Page 113 of Jax
I tasted copper. Acid. Ash. “Stella…”
“I was supposed to gain your trust,” she whispered, voice splintering at the edges. “Get close. Collect intel. Then, I was to escape, and tell them where the safe house was.”
Her posture said what her mouth couldn’t. Shoulders folded inward, spine curved, fingers twitching like she needed to grip something solid, something that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of what she carried. This wasn’t a plea for forgiveness, or a calculated confession. It was an elegy in motion, a woman offering her truth the way some offer their throat, exposed and unguarded, not to be spared, but because she’d already decided she didn’t deserve to be.
I didn’t respond. Not because I lacked language, but because information was flooding in too fast. Tactical matrices, risk trees, names and entry points all colliding beneath the surface—but beneath the logic was something older. Not fear. Not rage.
Grief, with a trigger.
Because she’d handed me the detonator buried beneath her ribs and trusted I wouldn’t set it off.
She curled tighter, arms locked around her ribs like scaffolding, breath clipped and uneven as the next truth bled out. “But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t tell them. I haven’t. I wouldn’t even know how. I just thought I’d have more time. I thought maybe if I told you first, I could….”
My hand moved without hesitation. Not dominance. Not reflex. Something more basic; strategy fused with feeling. I cupped the back of her neck and pulled her in, cradling her against my chest like I could imprint safety onto her skin, like maybe if I held her close enough, her heartbeat would sync to mine again.
“You came here tonight,” I said, voice low and ruined. “You asked me what trust looks like, and then you gave me yours. Not the cleaned-up version. The kind with blood on it.”
She nodded against my chest, breath catching in shallow waves, and I felt her inhale like a tide retreating, quiet, shaky, but real.
I pressed my lips to her crown, because every other part of my mouth would’ve come out as fire.
“You did the right thing, telling me. And Stella? If you’ve ever trusted anything I’ve said, trust this. We’ll get her back.”
Her breath hitched as she spoke. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“She is,” I said without hesitation, because the math left no room for sentiment. “If she weren’t, we’d already know it. Bodies get left behind when they want to send a message. Silence means leverage. That’s what this is, what you are to them. A tether. A pressure point. Which tells me two things: she’s alive, and they don’t know you’ve made your decision.”
Her sob cracked like a fault line; small, sharp, uninvited. She tried to muffle it, but guilt that old doesn’t stay buried. It rises. No matter how deep you bury it.
I pulled her in with both arms, not hesitant, not soft. Deliberate. Tight enough to stop the fracturing, like contact alone could bind the broken parts back together.
She wasn’t a threat. She was a storm with breath and bone and a name, a warning flung straight into the eye of the chaos, just in time.
“We tell the others,” I said, my voice hardening mid-thought. “No more waiting. No more shadows. This doesn’t stay between us.”
She flinched before the sentence even landed, already bracing for consequence, shoulders coiled, spine tight, like she heard the door closing before I’d even reached for the knob.
I eased back just enough to see her face, and there it was. Every muscle locked in preparation for rejection, like she’d already rehearsed how to survive being sent away.
“This isn’t betrayal,” I said, low and exact. “This is intel, raw and costly, the kind no clean source would ever hand us. And it came from the one person in this house who risked everything. Not to hurt us. But to speak when it mattered.”
Her lips parted, then faltered, as if the thought had too much weight to carry across the air. Her breath hitched at the edges, fragile and flickering. “You don’t hate me?” she asked, not like she didn’t know, but like she’d stopped hoping to be told otherwise, and only needed confirmation that someone, somewhere, could still hold her without letting go.
“I should,” I said, because that was the rawest truth I could offer, the kind that didn’t flinch, didn’t soften, didn’t pretend the damage hadn’t already landed. “I should hate that this was orchestrated, that you were sent in like a Trojan horse, wrapped in charm and guilt and falsehoods that don’t rinse clean. But I can’t. Because you didn’t betray us. You didn’t lie. You walked into this room and into my hands with your armor stripped, your voice breaking, your ribs fucking exposed, and gave meyour worst, not dressed in apology or beauty or anything meant to dull the edge. Just truth. Unfiltered. Like a blade set bare on an open palm.”
I touched her cheek not to claim or soothe, but to tether, to speak the language my mouth couldn’t carry, to show her I saw her not as a threat, not as a trap, but as a person standing barefoot in the rubble of her own survival. “You think I’m walking away from that?” I asked, my voice thick with awe, because what she offered me wasn’t manipulation. It was exposure. Risk. A kind of sacrament I wasn’t sure I deserved.
Her tears came soft and soundless, not seeking comfort, but release, like a dam finally giving way under its own weight, salt cutting slow paths down her cheeks. I pulled her tighter because I felt the frequency beneath her words, not a plea, not a confession, but a reckoning, low and deep, vibrating against my sternum like a war drum.
She had chosen me, not with promises, not with palatable pain, but with the kind of honesty that bruises. She held out her shame like a detonator she couldn’t carry anymore, and asked me silently not to drop it. That choice wasn’t a mistake to forgive, or a sin to account for. It was the spark that redrew the whole battlefield.
I didn’t speak again, because no words could hold the weight of what she’d already laid down. I just held her closer, and anchored her to the truth that whatever storm came next, she wouldn’t face it alone. She wasn’t a weapon. She wasn’t a liability. She was the variable no one planned for, the one who walked straight into the fire and offered her story as fuel.
And I, a man fluent in damage and well-versed in pain, finally understood what it meant to be trusted by someone who had every reason not to.
Her truth wasn’t a threat.
It was the signal.
