Chapter 19 #3
He continues walking, picking up his cold cup of coffee on the way.
“Rainer.”
He stops.
I hate the way his back looks at this moment.
Slightly bent. Older than I ever let myself notice. A man who has carried too much for too long, yet still turned around to pick up someone else’s mess because, apparently, that’s just what he does. What he has always done.
“That is over one hundred thousand dollars,” I say.
“I heard the number.”
“Then you know I can’t let you do that.” My voice comes out tight and low, barely held together. “I brought this mess to your door. To the one place that has never asked anything of me except to show up and do the work.”
The words scrape on the way out but I don’t care. The shame is too great to hold in silence.
“You should have let me go the day you found me in that skip,” I say. “You should have called the cops, shut the door, and moved on with your life.”
Rainer turns around slowly.
I keep going because stopping now would mean feeling everything I am saying and I am not sure I can survive it. “Instead, you kept me. You gave me work. Gave me somewhere to sleep. Gave me a fucking key and a way to pretend I wasn’t the same piece of shit I had been when you found me.”
His jaw clenches, but he does not speak, and somehow that is worse. It’s the silence of a man who is not going to argue because he does not think there is anything to argue about.
“And now look.” I point one hand toward the open roller door, toward the street beyond it, where Ricky’s car is probably still warm.
“Now my past is standing in your garage, in a suit, asking you for over a hundred thousand dollars, and you are acting like this is a bill you can just pay and file away.”
“It is a bill.”
“No, it’s not.” My voice cracks sharply through the workshop. “It’s my fucking bill.”
I hear my own breathing, rough and uneven, in the stillness of the workshop.
“I have cost you every step of the way,” I say, quieter now. “Every fucking step. Since the day I turned up here, trouble has been right behind me, and you just keep standing in front of it like that is your job.”
Rainer’s eyes narrow, but he neither moves nor says anything.
“Why?” The word scrapes out of me. It makes my throat burn. It makes something in my chest seem young and foolish and too vulnerable. “Why do you keep me around? I have brought you nothing but trouble. I’m not your son. I’m not even your own blood. You don’t owe me shit. So why?”
For a long moment, he just looks at me, then steps closer.
“Because you are worth it,” he says.
The words hit me so hard that I can’t breathe. I glance away because something on my face is about to give me away.
He doesn’t let me get far. “Zane, look at me.”
I hate that command but I obey it anyway.
His eyes hold mine, steady and certain. “Some people, you know they are worth it the same way you know an engine is worth saving. Damage is not the whole story.”
My throat goes tight.
“You are not trouble, son.”
Son.
There’s that word again. The one that lands in the middle of me and stays there.
“You are a man who was never given a fair start,” he says. “I know the difference.”
I stare at him.
There are moments in a man’s life when the right words find the wrong place inside him and split him open anyway.
This is one of them. Because I want to believe him.
Fuck, I want to believe him so badly it hurts.
But wanting to believe something and knowing how to live inside it are not the same thing.
My chest is too full and too tight right now that I have to turn away.
“Zane.”
I walk toward the stairs that lead up to the apartment.
“Zane.”
I stop at the bottom step because his voice has changed.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
I stand here for a moment with my hand on the railing before climbing.
When I walk through the door, my eyes go straight to the shelf against the far wall.
I cross the room and run my hand along the underside of the middle board until my fingers find the panel. It pops free and the tin waits inside.
I pull it out and carry it to the bed. The mattress dips under me as I sit. For a second, I just hold it, the metal cool against my palms, and stare at it.
I open the lid. The cash sits inside, tightly rolled and secured with rubber bands.
Nine thousand two hundred and forty dollars.
It looks pathetic against the one hundred and three thousand dollars Rainer has agreed to pay. A drop of water thrown at a raging fire. Still, it is everything I have and that means it’s where I start.
I put the lid back on and stand.
By the time I get downstairs, Rainer is in his office, hunched over the desk with the invoice folder open in front of him. The old calculator sits near his right hand. A pen rests between his fingers, unmoving.
He looks up when I stop in the doorway.
I cross to the desk and set the tin down in front of him. It makes a dull thud against the wood.
“There is just over nine thousand in there,” I say, keeping my eyes on the tin because I can’t look at him right now. “From fighting. It’s every cent I held onto. It is everything I have.”
Rainer looks at it but doesn’t touch it.
“I am going to pay back every cent you give him,” I say, compelling myself to gaze at him. “Every dollar. I don’t care how long it takes. Extra shifts. Weekends. Nights. Whatever you need from me. I mean it.”
He reaches out and rests one hand on the tin. For half a second, I think he is going to open it. Instead, he pushes it back across the desk toward me. The scrape of metal on wood is loud in the quiet office.
“Keep it.”
“No.”
“Keep it, Zane.”
“Rainer.”
His eyes lift to meet mine. They contain a warning, and something else resides under that warning. Something harder to read.
“I know you are good for it,” he says. “That’s enough.”
“It isn’t enough.”
“It is for me.”
I stare at him. People have taken from me my whole life. Time. Blood. Money. Choices. Nobody has ever pushed anything back.
I glance down at the tin, then raise my eyes back to him. “I cannot let you lose this place because of me.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes,” he says. “I do.”
“How?”
He leans back in his chair, slow, tired, and stubborn as hell. The way he gets when the conversation is over in his mind, even if nobody else has caught up yet.
“Because I’m not paying him to spare you the consequences.
” His gaze holds mine, steady and unshakable.
“I am paying him so those men don’t own you until you die.
If you go back into that ring for them, that debt never ends.
They will find another fee. Another loss.
Another reason you owe. Men like that don’t collect money, Zane. They collect people.”
I say nothing because I know he is right. Somewhere beneath the part of me that kept telling myself I could handle it, that I could fight my way out the same way I fought my way in, I knew it all along.
“You think I haven’t seen men get owned by people like Ricky?
You think this is new?” Rainer shakes his head.
“The faces change. The suits get better. The threats sound cleaner. But it’s the same old shit.
They get one hook in you, then another, then another.
Next thing you know, you are standing in a ring until your body gives out and they are still telling you there is more to pay. ”
The lamp on the desk hums between us.
Rainer points to the tin. “You keep that.”
“I don’t want to keep it.”
“I don’t care.” He drops his hand. “You have a life trying to happen, Zane. Do not hand it back to the first bastard who comes to collect it.”