The silence in the office was a physical thing, a third occupant that pressed in on them, thick and heavy with every unanswered beat of her heart. Brianna's arms remained locked around her middle, her knuckles white where her fingers gripped her own sides. She was a fortress under siege, and the enemy wasn't the man before her, but the ghost of the man he used to be.
Zane's gaze softened, the intensity fading into a profound, aching weariness that seemed to deepen the lines around his hypnotic dark eyes. His voice, when it came, was barely a whisper, a ragged thread of sound that somehow sliced through the silence.
"I need to explain, Brianna. I need you to understand."
A harsh, mirthless sound escaped her lips, a dry sob that held no humor. "Understand?" Her voice was stronger than she felt, a credit to years of practice in maintaining composure in the face of other people's emotional storms. This, though, was her own hurricane. "You think an explanation exists for five years of radio silence? For making me feel like I was nothing? Like we were nothing?"
"It was never about you." He took a single, cautious step forward. The worn leather of his boots made a soft sound against the polished floor. She flinched back instinctively, her shoulder blades pressing into the solid edge of her desk. The movement stopped him cold, his hands lifting in a gesture of surrender that was both familiar and painfully foreign on his large, capable frame.
"Don't," she whispered, the word sharp.
He let his hands fall, the hope in his eyes guttering like a dying candle. "I know I don't have the right to ask for anything. Not your time. Not your ears. Certainly not your forgiveness. But please. Just... let me say the words. You can throw me out after. You can call security. I'll go. I swear it."
Her throat worked, a painful convulsion. Every instinct, every shred of her professional training, screamed at her to shut this down. To protect herself. To recite the policy on professional boundaries and usher the ghost from her office. But the woman beneath the psychologist's armor was paralyzed, rooted to the spot by a desperate, starving need to hear him. To finally know why.
She gave a single, tight nod, her gaze dropping to a loose thread on the hem of her sleeve. She couldn't look at him. Not if she wanted to survive this.
Zane released a breath he seemed to have been holding for years. "After I got out... it wasn't a clean break, Brianna. It was a crash. The things I'd seen, the things I'd done... they followed me home. They moved into my head and started shouting. I was hollowed out. A shell. And the only thing I knew how to do was more. More work. More training. More silence." He paused, and she could hear the struggle in his breathing, the raw scrape of memory. "Talking to you... it was the one bright spot. The one real thing. And I started to hate it."
Her eyes flicked up to his, startled.
"I hated it," he repeated, his voice gaining a shred of strength, laced with a self-loathing so potent she could almost taste its bitterness. "Because for that one hour a week, I had to pretend I was still the man you fell for. I had to scrape together some semblance of being whole, and it was exhausting. It was torture. I felt... unworthy. Of your light. Of your voice. Of the way you'd say 'I miss you' like it was a prayer." He dragged a hand over his bearded jaw, the sound rough. "I thought I was protecting you. From the broken, burned-out thing I'd become. So, I... I just stopped calling. The silence was easier than having to admit I was shattered."
Tears she refused to shed burned hot paths behind her eyes. His words carved into old wounds, not with malice, but with a terrible, tragic precision. She saw it then, not as an excuse, but as a confession. The military-hardened man who couldn't bear for his pretty girl to see his cracks."You broke me," she said, the words quiet, flat, a simple statement of fact. "I cried for you every night for a year. I thought I'd invented a flaw in myself so profound that even you, from thousands of miles away, could see it and finally run."
"No." The word was a punch, sharp and immediate. He closed the distance between them in two long strides, stopping just short of touching her. The air around him carried the faint, clean scent of soap and the crisp outdoors, a stark contrast to the sterile, lavender-scented office. His proximity was a brand. Her skin prickled with the memory of his heat. "God, Brianna, no. It was never you. It was me drowning. And I was too much of a coward to drag you down with me."
His dark eyes held hers, and for the first time, she saw the full, unguarded truth of his regret. It was a yawning chasm in him. He looked every one of his thirty-seven years, and more.
"I got help," he said, his voice dropping again, an intimate rumble that vibrated deep in her chest. "It took a long time. Too long. But I'm not that man anymore. Or... I'm trying not to be." He hesitated, his gaze tracing the familiar lines of her face, lingering on the small mole beside her eye he'd once claimed was a beauty mark placed there just for him. "Seeing your name on that business card... it felt like a sign. A chance I never thought I'd get. I just... I needed to see you. To apologize. To look you in the eye and say I'm so fucking sorry for the pain I caused."
He was close enough that she could see the individual flecks of grey in his beard, see the pulse hammering at the base of his throat. The space between them hummed with a tension that was part grief, part history, and part something else entirely—a magnetic pull that five years and a mountain of hurt had done nothing to diminish. Her own breath felt shallow, her body acutely aware of his size, his strength, the sheer masculine presence of him that had always, always short-circuited her rational mind.
Her professional wall was dust. Her heart, the treacherous thing, was beating a wild, frantic rhythm against her ribs, a drum sounding for a man it had never truly surrendered.
She swallowed, her mouth dry. "An apology..." she started, her voice unsteady.
He didn't let her finish. "It's not enough. I know." His eyes dropped to her lips for a heartbeat, a flicker of heat so intense it stole the air from her lungs. "Nothing could ever be enough."
The air crackled. The past and the present collided in the scant inch of space separating their bodies. Every nerve ending was on fire, screaming with the memory of his touch, the ghost of his kiss. The promise of what that mouth could do.
Brianna's mind went blank, every rehearsed speech, every practiced rejection, vanishing into the static. All she could manage was a whisper, a question that was also a plea.
"What do you want from me, Zane?"
