Page 4 of The Bastard's Lily
He chuckles, low and dry. “Fair enough.”
The silence stretches. I bandage him up clean, but his eyes never leave my face.
“You remind me of someone,” he says finally. “Had that same fire in her jaw. Wouldn’t back down from anyone.”
“Hope she made it,” I reply.
He smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “Me too.”
When the guard returns, the man stands, grunts, and adjusts the sleeve over the bandage. He doesn’t say goodbye. But just before the door shuts behind him, he glances over his shoulder and adds, “Be careful out there, nurse. Some ghosts don’t stay buried.”
And then he’s gone. My hands are still for a long minute. I turn back to the tray, staring at the bloodied gauze. That tattoo. That voice.No way. He’s just another inmate. Just another stranger.
Except I’ve seen a mark like that before—burned into leather, stitched into the backs of jackets. But that was years ago. And he’s gone now.Right…?
Idon’thearhernamefirst. Just the tail end of a grunt from Vice about some new hire at the prison. He was talking to some of our old timers doing time up there.
“—looked like trouble,” he mutters, wiping oil off his hands and flicking it toward the floor.
“Didn’t talk much. Pretty little thing, though. Brown hair. Ice-blue eyes. Couldn’t miss ’em.”
The moment the words leave his mouth, it’s like the air shifts. That’s how ghosts work. They don’t knock when they return. They just… show up. Cold. Quiet. Uninvited.
I stay silent.
The others keep on talking shop, tossing around guesses aboutwhether the new nurse is fresh meat or just another pair of state-issued gloves. Someone jokes about how long she’ll last. Someone else laughs.
I don’t. I can’t. Because I know those eyes. I’ve seen them wild with panic and heavy with trust. I’ve seen them in my rearview mirror. In my dreams.
Ice-blue. Like the river the night we almost didn’t survive it.
“Did you catch her name?” I ask, too casual, too late.
Vex frowns, trying to remember. “First name is pretty, some flower. Last name is Hale, I think?”
The name hits me like a crowbar to the ribs. There it is. The final confirmation. She’s here. She came back.And she’s using her Grandmother’s maiden name to try and hide.
My knuckles tighten around the edge of the table until I feel the wood threaten to splinter. I make no sound. Show no reaction. Just grind my molars down and let the rage simmer. I don’t ask anything else.
Not when they start in on what she looks like, if she’s hot, if she smiled. I don’t want to know. Don’t want to imagine her in that sterile little nurse’s uniform, all soft-spoken and sweet while stitching up the same bastards I drink with.
She left. That’s all that matters. Left me standing in the ash of everything I thought we were building. No note. No call. No goodbye. Just gone. I kept that ring in my pocket for three damn months. Carried it like it still had weight.
It was stupid. I was stupid.
She made me believe it—made me think we were something more than a summer romance. But maybe that was all it ever was for her. One last rebellion before she snapped back into the good-girl mold. Back to white coats and clean hands and a life where I never fit.
And now she’s here again. Back in my town. In my orbit. Inmyfucking world, like the past didn’t gut me and leave the bones behind.
“Rook,” someone says.
I glance up. Vex is looking at me, brow furrowed. “You good?”
I nod once. Lie with the ease of a man who’s made a habit of it. “Peachy.”
They buy it. Or pretend to. I don’t stick around long. The moment the meeting shifts to talk of the next run, I stand and slip out the side door. My boots hit gravel like war drums in my head. Outside, the sky is a flat sheet of gray, the kind that never quite turns to rain. It’s the same kind of sky we had that night on the river. The night everythingalmostended. And maybe itdid. Maybe it ended a long time ago, and I just never noticed the silence that followed.
I light a cigarette. Don’t even want the smoke. Just need something to keep my hands from making fists. I stare down the long stretch of road, out past the gate and into the dark, where memories live like ghosts and grudges never sleep. If she thinks she can walk back into Berlin like nothing happened… she's mistaken.
