Chapter 4 Diesel
FOUR
DIESEL
I don’t take my eyes off her. I’m scared if I do, she’ll disappear again.
Not disappear—leave.
She left me.
Cold settles in my gut. I knew something was wrong.
I was gone too long, tied up in club shit and politics that I couldn’t untangle from.
I thought it would be okay. She was replying to my messages and calls like usual, then it stopped.
Silence. No responses, phone straight to voicemail.
When I got back to our apartment and found it empty, I was fucking terrified.
Three fucking days it took me to find her once I realised she was gone. Three hellish days of wondering if she was safe or hurt. Three nightmare days of not knowing if she was still mine.
She did well staying ahead of me. I taught my little firefly well, but I’m a bloodhound when it comes to her and I’m better at hunting.
Luckily.
I scrub my hand over my face trying to calm the restlessness vibrating through my body. I don’t like how pale she is, but it’s the look in her eyes that guts me. A defeated hopelessness.
How did I leave the most important person in my world bleeding out?
And how the fuck didn’t I notice how bad things were, even after she tried to tell me?
I take a breath, then another because the first one doesn’t fill my lungs enough. Makenna looks vulnerable in a way I’ve not seen in a long time. She’s curled up, trying to disappear into the cushions. I did this to her. Me. I’m meant to make her feel safe, not desperate enough to run away.
I should have known. Makenna always takes off when things get too much for her, but I’m the one she runs to.
At least, I was.
Fuck.
“I don’t feel important to you.” She’d said those words to me only a few weeks back. I didn’t know what she meant because it didn’t make sense to me. She’s the only thing that matters. There is no world that exists for me without her in it.
Everything I’ve done.
Every sacrifice I’ve made.
Every move I’ve taken in this game has been for her.
For us.
“Quit staring me like I’m a specimen.” Her words aren’t angry, just resigned. Somehow that’s worse.
She drums her fingers against the arm of the couch, frustration leaking through every movement. I’ve seen this look from her before. She’s backed into a corner, and if there’s one thing Makenna hates its having choice taken from her.
A flash of memory hits me. Another couch, another room. A different time and a younger version of her. She’d cut her hair to just below her chin. Her foster mother called it a fit of defiance. Her social worker said it was behavioural disorder. It wasn’t. It was the only thing she could control.
It sharpened her cheeks, but did little to hide the purple bruise spanning the length of her jaw—the one her shit head foster father had given to her. She’d been with the Robinsons then. They didn’t want kids, they wanted the money they got for taking them in though.
The blanket she’d wrapped around herself was threadbare, barely capable of keeping her warm. I can still recall how the room smelt musty and damp and the way her eyes lifted to mine, trust shining in them despite the mottled pattern staining her skin.
She’s not looking at me like that now. There’s a wary kind of pain mixed with frustration and anger.
I lean back against the wall, folding my arms over my chest, the leather from my kutte creaking as I move. I crave stillness to figure things out, but this isn’t the time to vanish into my own head.
I need to act fast.
She’s slipping through my fingers, and I don’t know how to keep hold of her.
We’re no longer kids, no longer scared of shadows, or bruises. And yet I feel more terrified than I ever have in my entire life. Because before it was us versus the world. Now, I’m standing on the wrong side of the line, willing her to step back over it with me.
“You need to eat.” Falling back into old habits is unsurprising. Taking care of her needs has always been my thing and routines comfort both of us.
Right now, that’s what we need. Comfort.
“I don’t want to eat, Zane. I want to leave.”
Makenna’s words cleave my ribs into pieces, and it’s made worse when she pulls the blanket up to her chin like a shield between us.
“I think we’ve established if you leave, I’ll find you.”
“Yeah, after six fucking days.”
I wince. That’s how long she was gone? I wasn’t sure when she left, but it means for three days she was messaging me like she was safely tucked away in our apartment, not jumping from hotel to hotel.
“You shouldn’t have turned your phone off. I couldn’t contact you.”
“That was kind of the point,” she mutters. “You can’t keep me here against my will.”
She’s wrong. I’ll fucking chain her to me if I have to.
I don’t say this. She’s scared and upset. Pushing her will make her retreat more, maybe even run again. I don’t know how to navigate this though. We’ve never been so opposed before.
“And where exactly are you going if I let you walk out that door, Makenna?” I ask.
“Max,” she corrects.
This time I bristle. “I’ve already told you I’m not calling you that.”
I won’t let her disappear into a persona she created to protect herself.
“Of course not. Why would you ever listen to anything I want?”
Fuck me. What the hell do I say to that? I clamp my mouth shut and she doesn’t offer anything either.
The silence is wrong. Oppressive in a way that makes my mind feel too loud. I want to wrap her in my arms, tell her I’m sorry for everything, even the things I might do in the future—but I’m scared to say the wrong thing.
“You know that man at the hotel has probably called the police, right?”
She says it as if I’m supposed to care. I don’t.
“Did you even have a plan?” I can’t resist asking, because I know she won’t have.
Working out the details has never been her strongest quality.
“I mean, were you just planning to bounce between hotels until you ran out of money? Because that’s not a life, babe. ”
Her eyes roll like a petulant teenager. “And being in a loveless marriage is?”
I grind my teeth together. Loveless? That’s what she believes? That there’s nothing left between us? She might as well have poured paraffin on the fire already smouldering inside me.
“We are not in a loveless marriage,” I growl. My tone cuts like glass.
She doesn’t get to rewrite our history or change our story just because she’s pissed at me.
“Aren’t we?” She sits up slowly, clutching the barrier of fabric around her so tight her knuckles whiten.
“What would you call this then?” Before I can answer, she continues, “What does it matter anyway? Love isn’t real.
It’s just chemicals the brain is too stupid to realise are a trick to make people procreate, right? ”
I wince as she throws my words back at me, words I’d said when I was younger—dumber. Before I understood what it felt like to fall so deep into another person there’s no start or end between us.
I believed it back then. Of course I did. From the moment I took my first breath I’d never known love or affection. I grew up in shadows, in pain and fear. Makenna was the first person to really see me, to care about me when no one else did. To make me feel.
When I first met her, I hated the world. I wanted to burn it all down, but then she taught me how to let good things slip into those spaces I’d kept locked away.
“I was an idiot when I said that,” I admit.
Her eyes slip shut. “You’re not an idiot, Zane. You’re a beautifully brilliant man who I love with every beat of my heart, but we both know this marriage has been over for a long time.”
Those words land like a detonation. No. I refuse to believe that.
I can’t think without her, can’t breathe when she’s away from me.
I haven’t slept fully for three days knowing she was out there without me.
My heart didn’t beat properly. My skin felt too tight.
My thoughts were erratic and muddled. It felt like I’d lost a piece of me. The most important piece of me.
But I don’t know how to put that into something she’ll understand.
So I repeat my earlier question. “What do you want to eat?”
There’s a beat of silence and then she huffs. “I don’t want anything.”
I ignore her and move into the kitchen. She’ll be hungry. She likes to pick, to snack. She eats when she’s stressed and right now, she’s at critical level.
There are packets of dried food, a few tins, crisps stuffed in the back of the cupboard that look like they’ve been there long enough to become sentient.
I accused her of not having a plan, but what the fuck is mine? Keep her locked up here forever? Demand she love me? Fuck. I tear my fingers through my hair, trying to breathe through the panic swelling inside me.
Usually I know every move before it happens and I plan for every possible outcome, but this… this has blindsided me.
I steel my spine. I’ll put it right. I have to. There’s no other choice.
I head back into the room to tell her we need to take a trip to the nearest supermarket, but my footsteps falter.
The room is empty.
The blanket she pulled around herself is pooled at the end of the couch, and the front door is open.
A cold wind sweeps through, settling deep in my bones, but it’s nothing compared to the fire licking along my veins.
She ran. Again.
My heart lurches into my throat, my feet moving before I even think about it.
No, no, no.
It feels like someone has a hand wrapped around my throat as I stumble out into the darkness, ready to chase her down.
And then I stop.
Makenna’s sitting against the low wall in front of the house, her knees drawn to her chest, her head resting on top. Even with half her face in shadow, I can see how sad she looks.
But she’s still here, and that says everything.
She lifts her gaze as I try to calm the racing beat inside my chest.
“I thought you’d —”