Page 8 of Jax
I didn’t realize I’d stepped away from the table until my back hit the wall. The jolt of contact startled a breath from me, but I didn’t move again. I pressed against it like I could sink through cinderblock, like if I stayed very still, the room might forget I existed.
My voice cracked when it finally returned. “How are you doing this?”
He let the question sit unanswered, letting silence crawl across the room like mist. It filled the space between us, thick and watchful, and when he finally did speak, it felt less like a reply and more like a verdict.
“Did you really think we wouldn’t plan for this? That we’d let you walk away without a leash?”
I opened my mouth to argue, but my voice broke on the effort, and I didn’t have the strength to shape denial out of breath that wouldn’t come.
“That’s what I thought. Now, I’m here to give you your new assignment, so listen closely,” he said next, and there was something in the cadence of it, something final and dispassionate, that told me there would be no appeal.
“I’m not doing anything else for you.” The sentence trembled with everything I couldn’t control, but I said it anyway, because it was the only weapon I had left.
“Of course you are.”
There was no heat in the reply. Just fact. Just certainty. A tone that didn’t believe in resistance because it had never needed to account for it. I remembered that sound, the way it felt in my ears when I was tied down and too weak to fight, when the only thing I could do was listen and obey. That voice was a straight line. It didn’t bend. It only cut.
“I tried to do what you asked,” I said, dragging each word into the light like a wound. “The clerk called the police, not me. I signed the paperwork and took it in, just like you said.”
The silence that followed stretched long enough to make the floor tilt again beneath me.
“Don’t worry about any of that right now. You have a far more important task now. Our dear, naïve friend, the detective, is going to be placing you somewhere new,” he said at last. “A special safe house. Off-grid. They’ll believe they’re protecting you.”
The air turned tight and sharp. My vision narrowed.
“You’re lying,” I whispered, though the denial didn’t hold weight anymore.
“You’ll be moved soon. They won’t tell you where until it’s too late. But we believe that the location they’ll be taking you to is also being used to house a few other… important individuals. Individuals who my superiors would very much like to know the location of. So, once you arrive at this special safe house…” He paused just long enough for dread to bloom in my chest like rot. “We want to know where it is.”
“You want me to betray them.” It wasn’t a question. Just horror finding shape in my mouth. “You want me to spy on the people trying to keep me alive?”
“Precisely.”
“They’re innocent,” I said, though the word tasted like fiction.
“No one is innocent, sweetheart, least of all the detective. These other people they’re protecting? They’re simply in the way,” he answered. “And you are the key to removing them.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You will.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream. But before I could speak again, before I could gather the breath or courage or pain to shape a reply, he took everything from me in a single, scalpel-clean sentence.
“We have your sister.”
The words didn’t land. They hovered, precise and bloodless, too calm to be real. They sliced through the room with surgical intent, and it took several seconds before my mind caught up, before my body registered that the floor was still beneath me and the ceiling hadn’t collapsed.
I stared at the mirror, waiting for it to fracture, waiting for someone to step into frame and tell me I’d misunderstood, but nothing changed. The glass held. The silence deepened.
“No,” I whispered, not in refusal, but in disbelief.
“You’re lying.” I said it faster this time, but the shape of it crumbled on my tongue.
“She is our honored guest for the time being, to ensure that you comply.” He said evenly. “So far, she has been very cooperative, and is completely unharmed. How long she remains that way is up to you.”
The table offered no comfort beneath my palm. The wall behind me felt colder than before. My knees dipped. My breath caught.
And then I saw her, not in the mirror, not in the room, but in my memory. Violet, barefoot in my apartment, holding a wooden spoon like a microphone, singing too loud and off-key while the smell of burned toast drifted from the kitchen. Her hair smelled like lavender. Her hugs always lasted too long.
