Page 38 of Stay with Me

“Then what happened to your temple? It’s red and swollen.” His voice was icy and hard.

“It was the door. When he pushed it open, I was kind of standing in the way.” Anger flashed in those eyes, and his jaw tightened. “He actually didn’t try to hurt me, Jax. He just wanted to get to what was in this house.”

The tension in his jaw didn’t ease and a long moment passed where I didn’t think I took one single breath. “Are you okay?”

Our gazes were locked. “Yeah. It just ... it shook me up. I didn’t expect that.” It sounded stupid considering what he’d warned me about. “I didn’t know that stuff was in the house.”

“I know.” His voice dropped, softened, and the longer he stared at me, the more tiny flutters grew in my chest, which caused a dozen or so warnings to fire off. “Clyde said you told him that the guy found stuff?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Upstairs in my old bedroom. The closet.”

“Shit,” he muttered, clearly disgusted. His fingers slowly trailed off the side of my head, and then he pivoted around, moving deeper into the house.

A moment passed where I just stood there, the hand holding the phone pressed close between my breasts. Then I forced myself away from the wall. Still having no idea why it was Jax who had come instead of Clyde, I followed him. He was halfway up the stairs, and neither of us spoke until he was crouched down in front of the closet, holding the piece of drywall.

“Did you see exactly what he got?” he asked.

“It was several bags of something that looked like brown sugar. I’m guessing that wasn’t it.”

“Fuck,” he muttered, sounding distracted. “Sounds like heroin. Little bags or big?”

Heroin. God, was Mom doing that shit now? “What do you mean by little? Like sandwich-bag size?”

“No.” He coughed out a laugh as he rose, facing me. “A sandwich bag of heroin would not be little. Talking this small?” He held up his finger and thumb, changing the space between them to a couple of inches. “What about that?”

“It was several Ziploc-sized bags, Jax. There were about eight of them, and they were full.” My heart skipped a beat when his face went blank. “That’s ... that’s bad, right?”

“Fuck yeah.” He thrust his hands through his hair. “Sounds like there could’ve been a kilo or more in those bags. And, by the way you describe it, sounds like black tar heroin.”

I knew what a kilo was due to the kind of classes I took, but I had no idea what that translated into in the drug world. “Black tar?”

“More expensive shit from what I hear.”

The walls shifted suddenly. “How expensive?”

“Shit. Anywhere from seventy thousand to over a hundred thousand per kilo,” he explained, drawing in a deep breath. “Really depends on how pure it is—if it was high-end shit or not. Could even be worth a couple of million.”

“Oh my God.” My knees suddenly felt weak. “How do you know this stuff?”

His gaze landed on me. “Been around the block a few times.”

“You did heroin?”

“Hell no.” He didn’t elaborate. “Tell me what this guy looked like.” After I finished describing Greasy Guy, Jax looked even tenser. “Doubt that it was his shit he was retrieving. And I don’t think it was Mona’s, either.”

My stomach flopped. “You think she was ... holding it for someone?”

He nodded. “Let’s fucking pray that this guy was who she was holding it for. If not ...”

Oh God, I didn’t need to be a drug kingpin to figure out what he meant. If Mom was holding drugs of that kind of value, the owner would eventually come looking for it, and with the drugs being gone, she was beyond being in hot water. She was drowning. All I could hope, like Jax had said, was that the crap belonged to Greasy Guy. He seemed to know exactly where it was.

As we headed downstairs, my phone rang in my hand. Lifting it, I saw that it was Clyde calling. “Hello?”

“You doing okay, baby girl?” came his deep, gravelly voice.

“Yeah.”

“Jax there?”

---