Page 102 of Breaking the Sinner

Travis smiled, bringing a closed fist up to his mouth. “Yeah. That sounds great, actually. Do you think you’ve learned enough during your time here?”

“Oh, I’ve learned…somuch,” she said. “I can’t even describe how much. You wouldn’t actually believe me if I told you how much.”

“Good. Good.” He nodded again. “Well, feel free to make your plans. I’m okay with you leaving whenever you want. Even if it’s at the end of the week.”

She covered her mouth. “Really?”

“You’ve done a great job at keeping my books organized. Seems like you learned the new system really well. I’m sad to see you go, but you’re right. It was an internship, so it wasn’t going to be permanent.”

She rolled her lips in, nodding. “Thank you. Thank youso much.”

“Your trip sounds amazing.”

“I think it will be.” She paused. “I do have one other thing I wanted to mention. Cobra.”

He nodded. “What about him?”

“He didn’t come into work today. Did he call or anything?”

Travis sighed, removing and replacing the cap of his pen. “He didn’t. Why do you ask?”

Gen nibbled on her bottom lip. “I worry about him. And I…”love him.“I think there’s something you should know about him.”

A line formed in Travis’s brow. “Go on…”

“He’s not planning on taking his certification test because he doesn’t have a college or a high school diploma.” She swallowed, watching as a strange emotion passed over Travis’s face. “He thinks there’s no point in bothering with the test if he can’t satisfy the requirements, so I’m almost positive that he’s planning on not coming in again because of it.”

Travis frowned. “Did he say if he wants to get a GED or not?”

“Didn’t seem like it.” Gen sighed. “But I don’t know.”

“That sucks,” Travis said. “I would totally help him get his GED, if that’s what he needed.”

“I thought that might be the case,” she said, pushing to standing. The words that had been on her mind since Thursday came flooding back to her. “But you can only help a person as much as they want to be helped.”

As far as she could see, she’d done more than enough to help Cobra.

Now it was time for him to help himself.

Chapter 40

On Tuesday night, Cobra started to miss the gym. He hadn’t been there since the Wednesday before—before Thanksgiving, before the brick of dynamite entered his world, before walking out on the one good thing to ever come into his orbit. He had a few ways of categorizing it.

He’d smashed his phone in the parking lot on Saturday, part anger, part stress-relief, part delirium of missing Gen. All contacts, messages, and photos were lost.

He couldn’t figure out if losing Gen’s number was the best or worst part about it. He’d seen her reaction when he let it slip that his mother was a murderer. Saw the color drain from her face, the resolute shock harden into a mask on not only her sweet face but on every single one of her family members’.

The actions of monsters didn’t just affect them. They stained everyone around them. And Cobra was stained for life.

He’d fled because he couldn’t handle it anymore. He could have waited, but he didn’t, because it was easier to blame it on her. Easier to pretend he’d given her an ultimatum and she’d made her choice. When really, the choice that had been made was to retreat to his cocoon.

Depression was his oldest friend. It came and went in thick, crushing waves, pushing him toward escapism, toward distraction, toward music, toward nothing. It ground him down into dust and then put the chisel in his hand, as if it had been him all along.

After last weekend, depression had come back with a vengeance. And it sought revenge for Cobra’s brief escape from its clutches, punishing him doubly for having dared to try enjoying life without its stinking, deluded directives.

He knew what to expect. It always let up eventually. He had to ride it out. Suffer through the numbness and the despair. Gen had provided a bright light in his dark tunnel. But he’d done what he always did: returned to the familiar contours of his cave. Sought the predictable. Pushed away anyone who dared shake things up.

But usually when he walked away from some glimmer of hope, he felt nothing. Because he’d trained himself to expect nothing.

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