“Some Buyers, sure, but most of them were Haldens, Arden. To them, we were the boys that could fuckandkill.”
“We?” I whispered.
Kane glanced down at his tatted chest. “I only got pulled into it around fifteen. Rafe was going at it alone for years before.”
I scraped my hands over my face. “I had no idea it was that bad for that long.”
Kane shrugged. “The fucker doesn’t talk much.”
“But you do,” I said, frowning. “Kane, why didn’t you ever talk to me about this? You can’t just hold that shit in.”
He grimaced. “I don’t know, Arden. Why don’t you ever talk about Room 82? About how we had to—” He cut himself off, looking stricken. Then he forced out his next words, “We hold it in because we need to let it hollow us out if we want to survive it. Then we let it out when we get to fight back. It’s a simple exchange of energy really.”
“But prison didn’t give us that exchange. Not much anyway,” I realized.
“No. It really fucking didn’t unless we took it out on ourselves.”
My gaze traced his profile at the note of hoarseness to his voice. “But you and I, we’re not dissociating like him. I did…in the beginning. But I found my way out of it. It’s been years, Kane. I don’t understand.”
He blew out an exhausted breath. “Rafe has twice as many brands on his body, Arden, and he’s spent the last eight years being unable to sign by the looks of his hands. We, at least, could scream at our prison. Rafe? I think he internalized all of it. His trauma. His guilt. That’s not something that gets fixed with a hug and a kiss. It’s going to take time.” Then he gave me a serious look. “So yes, he wouldn’t have stopped, and yes, you should not be alone with him for the foreseeable future.”
I hugged myself. “Ijustgot him back.”
Kane looked over at Rafe’s sleeping form. “No, sweetheart. You didn’t. That’s not Rafe. He’s in there, and we’ll find him, but it won’t be tonight.” Then he patted my knee and laid back. “Sleep. We got a kid to find and you need your rest. If he wakes up and tries to come for you, I’ll be in his way.”
I laid down beside him, my eyes cast to the drifting smoke of our fire and the twinkling stars above. “Kane?”
He grunted in acknowledgment already nodding off back to sleep.
“At the prison.” I drew in a breath. “By the cop car. I’m sorry I flinched away. You didn't deserve that from me, and I mean that Kane.”
He turned his cheek into the dirt, his green eyes tired but sad. “You don’t need to apologize to me.” His face fractured. “It’s…because you saw it. Isn’t it?”
My chin trembled. “It wasn’t your fault. All of you tried to stop it. And Itold youto use me. Even having seen that footage, I would’ve still said the same thing. Your lives were everything to me, and they still are.”
Kane turned his head back to look up at the stars. He was pale and distressed, his jaw flickering with tension. “I could’ve tried harder,” he muttered. “Somehow. I know I could’ve, and I didn’t. SoI’msorry, Arden.”
"You couldn't have Kane. That's just your heart talking, you know? I know you think it's not that big, but it is. Fuck. No, there was nothing you could do. I saw with my own eyes that there wasn't. So please, don't you dare put that on yourself. You're a victim too." I sniffed and played with the frays on the hem of my jacket. “God, I hadn’t even remembered any of it. It was easy to pretend it never happened until I was forced to watch it. I hate myself for the things I thought about you and Thorne and Rafe after I did. I…hatedyou, and it was killing me because I also love you so fucking much. Even when I first got out, when I flinched back, it was only because I was still in my head about it. It'd been so long since I'd seen you. I just…needed a second to recalibrate, to remember you as you are.”
“It's okay if you do hate me, Arden. Two things can exist at once,” he said softly. “Just like we had each other during all of our shit. I don’t know if I really believe that anything is ever just one thing anymore. Good. Evil. Perspective corrupts both.”
I grinned a little. “Prison made you wise, Kane Creed.”
“Fuck you, I was always wise,” he said, but he was grinning too. It faded fast. There one finite second and gone the next, but in that second, I felt like a tiny piece of Thorne was still alive.
“Are…youokay?” I whispered.
He shook his head subtly no and laid his arm over his eyes. “In another life? I hope so.” Then he peeked out. “And you?”
I rolled onto my side, putting my back to him. “I will be,” I vowed, peering into the crackling embers of our fire.
The next morning, Rafe was still hollow, but he didn’t leave us. He rose when we did, his eyes shadowed, and when we mounted our bikes and left the abandoned motel behind, he followed. For a week, we kept driving like that, miles bleeding into miles beneath us, the world rushing past in blurs of trees and highways and gas stations we never lingered in. We didn’t really talk. Kane and I both knew that the one thing Rafe could heavily relate to was silence. We thought that if we offered him that and showed him that it was asafesilence that maybe he would come back to us, and with every day, pieces of him bled free.
It wasn’t all at once. There was no miraculous return to the man he’d been before prison, pain, and years of isolation. But in tiny fractures there wasRafe. The man who protected his family at all costs, who took a life sentence in that fucking prison when he really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. It was really small things, you know? Sometimes his glance held a second longer than before or his breath didn’t shake so badly if one of us accidentally touched him. Then it was the way he stayed closer to us on his bike instead of drifting ahead or lagging behind. It was like watching someone surface from deep water, lungs burning, unsure if it was safe to breathe yet. Honestly, I couldn’t help thinking about Halden’s Tank. Rafe had saved my life that day, had physically thrown himself into glass just to communicate,and those first days after escaping prison felt a lot like that—only it was Kane and I throwing our bodies at the glass, trying to reach across an impossible void and just…be there.
One evening, when the sky had melted into bruised purples and oranges and we’d stopped outside a rundown convenience store to refuel both the bikes and ourselves, Kane came back with a pack of cigarettes despite neither of us being real smokers. It was just like how we drove those damn bikes like our lives depended on it. We did it for Thorne. We leaned against our bikes in the cooling air, passing the cig back and forth while the engines ticked softly, the smoke curling upward into the dusk. Rafe hovered at first, uncertain, then slowly he stepped between us. He didn’t look at either of us. He simply reached over, plucked the cigarette from my lips like it was the most natural thing in the world, and slid it between his own, inhaling shallowly before letting the smoke drift from his mouth. His hands shook as he lifted them to sign, the movements broken and stiff from the damage in his hands, but the effort was unmistakable.
Thorne, is she okay?he asked.
