And that right there was the problem, wasn’t it?
Harper had looked at me today and finally seen what I really was.
And she ran.
Maybe she was right to.
I’d shown her the thing I kept caged. Let her hear it rattling the bars. Let her see exactly how close I was to tearing someone apart with my bare hands.
She didn’t see protection. She saw violence wearing a different mask.
And it only confirmed what I’d always suspected: I didn’t deserve her. Maybe I didn’t deserve anyone.
I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars. The pain was everywhere now. In my chest. My throat. Behind my eyes, where I refused to let it out.
This hurt worse than any beating I’d ever taken. Physical pain, I understood. Physical pain had rules. It faded. It healed. It left scars you could see, ones that made sense.
This? This was a wound that would never close.
I wanted to punch the wall. Wanted to feel my knuckles split open, wanted the sharp bite of broken skin to give me something else to focus on. But knowing my luck, I’d shatter something and end up in the infirmary.
The one place I couldn’t let myself go.
Not now. Not ever again.
I’d have to figure out a way to switch assignments. They’d have to drag me to solitary before I’d ever step foot in that place again.
At least I’d protected her from Silas within these walls. He’d swung first. And I didn’t swing back. With any luck, the piece of shit would be out of a job by end of day.
Small victory. Hollow as hell.
But as far as any relationship with Harper? That was gone. She was done with me. And I was here. Alone. Same as I’d been for fourteen years.
Honest to God, I couldn’t take this anymore. I couldn’t take anything else. One more blow, and I’d crack straight down the middle.
“Blackwood.” The clang of metal made me flinch. A guard’s baton rapping against my cell bars. “You have a visitor.”
40
KNOX
The buzzer sounded. Metal scraped against concrete. And my entire world tilted on its axis.
Because sitting at the table in the center of the visiting room wasn’t Ryker. Wasn’t Axel.
It was her.
Gwendolyn.
Even after ten years, I knew her instantly. The same light-brown hair with sun-kissed highlights that used to bounce in pigtails now fell in loose waves around her face. And those eyes. Lord, those eyes. The same warm brown I used to stare into while rocking her to sleep, singing off-key lullabies until her tiny fingers stopped gripping my shirt.
My boots felt welded to the floor.
Fourteen years of prison had turned me into something carved from stone. I’d faced down men twice my size without flinching. Took a shiv to the ribs and didn’t make a sound. But this? This eighteen-year-old girl with her mother’s chin and my stubborn jaw?
She unmade me.
In my head, she’d been frozen at the age I’d last seen her: Eight years old. Gap-toothed smile. Tiny hands reaching formine. But this woman sitting before me had lived an entire decade without me. Graduated. Dated. Cried. Laughed. Grew up.
