Ginger's Heart - Katy Regnery Page 0,111

shrug, and her tears dried—she had nothing left to give.

“I can’t,” she murmured, her tears ceasing as mysteriously as they’d begun.

“Gin,” he said again, standing up, gesturing uselessly with his hands. “I’m . . . sorry he’s gone.”

I’m sorry he’s gone. A ball-peen hammer to her dried husk of a heart. Four words and it was pulverized to dust.

“He’s not,” she said softly, walking away from Cain, dazed and dull and numb all over. He’s just away.

PART FIVE

Chapter 23

She loves you.

Be good to her.

Care for her.

Love her.

Promise.

Please.

Promise.

Cain shot up in his cot, drenched in sweat and shaking as the dreamy echo of Woodman’s broken voice faded.

“God,” he gasped, scrubbing his hands over his face and blinking into the darkness before lowering his forehead to his bent knees.

Since losing Woodman, almost a month ago, he woke up like this every other night: seeing his cousin’s frightened, blank, green eyes staring straight up, into the void of forever, feeling the weight of Woodman’s head on his lap, seeing the blackish-red slickness pool at the corner of his mouth and slide over his slack and cooling cheek.

And always—always—he heard the handful of words that had been Woodman’s dying plea. They were Cain’s constant companions—constant torment, waking and sleeping—and yet he had no idea how to honor them, how to make them happen.

Not that he’d really tried. He’d mostly been drunk since the funeral, and when he wasn’t, he was tearing around Kentucky on his motorcycle. Seven times he’d packed his saddlebags and headed for the border, and seven times he’d stopped before crossing over to Tennessee or Virginia or West Virginia or Ohio or Indiana or Illinois or Missouri. He’d stood there at the border seven times, the adjoining state mocking his captivity. He was desperate to leave—desperate to run away and never go back to Kentucky again as long as he lived. But if he did that, he’d be turning his back on Woodman for good. He’d be taking Woodman’s sacred trust and trashing it. And he couldn’t. God help him, he couldn’t do it.

So, seven times, at seven state borders, he’d grudgingly turned around and headed back to Versailles. Well, back to Versailles after going on a two- or three-day bender wherever he found himself.

He swung his legs over the cot he’d set up in the corner of the empty office and reached for the omnipresent bottle of vodka beside the bed. He unscrewed the top and took a nice long swig, relishing the burn on his throat. He licked his lips and took another gulp before screwing the cap back on, then stood up and stretched his arms over his head. There were no windows in the small interior office, which was a good thing since Cain was buck naked. He pulled his jeans on inside out, not bothering to zip or button them as he walked across the cold floor toward the office door. He opened it, squinting his eyes at the bright light streaming through skylights into the showroom.

On one side of the room, the three motorcycles shipped to Versailles from Iceland and Virginia were still bungee-corded to the pallets they’d arrived on. He hadn’t touched them since he signed for them.

Turning back into the office, he flicked on the light and padded over to the small refrigerator, grabbing an energy bar from the top of the fridge and throwing the wrapper on the floor. The clock on the microwave read 11:46, which meant that Kennedy’s would be opening in fourteen minutes if Cain wanted to go get a cold beer and surround himself with the inanity of humanity until he returned home ten hours later and passed out in a cold stupor.

He’d done the same thing yesterday, and the day before that, after he got back from the Ohio border, where he’d turned around before crossing over, close to Cincinnati.

When he was a kid, his parents took him to the Cincinnati Zoo, and he remembered watching a wolf pace its cage. He’d asked the zookeeper why it kept walking back and forth, back and forth across the same ten or twelve feet in front of the glass, and the keeper had answered that the wolf was used to roaming a vast area to hunt and claim territory. Without the space to roam, it paced the small width of its cage in an effort to re-create its instinct to wander. It was trying to hold on to its purpose, but without the need to hunt, it had none.

He’d