Page 139 of Jax
“You’re bound back together.”
I moved to the knots at her shoulders, loosening them with quiet hands. Letting the rope fall where it wanted, like it knew the work was done. It didn’t cling. The fibers slid from her skin without resistance, leaving heat in their wake. Memory, not damage.
She didn’t lift her head. Didn’t speak. But her fingers curled gently on her thighs, her spine rising with each breath. I paused at her legs, rubbed behind her knees to warm the skin, careful and slow. Not to rouse her, but to anchor her back into herself. I murmured to her, a rhythm to help her breathe her way down from the high.
When the last coil slipped free, I gathered it in one hand and set it aside. Then I crouched in front of her and offered my palm.
“Come here.”
She didn’t speak. What came next wasn’t silence; it was a return to homeostasis. It was a stillness that only followed something sacred. The moment after impact, when nothing shakes. She hadn’t unraveled. She’d arrived. And I wasn’t there to catch her because she fell. I was there because someone had to see her land.
That was the part most people missed. This wasn’t about power, or control, or even pain. It was about connection. About building something strong enough to hold what someone thought they had to carry alone. Rope and pressure were tools. The real work is what happened when the noise faded and someone stayed, anyway.
So I wrapped my arms around her, not to claim her, not to soothe, but to prove she was still here. That I was, too. That what broke didn’t stay broken. That softness, when built right, is stronger than armor. Her body tucked into mine, breath syncing with my breath, her cheek pressed to my chest like it knew the sound of home.
I didn’t whisper promises. Didn’t offer praise. I just stayed. Still. Anchored. Present. Because sometimes love doesn’t sound like poetry. Sometimes it sounds like rope falling quietly to the floor. Like a hoodie pulled over trembling shoulders. Like breath shared in silence.
31
Jax
Storms don’t arrive unannounced.They build in silence first; barometric shifts, a drop in pressure, a static weight that settles into your bones long before the first crack of thunder. Most people only notice when the sky starts to scream. But I’ve always been better at reading the quiet signs.
I stood at the window and watched the sky reshape itself into something feral. The clouds didn’t drift, they advanced. A low, deliberate crawl across the hills, in bruised shades that looked like old war stories and unfinished prayers. This wasn’t just weather. It was nature baring its teeth, dense with consequence, curling above the horizon like it had finally been given permission to arrive.
Behind me, the room held a quieter kind of tension, less volatile, but more earned. Stella slept in the center of the bed, tangled in the aftermath. Her limbs caught in the sheets, body curled from instinct rather than rest. One leg tucked like she was still sleeping on concrete, the other stretched into the space where I’d been, as if she could hold on to the heat I left behind. The tousled blankets covered much of her still-naked form, but they didn’t hide what was already written on her skin. The ropemarks on her thighs had faded to the color of old wine, faint curves clinging like runes, neither angry nor raw. Just there. Unapologetic. Ghosts that hadn’t decided whether they meant to haunt or heal.
Her breath moved in a rhythm that wasn’t peaceful, but had steadied. She hadn’t shifted in hours, and I hadn’t stopped watching her. Something was coming. I could feel it in my spine.
I’d stayed long after she drifted off, tracking the moments her breath hitched and eased again, not into calm, exactly, but into something hard-won. She hadn’t said goodnight. Just curled toward the pillow and let the dark hold her in a way she no longer resisted.
Stillness looked strange on her. Beautiful. Foreign. Not fragile in the way of weakness, but in the way of something that finally allowed itself to rest.
Then the phone buzzed. One sharp vibration on the dresser, loud enough to crack through the quiet like a warning shot. I didn’t check the screen. I didn’t need to. Only one person called this late.
I crossed the room and answered. “Tell me you’ve got something.”
“I do,” Quinn said. No small talk, no buffer. Just, “Put me on speaker.”
I was already moving. The hallway stretched ahead, floorboards dark beneath the weight of shared tension. I didn’t flip on the lights. The others were up. We’d all felt the shift.
The living room glowed with low tactical light, the rest lost to shadow. A single lamp poured gold across the center table, catching on gear and movement. Niko stood near the whiteboard, hands smudged with marker. Carrick hovered over his laptop, jaw tight, fingers typing with urgency. Sully had half-assembled weapons spread around him, Rifles, blades, bolt cutters—all of it arranged with the discipline of someonepreparing for war. The air smelled of metal and oil, seasoned with adrenaline.
Bellamy sat curled in the chair by the fire, Kindle forgotten on her thigh. Her eyes lifted the moment I entered—quiet, focused, waiting. Deacon stood watch at the window, arms folded, his jaw working like he hadn’t stopped grinding it in hours.
“We’ve identified what we’re fairly certain is the correct warehouse,” Quinn said through the speaker. “One of the locations we got from Rayden’s flash drive is registered to the same shell company Stella was nearly forced to sign her property over to. Industrial district. Riverfront.”
The words landed like confirmation. The kind that tightens your chest and drags memory into focus. We’d known, just not with proof solid enough to believe it out loud.
Then I felt her.
Soft footsteps behind me. Bare feet on hardwood. Stella moved like a shadow pulled toward pressure, not woken by sound, but drawn by the shift. She always felt the storm first. She didn’t speak or look at me. She stood in the doorway, wrapped in one of my hoodies and a pair of sweatpants, her hair loose over her shoulders, skin pale with sleep, eyes locked not on the room, but on what was coming. Silent. Still. Waiting for the nightmare to take shape.
“It matches everything Stella told us,” Quinn said. “The hum. The cold. That metallic scent. Planes overhead. I pulled the records. The property was purchased eleven months ago through a Mafia front. The paper trail’s clean, but it’s fake. It’s a shell.”
The room didn’t move. Even the air felt suspended mid-breath. Niko’s fingers flexed around the marker, then capped it without a word and stepped back. Carrick muttered something low, voice tight. Sully leaned over the table, weight braced onhis forearms, breath slipping out like a valve released. Bellamy closed her Kindle and set it aside, the motion small but precise.
But all I could see was Stella. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked. Her shoulders didn’t shift. One hand curled into her sleeve, knuckles white, jaw locked, lips parted like a sentence had climbed halfway up her throat and stalled.
