His jaw tightened. That wasn’t what he’d told me. And now he knew that I knew he’d lied. I swallowed slowly, glancing around at my surroundings.
“How were you here? In time. For him?” I stuttered, waving my hand and trying to deflect.
It sounded like he sighed. “Watching you.”
My stomach knotted. “That’s not reassuring.” I pulled my arm from his grasp.
“You don’t walk safe at night,” he said. “Someone should be looking after you.”
That twisting in my stomach tightened, my mouth suddenly dry, and a low, resonating panic swept over me. For a moment, I thought he was saving me. But now it looked like the other man had just got there first. My head swirled. Sweat prickled at my skin. At my palms and down my neck. Shit.
“Hey.” He reached out, fingers curling around my wrist again, voice cutting through the noise in my head, grounding me where I stood. “Grey. Look at me.”
Grey.
The world tilted. No one had called me that in over ten years.
My breath caught, sharp and painful. My heart slammed into my chest so hard it felt like it might crack my ribs.
“What did you just say?” I whispered.
His hand tightened on my arm, not restraining, just anchoring.
“Grey,” he said again, quieter now.
And suddenly, I was seventeen again, standing in the rain with a boy who smelled like smoke and leather, his fingers brushing my hair back as he breathed the word like a secret.
I stared up at him, fear and disbelief tangling in my chest.
“No,” I said. “That’s not possible.”
His eyes never left mine.
“Yeah,” he said roughly. “It is.”
The name rose in my throat, impossible and familiar all at once.
“Ryan?”
His breath shuddered. And just like that, the past came crashing back in.
Chapter Six
Ryan.
She said my name. That name. Not Reap. The name of the boy I once was. The one who dreamed of things too big for the scrap of a chav that I was then.
She knew.
The realisation hit hard and fast, a rush of something dangerously close to relief flooding my chest before I could stop it. For one suspended moment, the years between us folded in on themselves. Rain-slick pavements, stolen laughs, her fingers cold in mine, the way she used to look at me like I was more than the sum of my mistakes. It all came back in fragments, brightand brutal. Too much. Too quick. Because the man standing in front of her now wasn’t the boy she’d loved, and she wasn’t the girl who’d believed in him.
Prison had carved me into something else. Life had hardened her too. And standing there, with my real name on her lips, the joy of being seen again tasted bitter. Whatever we’d been, whatever we might’ve been, had been paid for in years neither of us could get back. I stayed still. Let it hurt. Let it matter.
“How?” she whispered, her eyes scrutinising every part of me.
She lingered on my face, her gaze dusting over my lip where a ring hung on the left, scanning across to the earrings cascading up my ear and then to the other side, to the stretched lobe, black metal pulling the flesh wide, deliberate, permanent. I caught the slight hitch in her breath and felt that old tug in my chest. She was seeing the man I’d become, all the choices and compromises inked and pierced into my skin.
Sophie bit her lip as her eyes traced down my body, her gaze lingering on my neck, at the lick of black and grey ink that peeked out from under my beard and down onto my chest. Her breath hitched. I’d been built like a whippet when I was eighteen. Tall. Thin. Gangly. Now I was a brick shit-house.
