite the truth. So many nights I lay awake in an empty, cold bed, wondering where he was. When he came to stay, we’d fall asleep wrapped in each other, but he’d be gone before the sun rose.
“You’ve been existing pretty well without me in your life, Zane.”
“Firefly.”
“Max. I haven’t been Makenna for a while now, which you’d know if you bothered to actually talk to me.”
“You don’t want me to call you the name you scrawled in hearts beside mine?”
He might as well have ripped open my chest with those words.
I’d gone through a phase when I was twelve, writing Makenna Grace Cooper on everything I owned.
Makenna felt like she belonged to Zane. Max was the girl hiding from fists and raised voices.
She was the way I coped when things got hard, a way to distance myself from what was happening in my life.
“I’m not a kid anymore, Zane. I don’t believe in fairytales.”
“This isn’t a fantasy, baby. This is our life.
” His fingers twitch, like he wants to reach for me, but doesn’t know if I’ll let him.
He sighs. “That name is armour, not your identity. You’re not that scared little girl anymore, firefly.
You don’t need to wear her like a shield. Especially not against me.”
Fuck. He always did know how to burrow under my skin, how to reach the parts of me I try to hide. And I hate that he’s right. It isn’t just protection, it’s who I need to be when I’m at my weakest. She’s my protection from the world.
“I never said I was afraid.” The lie tastes bitter.
“Then you don’t need her, Makenna.” His head dips so close I can lean up and kiss him if I shifted just a fraction. It’s so tempting. I’ve missed him so much. He cups my cheeks, warm and steady. “You can’t hide from your feelings, not even by changing your name.”
That cuts deep, a wound ripping through my soul. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
It is, but I don’t want to let down my walls for him. Not when he’s been so careless with the foundations already.
“You’re hiding. Max, Makenna—they’re not different people, baby. They’re both you—” He grabs me so abruptly I squeak in surprise. His eyes are focused on my hand gripped in his like a heat-seeking missile. “Where the fuck is your wedding ring?”
I blink, getting whiplash from the sudden change in direction, then lower my gaze to my empty finger. There’s still an indent from where it used to sit, like removing it wasn’t enough to sever what we have.
“Why would I wear something that proves our commitment to each other when you’ve made it clear you don’t want to be with me?” My voice cracks. I wish I was stronger, but I’m so tired of standing tall. I just want to stop.
He scrubs his jaw, a myriad of emotions rippling through him. “You think taking that off changes anything? You think it makes you belong to me less? A ring doesn’t make a marriage.”
“It doesn’t fix one either.” I swipe my damp cheeks. “Just sign the papers, Zane. Then we can both get on with our lives.”
He slams his palm against the steering wheel, hard enough to rattle the car. It’s like watching a volcano before it blows. “You’re not leaving me. I don’t care if I have to tie you to the fucking bed.”
I close my eyes, just for a second to ground myself. “Over forty percent of marriages end in divorce. You told me that when we first got married.”
“Yeah, Kenna, and sixty percent don’t. If you want a divorce, you’re going to have to kill me, because being dead is the only way we’re no longer married.”
Dramatic, but of course I should have expected him to say something like that. But where was that intensity on the nights when I was sitting home alone, crying and missing my husband?
He starts the engine and pulls back onto the road. I stare out the window, getting lost in the flashes of the streetlights as he drives. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t care either. I rest my head on the glass and let my eyes drift closed.
“Firefly?” I peel my eyes apart, disorientated.
Zane’s blurry face swims in front of me before he comes into focus. He’s crouching down in the open door, his brows tight, the only expression he allows to slip past his defences.
I straighten in my seat, feeling cold and groggy. Where the fuck are we?
There are no lights out here, no houses other than the stone cottage illuminated in the car headlights. It looks old, rustic. The kind of place you come to be forgotten by the world. Maybe that’s why he brought me here. To forget.
“Where are we?” My throat is scratchy and I cough to clear it.
“Somewhere we can talk.”
He cups my knee, his touch both grounding and painful. How can he be so close and yet a world away from me?
I should push him away, but for a moment I just let myself feel, imagine that everything is okay between us, and that my heart isn’t ravaged by my pain.
“I don’t want to talk.”
“I know,” he says, quiet and resigned, “but you’re going to.”
He unbuckles my seatbelt as if he thinks I’m incapable of doing it myself, then stands, offering a hand to me. I shouldn’t take it, but I’m so drained I don’t trust my legs to hold.
I let him help me out of the car, let him steady me when my knees try to fold, then I cling to him for longer than is right, considering I left him and ran without a word.
He peers down at me, the hard shell he gives the world softening. I desperately want to fall into his arms, to sob into his chest, but he’s not my safe place anymore.
I don’t know what my life looks like without him in it. But this… This isn’t living. It’s a slow death. It’s an erosion of everything I thought I had.
“I’ll stay tonight,” I say, as if I have a choice, “but in the morning, I’m leaving.”
It breaks me to say it. My brain rebels at the idea of giving up on our marriage, but he’s the one who checked out long before I did.
His throat bobs, and I swear his eyes brim with tears, but maybe I imagine it because his walls slam into place in the next beat.
“Inside.”
I swallow the barbs choking my throat and walk into the house.
It’s warm inside, silent aside from the hum of the appliances.
This isn’t a home. I don’t know what makes me think that, but it feels empty.
A shell. There are no photographs on the walls, no personal knickknacks on any of the surfaces.
It’s staged to look like it has a heart, but there’s no beating beneath the wallpaper.
I sink onto the couch like my legs have weights in them. He doesn’t say a word when I drag a blanket off the back of it, wrapping it around myself.
And I know he’s thinking the same thing I was a month ago.
Is this the end of our marriage?
Because I don’t know how we come back from this and, judging from the look on his face, neither does he.