Page 35 of Brother's Keeper

“How about I talk, and you listen, then?”

His chest swelled with a heaved breath. “Can’t stop you, can I?”

“Nope.” I leaned against the doorframe with my arms crossed. “I’m gonna tell you what I’ve been thinking; feel free to cut in any time. You’re already in the Bloody Hex. Running the show, you say. Yet you still want my Hex mark.” He wasn’t watching, but it felt appropriate to brandish the skull tattoo inked in black on the back of my hand. I held it aloft for a long moment, as if I wasn’t sick of seeing the damn thing after wearing it for twelve long years.

Finally, I used it to gesture to the quiet hall stretched before and behind me. “You might have noticed I’m pretty busy here, not so much doing the gang thing anymore. If you take my place, does that meanyoubecome the Capitol’s lapdog? As it sits, I take orders, and you give them out. Seems like a downgrade.”

Jax let out a growl. “Stupid kid.”

That didn’t take long.

The shapeshifter worked his way to sitting and scowled at me with his singular yellow eye. An antimagic collar was fastened around his neck.

“Without the mark, I’m an outlier,” he said. “Lower on the food chain, as you put it, than I wanna to be. I have found my prey in you, and I’m not gonna stop till I’ve hunted you down.” He bared his teeth, filed to sharp points, and I remembered when Ripley told me the big cat shifter ate people. If Jax had successfully ripped my hand off, then made a meal of me, would it be considered cannibalism? Odd magic made for odd morality.

Thinking of Ripley cemented my intentions in coming here. I dragged the toe of my boot across thescrubby carpet and studied the line it left behind.

“There’s other prey, you know,” I mused. “That doctor from Thorngate? He’s scrawny. Weak. He could be prey.”

It was a hard sell, assuming Jax knew anything at all about Ripley. The one-man apocalypse gassed an entire prison to aid the escape of dozens of inmates, shut down our city for weeks with his homebrewed virus, and would have poisoned every attendee of the Capitol’s hundred-year gala if I hadn’t intervened.

Jax turned up his nose. He swung his legs off the edge of the bed. “Nice try, Farrow, but you’re the one I want.”

I nodded. “And I’m all yours, buddy. But I’m talking about your lackeys, Yorkie and Jetta. Don’t they want in on this sweet Hex gig, too?” I tipped my hand toward him once again, baiting the beast trapped inside him by the suppression collar.

“Oh, they want in,” he replied. “And they’ll earn it, same as I will.”

“By finding their own prey?”

Jax’s thin lips peeled back in a smile. “Maybe they already did.”

He could have been lying, or I might have been reading too deeply into his words, but the angle of his slitted cat’s eye implied a sort of knowing that made me more suspicious than ever.

“But I’ll never tell,” Jax continued. “Because I understand self-preservation, you see. And I have some fucking common sense.”

Throwing my own words back at me. He was smartenough to realize he needed to change his strategy, but too dumb to know better than to push me.

I aimed my fingers toward him, then curled them in a midair grab that cinched around his torso. With a jerk, Jax flew forward off the bed and hit the cell door with a clattering clang. He yelped as I held him with only inches between us, pulling hard enough to imprint the grid of bars on his chest and face.

“You wanna rethink that?” I hissed.

Jax snarled in response.

I bent close to him, clenching my fist to lock in my mental grip. “Better dish, asshat, or I’ll drag you through this door one piece at a time.”

“Mister Farrow!” a new voice called from down the hall.

I glanced aside to see Tobin approaching.

“Showing our guest the Capitol’s hospitality, I see,” he said.

Tobin came to a stop beside the cell, where he split a critical look between Jax and me. “And giving me an interesting peek into the mind of a criminal.” He nodded toward me. “Yourmind, that is. Which takes no issue with assaulting a defenseless prisoner, apparently.”

Refusing to face him and lose my focus on Jax, I replied. “Figured I owed him one. Turnabout. Fair play. All that.”

“Were you powerless when he attacked you in the interrogation room?” Tobin asked. “If so, then this might be fair. Instead, it looks like schoolyard bullying.”

Bullying? Like the three-on-one antics Jax and his cronies pulled on me in prison?

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