Chapter 5
Zane
The fridge has been running on empty for almost two days now. It’s a cold little box of disappointment, just humming in the kitchen corner as if it has a right to judge me.
I stand in front of it with the door open, bare feet planted on the worn floorboards, one hand braced against the top of the door, staring at the sad remains of what Rainer stocked before he picked me up from those gates.
The bread and eggs are gone. The soup is a memory.
The chips—the ones with the red label that I’d always reached for first since I was eighteen years old, and that Rainer always kept in the second drawer of his office—are gone too.
Every last packet. Demolished sometime between getting out and whatever hour it currently is, consumed by a man who ate standing over the sink, without tasting a single mouthful, because apparently some habits don’t stay behind bars when you walk out of them.
They follow you home. They pull up a chair and make themselves comfortable.
I still eat fast. Still eat standing. Still sleep with one ear open for sounds that don’t belong, cataloging them before I’m even fully awake. Years of conditioning and two days of freedom, and still my body hasn’t figured out which to believe.
The fridge hums louder, as I stare at what’s left inside.
A wheel of cheese on the door shelf, wrapped tight in plastic. Something at the very back, wearing a green tint, that suggests it might have had ambitions of being food the last time I was a free man, but has since moved on to other projects entirely.
I close the door and step away.
Rainer locked up hours ago.
I heard the whole lockup routine from upstairs.
The roller door groaned down, metal complaining the whole way, as it does every time, as if it had never accepted that closing is part of its job.
The side door slammed into place because it sticks now, worse than it used to.
Then Rainer’s truck. The engine turned over twice before it caught, and then the sound of it pulling out of the driveway and moving down the street until I couldn’t hear it anymore.
Then nothing.
The workshop beneath me is quiet. The entire building is quiet.
Inside, it was never quiet. Not really. It had layers.
Men coughing in the dark. Someone praying under his breath in the bunk two cells down, every night without fail, the same words in the same order. Someone else talking shit to whoever was close enough to hear, because silence scared him more than any punishment prison could come up with.
Out here, the quiet is just… empty.
I’ve been sitting inside it for hours, perched on the edge of the bed with the lamp on and one of my old car magazines open across my knees.
The page is turned to an article about restoring a model I couldn’t give a shit about.
I’ve been staring at the same paragraph until the words stopped being words and became scratches of ink on paper that meant nothing.
All I could think about was her. Skylar.
Even the fucking air remembers her here.
I drag a hand down my face, as my stomach growls. Loud, demanding, and shameless. A rude little traitor operating on its own agenda, regardless of what the rest of me is dealing with.
“Yeah,” I say to it. “I heard you.”
It growls again.
“Needy bastard.”
I need to leave the workshop and find something to eat. The thought shouldn’t hit as hard as it does. It’s food. It’s a ten-minute walk, a transaction, and a walk back. Normal men do that shit all the time.
But normal men don’t have Griff slithering back into their lives the second the gate shuts behind them. Normal men don’t walk out of prison to find a debt waiting on the footpath like it never went anywhere.
His words move through my head the way all bad things do. Uninvited. Unhurried.
You owe us. That fight you bailed on lost us a shit ton of money.
My jaw locks.
And now you’re out, he said, as if all that time were an inconvenience I’d put him through personally. As if I’d chosen it.
There is no way in hell I’m going back to prison.
Which means I need to play it smart. Stay the fuck away from Griff’s side of town.
The noodle place on Carver Street where I first ran into him is off the fucking table.
Anywhere within five blocks of that side of town is somewhere I don’t go until I know more about who is owed what and how serious they are about collecting it.
The smart play is to order food for delivery. But I don’t have a card. That’s a problem for tomorrow. I need cash.
I look toward the back wall.
The money would still be there. Rainer wouldn’t have touched it. He wouldn’t go looking, and even if he found it, he’d leave it alone, the way he leaves everything alone that isn’t his. I move to the bed and climb onto my knees on the mattress.
The lamp beside the bed throws a yellow pool of light across the shelf I built when I was eighteen, using timber offcuts I found stacked behind the workshop under a tarp.
It’s nothing fancy. Nothing pretty. Just a square box I hung on the wall, made of wood and brackets, rough along one edge where I ran out of patience—a recurring theme when I was eighteen and everything felt like it needed to be done yesterday.
I remember Skylar looking at it. Arms folded across her chest, head tilted at that angle she used when deciding whether something deserved her full commentary.
“You built that?”
I leaned against the doorframe with my arms crossed, cocky as hell, because I’d built a shelf that hadn’t collapsed immediately, and considered that an achievement worth acknowledging. “Try not to swoon.”
She walked over to take a look at it. “It’s crooked.”
“It has character.”
“It has a structural identity crisis. Shame. You’d think hands that know their way around an engine could handle a straight line.”
I looked at her. “You jealous, Sky, that my hands were somewhere else.”
Fuck, I was a cocky bastard back then, but Skylar had a gift for taking a man’s ego apart by snapping it over her knee, and handing it back with a smile.
“Jealous?” she said, eyes cutting to mine. “Of a shelf you built with the same confidence you fuck with? No, Rivera. I’m impressed. It takes real talent to screw something that hard and still leave it unsatisfied.”
I told her she was welcome to admire my craftsmanship any time she felt the urge.
She looked at me, then smiled. “Rivera, if I ever feel the urge to admire something that thinks it’s bigger than it is, I’ll start with your ego and work my way down.”
She turned around and put her hair tie on the shelf without another word. Left it there like she hadn’t just spent three minutes critiquing it. Two days later, a pair of earrings appeared. Small gold hoops she swore weren’t hers, even though they sat in the same spot for three weeks.
The shelf never collapsed though.
I run my fingers along the underside until I find the lip of timber nailed in from below. The raised edge blends into the rough work, hidden in plain sight. A mistake if you don’t know where to press. A door if you do.
I press the right spot and the small panel drops on its hinge.
The tin is still there, old and faded.
I found it in Rainer’s skip years ago and kept it because it had a lid that sealed tightly and a shape no one would look twice at. Perfect for dirty money.
I pull it out and sit on the edge of the bed with it.
For seven fucking years this box remained here untouched.
I work the lid loose with my thumbs and set it beside me. The money sits inside, a neat roll held together with a rubber band, exactly as I left it. Tucked tight. Organized. The only part of my teenage life with any sense of order.
Every note earnt in places I don’t let myself think about for too long. The stink of blood, sweat, cheap beer, and men with good shoes who paid to watch poor boys hurt each other for sport.
I was eighteen, angry, and stupid enough to think I could use a dirty world without letting it leave fingerprints on her.
I pull out what I need for tonight.
Enough for food and a few supplies for tomorrow. I put the tin back in the small nook and press the panel back into place.
My wallet sits on the little table beside the bed where I left it. Black leather, worn at the corners, stitching coming loose along the top. I pick it up and flip it open to slide the cash in.
And there they are.
Both of them.
Folded flat behind the card slot, tucked into the crease where the leather folds against itself. Two scraps of paper that should not have the power to put a grown man on his knees.
My body goes still. Skylar’s handwritten notes.
I set the cash on the bed. My fingers are unsteady as I pull the first note out.
It is torn from whatever paper was closest at the time. Her handwriting races across it, fast and slanted, with the ink pressed harder in places, as if the pen had not worked properly.
You live like a raccoon. You’re welcome.
Something moves through my chest that I don’t have a clean word for.
That was Skylar’s love language. Insult first. Softness buried underneath. Care dressed as judgment so no one could accuse her of having a heart she wasn’t ready to admit still worked.
The second one waits behind it.
It’s smaller. A receipt, bent in half, the ink along one edge slightly smeared. I know what it says. I know every word. Every line. Every shaky admission she never would have said out loud unless the world was ending, and maybe not even then.
I unfold it anyway.
I’m not scared of you. I’m afraid of what I feel.
My thumb rests beneath the final sentence. I read it again. As if the words might change. As if the paper might grow merciful. But it doesn’t.
The next morning, I found that note in my jeans pocket. I shoved my hand in without thinking and felt the paper against my fingers. She had already left for school. I stood in the middle of the workshop and read her confession three times before my brain caught up with my chest.
That was the closest I had ever come to understanding what it meant to have something worth protecting.
Skylar had seen my rage. Had seen my fists, all the ugly parts I tried to hide behind swagger and smartass lines. She knew I could be violent and reckless. That I was one bad day away from ruining my own life because I had spent too long believing it was already ruined.
And she still said she wasn’t afraid of me.
God.
She should have been. And then I sat across from her in a prison visiting room and proved that she had trusted the wrong man.
My hand closes around the note, not enough to crush it.
The hunger that dragged me over here is gone. Packed up and left without a forwarding address, replaced by something heavier that settles into my ribs and with every intention of staying. I’ve never been good at naming feelings.
I fold the notes back along their creases. The paper knows exactly where to bend, finding the lines without any help from me. I slide them back behind the card slot, then tuck the cash in front of them and close the wallet.
For a long moment, I sit on the edge of the bed, holding it in both hands.
She likely still has the same number.
I still know it.
Every digit, in order.
All those nights in that cell, lying on a prison mattress in the dark, staring at nothing while the world slept without me, I told myself I would call her tomorrow.
Just to hear her voice. To know she was still out there somewhere, still breathing, still carrying that particular fire she was born with, a fire nobody and nothing had ever managed to put out.
Just once, so I could hear her say hello before I hung up and let her go again.
Then morning would come, and common sense would crawl back in. She was building some version of a life, and calling her would be selfish on my part. So I stayed gone.
Some men find religion in prison. They find God, purpose, or the particular peace that comes from accepting something larger than themselves. I got haunted by a contact I never dialed.
My phone sits on the kitchen counter. I can feel it from here, full of temptation and stupid ideas. I sit with it anyway.
What would I even say to her?
Hey, Sky. I’m out. Been out for two days. Still have your notes. Both of them. I still think about your scar, your mouth, and the way you laughed when you didn’t mean to. I still think about you every single day.
Start with sorry, you sick bastard.
One word. Just that. The smallest possible beginning. But sorry doesn’t even cover it. Sorry is a word you hand someone when you’ve bumped into their shoulder in a corridor. Not what I did to her.
I stand up.
The wallet goes into my back pocket, heavy as a loaded gun. Then I move over and grab my old leather jacket from the back of the chair, shove my arms through even though it is a little tighter now than before, and head for the stairs. The steel rings hollow under my boots on the way down.
I unlock the side door.
The cold night air hits me square in the face, sharp enough to wake the parts of me I wish would stay dead. For a second, I stand staring out at a world that continued moving without me.
Somewhere out there, Skylar is living the life I told myself I wanted for her. Without my name dragging behind her like a chain. Without my damage bleeding into everything she tried to become.
I step outside and pull the door shut behind me.
I close my eyes and tell myself the same thing I’ve told myself for years. She is better off without me. And maybe one day, if I say it enough, it will stop fucking hurting so much.