Page 6 of Broken Pieces
He laughs as he walks away, as if he didn’t just tilt my entire world sideways and walk off with the match still smoldering in his hand.
I want to scream at him.
I want to chase him down and rip that fucking smug grin right off his face.
I’m furious. Furious with him. Furious with myself. With every broken piece of me that responded to him without permission.
He didn’t even touch me, not a single fucking finger, and still I am sitting here, exposed, shaken to the core of bones I have spent years burying under armor.
I hate him.
Hate the way he walked in here as if he owned the air I was breathing. The way my skin still buzzes even though he is walking away. And now I cannot stop hearing his voice.
"Not tonight, sweetheart."
The words keep looping through my head, coiled tight around that cocky grin he stamped into me before walking out.
“Careful, pretty boy,” I say, turning in the chair to face him. “Guys who walk around as if they own the room are usually overcompensating for a dick that is not even worth unzipping.”
It's petty and cruel, but for one fucked-up second it makes me breathe easier, as if I have taken something back, even if it is only a scrap of control I never really had. The relief doesn’t last.
He stops, turns, and his eyes find mine again, his grin tugging wider as if he has been waiting for me to snap.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
That fucking word again. Soaked in mock sympathy, dipped in sin.
“You might be the first to call me out, but you will be the last to see what I am really packing.”
And then he’s gone, leaving me here, half furious and half fucked up in the worst way imaginable, pretending I’m not already drowning in the aftermath.
My whole body feels wrong, wired too tight, skin pulled thin over bones that no longer hold steady. My pulse refuses to settle. It pounds fast and fucked-up, chasing the echo of his stare still stamped across my skin.
That cocky fucker walked in and detonated something inside me, and now I am the one choking on the dust, left to sift through the wreckage while he disappears as if he didn’t set the whole fucking room on fire.
He got under my skin, burrowing deep, spreading through me as if he were a virus I never saw coming. One smirk was all it took. One look. One fucking line, and suddenly he was everywhere I did not want him to be.
And I hate it.
I hate the way my body sparks when he gets close, all heat and nerves and hunger I never gave it permission to feel.
But what I hate most is that for one impossible, goddamn moment, I wanted him to stay.
Chapter Two
Zane
Thekitchendoorslamsshut behind me, the crack of it loud enough to rattle the glass in the window.
I don’t turn around. Don’t slow my pace. I don’t give a single fuck if that cold, bitter bitch who runs this place caught me walking out again. Let her scream herself hoarse because I’m not fucking listening.
Her voice cuts through the walls anyway, high and jagged, barking orders at kids too small and too beaten down to push back. They nod quick, scatter faster, keeping their eyes down as if ignoring her could make her less of a monster stuffed into a cheap cardigan.
She isn’t a foster mother.
She’s a fucking prison warden.
A woman who cashes the state’s money and calls it care. Nothing more.
