Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Miranda
The bed smells like him.
That’s the first thing I notice after the door slams. The echo of it rattles through the walls, and then the house goes quiet.
I’m left lying in his bed, in his room, staring at the ceiling of a house I was never supposed to be in, breathing in the leather-and-something scent of a man who just told me, very clearly, that I am a problem he is done solving.
I don’t cry. I don’t have it in me.
That’s the second thing I notice. The absence of feeling.
Like someone reached in and turned a dial all the way down to zero, and now there’s just this gray quiet where the pain should be.
I’ve felt it before. The last time was in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, a doctor’s voice somewhere above me, and the slow realization that my mother was gone and I was the only one left.
I thought I knew what losing everything felt like. Turns out it comes in more than one form.
The job. The hospital. The contract. The debt that never gets smaller no matter how many shifts I work, no matter how many things I give up to throw money at it. My apartment, which was barely an apartment. My mother, two years ago. Everything I’ve ever tried to hold on to has found a way to leave.
And now this.
I stare at the ceiling and think about Grayson’s face right before he walked out.
I always knew that I was someone that was easily abandoned.
I’ve never had great luck with depending on people.
So when did I start counting on Grayson?
Why did I let him force his way into my life?
Maybe because apart from Brooke, he was the first person to pay attention to me, to worry about me.
The stupid, foolish part of me thought that meant something.
That part of me forgot my place in this world.
His cold voice sounds in my head again, and I stare blankly at the ceiling.
The worst part is I don’t even have the energy to be angry about being wrong.
I just feel it settle into me the way cold settles into a room when the heat goes off.
This is the part where I usually get up.
Get moving, get practical, find the next step and take it.
That’s what I do. That’s all I’ve ever done.
I lie here and wait for it to start.
It doesn’t.
I’ve run out of reasons to fight back. That’s the truth of it. I’ve been rebuilding the same rubble for two years, and I’m tired, but the rubble is still there, and I don’t know what I’m rebuilding it toward anymore.
I tried so hard. I tried to do everything right, and I still keep losing.
The future I had weakly clung on to, I can’t see it anymore.
When I think about it, all I feel is despair.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who to turn to.
What I do know is that I have nothing left.
I’ve wrung myself dry fighting and struggling. I just want to quit now.
I should get up.
It takes effort to move, but I force myself to get out of bed.
There’s no destination in my head. Just the understanding that I can’t stay in this room. I make it to the door and then to the landing, and I take the stairs one at a time with my hand on the rail, not thinking past the next step because that’s all I can manage right now.
An older woman is in the kitchen. She turns when she hears me, and the wooden spoon in her hand stops moving. She’s familiar for some reason, but I can’t put a name with her face, nor do I have the strength to try.
“You should be in bed,” she says, concerned.
I stop in the doorway, leaning against the doorway. “I need a car. Could you book me a taxi or something?”
She sets the spoon down, her brows knitting together. “Mr. Wolfe isn’t back yet. Are you sure you don’t want to wait for him?”
“He’s told me to leave.” My vision is blurring from the pain, but I sink my teeth into my tongue to focus. “I need a car to this address.”
I give her the address of a downtown office, the one place I never wanted to set foot in again. “I don’t have any money, though.”
“It’s fine,” she says and picks up her phone. “I’ll call you a local service that we use sometimes. We have a tab with them.”
I lean against the doorframe while she makes the call. I don’t dare sit. This isn’t my place. I’ve inconvenienced the owner of this house enough.
I look at the countertop, trying to stop my eyes from searching for the young child who’s carved a space in my heart. I have to stay away from Ethan.
“Twenty minutes,” Linda says, hanging up.
“Thank you.”
She picks up her spoon and sets it back down. “Can I get you something to eat or drink?”
“No, thank you.” I look around. “I’ll go wait by the door.”
“Would you like a change of clothes?”
Her question has me looking down at my bloodstained shirt, and I’m suddenly reminded of the two goons in my apartment, the way they had beaten me. This is my blood. My injuries should have been worse given how messed up my clothes are.
But I can’t find it in me to take one more thing from Grayson.
I shake my head. “No. I’m fine.”
I go sit on the bench by the door. Through the narrow window beside it, I can see the drive, the tree line at the edge of the estate, the sky gray and low.
I don’t know why I gave Kozlov’s address.
I haven’t thought about it, and I don’t intend to.
Some part of my brain is still running on instinct even when reason has packed up and left, and the instinct says go back to where it started.
Go back to the man whose debt I’ve been paying in bruises for the better part of a year.
Maybe it ends there. Maybe that’s just the next right step, and my brain is too wrung out to argue with it.
The thought doesn’t scare me. It fills me with relief. I want it to be over now. That’s probably the part I should pay attention to.
I hear Ethan before I see him. A soft creak from upstairs, small, uneven footsteps moving toward the landing. I look up at the ceiling and sit perfectly still.
Linda’s voice comes from the kitchen, low and coaxing. A small sound of protest, high and sleepy. Then her voice again, gentle, redirecting.
The footsteps move away.
The pressure behind my eyes is enormous. I press my fingers to my mouth and breathe through it until it passes, and then I breathe through it once more just to be sure.
Somewhere in the back of my head, a voice tells me to lie down. I’m in no condition to move. But why? Why does it matter?
I have nothing left to give.
The car pulls up eleven minutes later. I watch the headlights sweep through the window, and I stand.
The morning air hits cold as I walk to the car, and I don’t look back at the windows. The driver doesn’t speak. The road unreels ahead, gray and straight.
I watch the estate disappear in the side mirror and just close my eyes.
I don’t know how long it takes, but the city comes up around the car gradually. Buildings replacing tree line, traffic thickening, the gray sky pressing lower.
I watch it through the window.
I used to do this thing on bad days where I’d run the numbers in my head.
How much I owed. How many shifts it would take.
How many months if I picked up overtime, if I skipped meals, if I gave up the apartment and found somewhere cheaper.
I’d run them until they added up to something manageable or until I fell asleep trying.
It was a miserable habit. But it was mine, and it kept me moving.
I try it now.
Nothing comes.
There are no numbers to run. No shift to pick up. No next step to calculate. I search for the part of me that always had a plan, even a bad one, and I find only quiet. Like a room where the furniture used to be.
The car stops, and I look up.
A glass-fronted building on a street that looks like money working hard to look clean.
I stare at it through the window and wait for my body to do something.
To tighten, to resist. I wait to feel the old sick dread that used to start in my stomach whenever I so much as got a call from one of Kozlov’s men.
Nothing.
I get out.
The doorman looks at my clothes and then my face. I see the moment he decides not to say anything, and I don’t feel relief, or embarrassment, or any of the things I would normally feel. I just walk past him.
Inside, a man in a dark jacket goes still the moment he sees me. I don’t look at him long enough to read his expression.
“I’m here to see Kozlov,” I say.
He looks at my face and then at the dried blood on my shirt.
“He’s expecting you?” He raises a brow.
“No. But I think he’ll want to see me.”
He pauses momentarily, and after one last dubious look at me, he lifts a radio to his mouth and turns away slightly. I stand and wait.
After a minute, he turns back and tells me to follow him, and I do. I watch my own feet move across the marble floor and think about how strange it is that your body keeps going. Even now. Even when the person inside it has stopped.
I think about my mother for a moment. The way she looked in the last weeks, how small she’d become in that hospital bed and how she’d still tried to smile every time I walked in. She fought so hard to stay. I wonder, briefly, what she’d think if she could see me now.
I let the thought go. It drifts away the way everything does when you stop holding on.
The doors open.
Kozlov is behind his desk, a paper bag open in front of him, eating with the ease of a man who has never had cause to be afraid of anything.
He looks up when I walk in, and his eyes move over me slowly.
The amusement that crosses his face is the particular kind that comes from feeling very comfortable, a man in his own territory looking at a problem that has walked itself through his door.
He doesn’t stand.
“Miranda.” He leans back in his chair, looking me over. “You look terrible.”
I don’t say anything.