Page 71 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
The ring is gone.
The tattoo...
My chest tightens, something breaking deeper this time.
It feels like he’s taking everything. Everything that connected me to them. And I don’t know how to hold onto anything anymore.
My eyes close.
And this time I don’t know what I’m losing when they do.
sixteen
Elijah
Zach comes back to himself in pieces, the change showing first in his breathing before it reaches his eyes. I’m already in the doorway when it happens, watching the small, uneven pull of his chest settle into something steadier, watching the way his fingers twitch against the sheets like his body is checking its own weight again.
He opens his eyes and finds the ceiling, then the room, then me.
Recognition lands.
Not confusion, not panic, recognition, and with it the understanding of what he did.
I don’t give him time to sit in it.
“The dealer works for Vargas.”
The words cross the room without force and land anyway.
“You went to him.”
He pushes himself up too quickly, the movement betraying him as his balance lags a fraction behind, his hand catching against the mattress to hold himself there.
“I didn’t know,” he says, and there’s no delay in it, no attempt to shape it into something better. “I didn’t know.”
I take another step into the room, the door left open behind me, the rest of them just out of sight but not out of reach.
“You didn’t think to question it,” I reply. “You didn’t think to look at who you were dealing with while she’s out there—”
“I didn’t know,” he repeats, louder now, something in it splintering. “I’ve been seeing him since I got picked up by the expansion team. It wasn’t new.”
The answer isn’t an excuse, and it doesn’t soften anything, but it settles into place with a kind of clarity that wasn’t there before.
“My hip,” he continues, dragging a hand over his face as he steadies himself. “That’s where it started. The painkillers. I kept taking them longer than I should have and then I just… didn’t stop.”
He doesn’t look away when he says it.
“I couldn’t play without them,” he adds. “Then I couldn’t function without them.”
The room feels smaller than it should, like the walls have shifted inward while we weren’t paying attention.
“I thought I had it under control,” he says, and there’s a brief, humorless edge to it that doesn’t last. “Until Lia.”
Her name changes the space.
“She made it quiet,” he says, and his voice drops, not softer but lower, like he’s speaking around something lodged in his throat. “I didn’t need them when I had her.”
I hold his gaze.
