Page 120 of Jax
“We don’t save her by guessing,” I continued. “We do it by being smarter than the men who took her. They built a system that counts on chaos. On people like us charging in; too loud, too fast, too blind. You know what breaks structures like that?Not brute force. Pressure. Applied at the right fracture point until it collapses from within.”
Her breath caught, but she stayed silent. That stillness wasn’t fear. It was logic settling in. Panic yielded to strategy.
“If we move without intel, you could be taken again. Or worse. And then she’d lose you for real.”
My hand slid gently over the rope warming against her ribs. Not control. Presence.
“And so would I.”
I hadn’t planned to say it. But I didn’t take it back. Truth deserves space to echo.
She didn’t flinch, but something shifted—her weight, the way her breath slowed, how her silence began to feel like consent.
“Clarity hurts,” she said.
“It’s supposed to. It strips away what you wanted to believe and shows you what’s actually there. And once you see that, you finally know where to cut and where to burn.”
She made a soft sound, half laugh, half ache, and tilted her head toward mine.
“I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”
“You don’t need strength. You need strategy. Pattern awareness. Resource control. And a reason. A real one. Without it, even the best plan fractures.”
She didn’t argue. Her body told me what her voice didn’t, that she was still listening, still shifting, still deciding.
“You think I’m worth that?” she whispered.
“I think you are worth so much more than that, Stella. I think that being kidnapped tore away your ability to trust others unconditionally. You began to accept isolation because you thought that was the only way you could stay safe. But it’s not. There is safety in letting someone see who you truly are.”
She exhaled, deep and whole. And for the first time, she let herself rest inside the truth. Not because I told her to. Because she was ready.
“I think,” I added, letting one hand rise to the center of her sternum, just above where the pattern wrapped closest to her heart, “you’ve been strong on your own. But strength without backup isn’t noble. It just leads to emotional erosion.”
She tipped her chin toward me again, and this time I saw it. Her eyes were still tired, still raw, but no longer empty.
“You always talk like this?” she asked, voice laced with quiet disbelief.
“Only when it matters,” I said.
This time, the laugh came easier. Fragile. But unburdened. Progress. In this house, in this war, that was everything.
Then, so soft it nearly slipped beneath our breath, she spoke.
“Okay.”
It wasn’t triumphant. It wasn’t even resolved. But it was something. And again, more certain this time: “Okay, we wait.”
There was no visible shift, no dramatic crack in her armor. But beneath the rope, beneath the diamond lattice of tension and symmetry wrapped across her chest, I felt the change. Her breath deepened. Her spine settled. Her muscles surrendered to the shape of stillness like maybe, just maybe, it was the first time her body had ever known peace without a cost.
I didn’t tell her she was brave. That wasn’t the word she needed. It would’ve felt patronizing. Simplistic. Reductionist.
So instead, I let her speak again, let her make the next move.
“And in the meantime,” she murmured, voice so soft I felt it in my collarbone before I registered the sound, “I stay here. In this. With you.”
She wasn’t talking about the rope. Or the room. Or even the moment. She meant relationship. Partnership. The quiet surrender of belief drawn in breathless lines across memoryscorched by surviving trauma. She meant choosing reason over panic, not because it soothed her, but because it finally felt right.
“You’re always with me. Rope or no rope.”
