Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Nicky
The first thing I notice when I slip through the front door is how quiet the apartment is.
Not the empty quiet of an abandoned place, but the held-breath quiet of someone trying not to be heard.
My keys make too much noise in the lock, my footsteps too loud on the hardwood, and I wince at every sound.
I’m exhausted down to my bones, the kind of tired that comes from watching a man beg for his life and knowing there’s nothing you can do to save him.
My hands still smell like death despite the industrial soap I scrubbed them with at the warehouse.
My clothes reek of fear and blood and the particular stench of violence that clings to everything it touches.
All I want is a shower hot enough to burn the night off my skin.
But first, I need to see him. Need to know he’s still here, still breathing, still choosing to stay in this fucked-up life I’ve built for us.
I find Liam on the sofa, curled up so small he barely takes up a single cushion.
He’s wearing the same clothes from yesterday, my old band t-shirt and sweatpants that are too big for his thin frame.
His hair falls across his face in pale waves, and in the gray morning light filtering through the windows, he looks impossibly young.
Fragile. Like something that might shatter if I breathe too hard.
The throw blanket has slipped off his shoulders, pooling around his waist. He must be cold, he’s always cold now, like prison leached all the warmth out of his bones. Without thinking, I reach for the blanket, pulling it gently back up to cover him.
My fingers brush his shoulder as I tuck the fabric around him, and he jerks awake with a sharp intake of breath that cuts right through me.
His eyes snap open, wide and terrified, searching for the threat. When they land on me, he scrambles backward against the arm of the sofa, pressing himself as far away as the furniture will allow. The fear in his expression is so raw, so immediate, that it hits me like a physical blow.
“Sorry,” I whisper, raising my hands to show I mean no harm. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
But he’s not seeing me. Not really. He’s seeing whatever nightmare was chasing him in his sleep, whatever horror his mind conjured while I was out doing the things that make him look at me like I’m a monster.
Then he blinks, and his eyes focus. “Nicky?”
The uncertainty in his voice breaks something in my chest. Like he’s not sure I’m real, or maybe not sure he wants me to be.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice rough with exhaustion and something that might be grief. “It’s me.”
“You came back.”
It’s not relief in his voice, it’s surprise. Like he genuinely didn’t expect to see me again. Like maybe part of him hoped he wouldn’t.
“I said I would.”
The words hang between us, heavy with the weight of all the promises I’ve made and broken. I said I’d always come back to him, but I never said what condition I’d be in when I did. Never mentioned the blood under my fingernails or the way violence follows me home like a stray dog.
And part of me is hurt. Liam wanted this for me. He wanted me to join the mafia.
But that was the old Liam. The young Liam. The innocent Liam. And I am man enough to know that nobody is responsible for my life choices apart from me.
We stare at each other across the space of the living room, and it might as well be an ocean.
He’s pulled the blanket up to his chin now, using it like armor against whatever he sees when he looks at me.
His blue eyes are careful, guarded, like he’s trying to solve a puzzle he’s not sure he wants the answer to.
“Are you hurt?” he asks finally, and the question catches me off guard.
Because he’s still worried about me. Even now, even after everything, his first instinct is to make sure I’m okay.
It’s so fundamentally Liam, so much like the boy who used to patch up my scraped knees and worry when I was five minutes late, that I almost start crying right there in my own living room.
“No,” I say, though it’s not entirely true. I’m hurt in ways that won’t show on x-rays, bleeding from wounds that won’t heal with bandages. “I’m fine.”
His gaze travels over me, taking inventory. I know what he’s seeing. My dark clothes, now rumpled and stained, the tension in my shoulders, the careful way I’m holding myself like I’m trying not to fall apart.
And then his eyes land on my hands.
I look down and see what made his breath hitch. There’s blood under my fingernails despite my scrubbing, dark crescents that tell a story I don’t want him to read. On my shirt cuff, barely visible but unmistakably there, a small spatter of red that I missed in my hasty cleanup.
“It’s not mine,” I say quickly, because I can see the question forming on his lips and I need to answer it before he has to ask.
The words hit him like a slap. His face goes white, and he shrinks further into the corner of the sofa. The blanket pulls tighter around him, and I realize with a sick twist in my stomach that he’s not cold, he’s trying to make himself disappear.
He is scared of me. Scared of what I have done. And he is right. He is the one who has been to prison, but the things I have done are far, far worse. Liam never meant to take a life. Unlike me.
“I need to shower,” I say, because suddenly I can’t stand the way he’s looking at me. Can’t stand the space between us or the careful way he’s breathing, like he’s afraid the wrong word might set me off.
He nods without meeting my eyes. “Okay.”
I should leave. Should give him space to process, to breathe, to exist without the weight of my presence pressing down on him.
But I can’t seem to make my feet move. Can’t stop looking at him curled up on our sofa like a wounded animal, can’t stop wanting to reach for him even though I know he’ll only flinch away.
“Liam,” I start, but I don’t know how to finish. What do you say to someone whose world you’ve just destroyed? How do you apologize for being exactly what they feared you were?
“Just... go shower, Nicky.” His voice is barely above a whisper, but there’s something in it that wasn’t there before. Not anger exactly, but something sharper than sadness. “Please.”
So I go.
The bathroom feels like a sanctuary and a confessional all at once.
I strip off my clothes with mechanical precision, each piece of fabric another layer of the night I’m trying to shed.
The shirt goes in the hamper. I’ll have to burn it later, along with the jacket and probably the shoes.
Evidence of a life Liam should never have to see.
The water is scalding when I step under the spray, hot enough to turn my skin red, but not hot enough to wash away what I’ve done. I scrub at my hands until they’re raw, digging the soap under my fingernails, trying to erase every trace of violence from my skin.
But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
I press my forehead against the tile wall and let the water run over me, trying to wash away the memory of Dante’s smile as he worked.
The way the Russian had begged in broken English, promising information, money, anything to make it stop.
The sound the knife made going in, over and over, until the begging became gurgling and then blessed silence.
I’d stood there and watched it happen. Held the man steady when he tried to run. Driven the car that brought us there and the car that took us away.
My hands are clean, but they’ll never be clean.
When I finally turn off the water, the bathroom is thick with steam, the mirror fogged over so I don’t have to see my reflection. I dry off slowly, putting off the moment when I’ll have to face Liam again, when I’ll have to see that careful fear in his eyes and know I put it there.
I pull on clean clothes, soft sweatpants and a tee shirt that smell like fabric softener instead of blood, and try to convince myself that changing my clothes can change what I am.
When I emerge from the bathroom, Liam is exactly where I left him.
He hasn’t moved so much as an inch, still curled up small in the corner of the sofa with the blanket wrapped around him like armor.
But his eyes follow me as I cross the room, tracking my movements with an alertness that makes my skin crawl.
He’s watching me like I’m dangerous. Like I’m something that might strike without warning.
And the worst part is, he’s not wrong.
“Better?” he asks, and there’s something almost clinical in his tone. Like he’s conducting an experiment, measuring the distance between who I was when I left and who I am now that I’m back.
“Yeah,” I lie.
I hover near the kitchen, unsure whether I’m welcome in my own living room.
The space between us feels charged, electric with all the things we’re not saying.
I want to sit with him, to close the distance, to pretend that nothing has changed.
But I can see the tension in his shoulders, the way he’s coiled like a spring, ready to bolt if I come too close.
“Are you hungry?” I ask, because it’s easier than asking the questions that really matter. Easier than asking if he still loves me, if he can ever forgive me, if there’s any part of the boy I used to be that he can still see.
He shakes his head without looking at me.
“You should eat something,” I press gently. “You barely touched dinner yesterday.”
“I’m not hungry.”
The words are flat, final. A door closing between us.
I make coffee anyway, because I need something to do with my hands. The familiar ritual of grinding beans and measuring water feels almost normal, a piece of the life we were trying to build together before everything went to hell.
While it is brewing, I make Liam tea. When the drinks are ready, I pick up the two cups and carry them to the living room.
I set the tea on the coffee table within Liam’s reach, and then I settle into the armchair across from him, careful to maintain distance.
The sofa is his space now, his sanctuary, and I’m not invited in.
He doesn’t touch the tea.
We sit in silence as the morning light grows stronger, painting the apartment in shades of gold and shadow.
From here, I can see the city waking up.
People heading to normal jobs, living normal lives, carrying normal amounts of guilt and regret instead of the crushing weight that follows me everywhere.
“What happens now?” Liam asks suddenly, his voice so quiet I almost miss it.
I look at him, trying to read his expression, but his face is carefully blank. Neutral. Like he’s learned to hide his thoughts behind a mask, and I wonder if that’s something prison taught him or something I taught him just by coming home covered in someone else’s blood.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
It’s the most honest thing I’ve said in hours.
Because I don’t know. I don’t know how to bridge the gap between us, don’t know how to be the person he needs when I’m barely holding onto who I am.
I don’t know how to love someone who flinches when I touch them, don’t know how to build a life with someone who looks at me like I’m a stranger.
“I could go,” he says, so quietly I almost don’t hear it. “If you want. I could find somewhere else.”
The words hit me like a punch to the gut. “No.” The response is immediate, visceral, torn from somewhere deep in my chest. “No, I don’t want that. I want you here. I want...”
I trail off because I don’t know how to finish that sentence. I want things to go back to the way they were, but they can’t. I want him to look at me the way he used to, but he won’t. I want to be the person he chose as his best friend, but that person is gone.
“I want you to stay,” I say finally, because it’s the only truth I have left.
He nods slowly, but there’s no relief in his expression. No warmth. Just careful consideration, like he’s weighing options in an equation I’m not privy to.
“Okay,” he says.
But it doesn’t feel like a victory. It feels like resignation, like someone agreeing to serve a sentence they didn’t choose.
The coffee and tea grow cold between us as we sit in our separate corners of the same room, close enough to touch but separated by something wider than the distance between the sofa and the chair.
And I realize with a sinking heart that coming home isn’t the same as being welcomed back. That surviving the night doesn’t mean we’ve survived what it cost us.
That sometimes the person you love most in the world can be sitting three feet away from you and still feel completely, impossibly out of reach.