Page 151 of Jax
I moved into the room on instinct, quiet despite knowing she wouldn’t startle. Some places demanded reverence, and this was one of them. My rifle hung heavy at my side, my eyes sweeping corners already cleared, not because I needed to, but because routine gave shape to things that otherwise wouldn’t hold. There was no enemy left here, only echoes.
“She’s alive,” Sully said tenderly, and even that truth felt intrusive, like the building itself might reject it. Hope sounded unnatural in a place that had forgotten what it looked like. “She’s waiting for you.”
That was when she broke—not loud, not dramatic, just a rupture. One sob, sharp and sudden, like something snagged inside her chest finally gave out. It dragged another one behind it, and then more, until the weight of it overwhelmed her body, and she buckled beneath it.
Sully caught her without hesitation. He didn’t scoop her up or fold her in, just anchored her with quiet steadiness, his arms a brace rather than a rescue. There was no urgency in the gesture, no dominance, only that solid, grounded stillness that made him who he was. When she tried to stand, her legs trembling beneath her and her breath catching in uneven bursts, he adjusted to support her without overtaking her, lending just enough of himself to steady the rise without stealing the choice.
But it wasn’t Sully who kept her upright.
Deacon crossed the threshold like a tide, quiet and inevitable, his med pack already slipping from one shoulder and landing on the concrete with a soft thud. He didn’t speak.Didn’t ask. Just knelt and unzipped the bag with movements as clean and practiced as a ritual. The emergency blanket he pulled free was utilitarian, worn, but he handled it like something sacred. When she didn’t reach for it, he didn’t hesitate. He simply draped it over her shoulders, unassuming, precise, as if offering care without drawing attention to it was its own kind of reverence.
Next, he retrieved a sealed water bottle, cracked the cap, and handed it to her. The sound seemed too loud in the silence. Violet took it like she half-expected it to vanish. Her fingers trembled. Plastic crinkled. She drank in shallow swallows, each one costing more than it gave, her throat relearning the mechanics of normal operation. Still, she drank. Then came a crushed granola bar, torn slightly at the edge. She peeled it open with mechanical focus and ate with the halting rhythm of someone trying to remember how.
I stayed near the door, back to the wall, rifle slack at my side. The immediate threat was gone, but readiness grounded me. It wasn’t about violence. It was about control. About ritual. I couldn’t erase what had been done to her, but I could stand between her and whatever came next.
The room around her told its own story: stains down the walls, rust bleeding from bolts like decay. No shackles. No locks. But captivity had left its print. It lived in the stillness, in the posture of a girl still standing though her body had every reason to collapse. This wasn’t just a prison of steel, it was built from time. From silence. From fear so thick it rewrote reality.
And still, she stood.
Not by her own strength. Not yet. But by ours. Sully’s stability. Deacon’s quiet care. The simple, defiant truth that someone had come.
When Deacon checked her pulse, he didn’t ask. Didn’t warn. Just reached for her wrist and touched her so gently it felt morelike a memory than motion. He didn’t look at her face. Her body told him more than her eyes ever could. And she didn’t flinch. That was the first thing I noticed; she didn’t pull away. She just let him read her, like some part of her recognized him. Not the man. The intent.
It was trust. The kind that doesn’t come from words. The kind that lives in movement. In silence. In care that doesn’t ask to be acknowledged. Something about Deacon made surrender feel less like a gamble, and more like an inevitability.
The room still reeked of what had happened here. Blood. Rust. Time. The drain in the floor looked scrubbed, but not clean. A smear of dried maroon curved toward it like the ghost of a dragged heel. I couldn’t stop cataloguing, my mind running the inventory the way lungs remember how to breathe underwater. Not because I wanted to. Because I had to.
But I watched her too.
Not like a threat. Not even like a rescue. I watched her the way you watch a support beam in a burning building, trying to determine if it would hold.
The longer I watched, the clearer it became: it wasn’t Deacon’s hands or Sully’s voice that had kept her standing. It was the fact that neither of them asked her to be strong. They simply made space for her to fall—and held it open until she didn’t.
A few moments later, Nikolai signaled that it was time to move out. He pointed to the left, further along the corridor. Deacon held the line behind us, Sully stayed anchored at Violet’s side, the room shifting into a new rhythm as Carrick and I moved back into the main warehouse area.
We turned and moved to the second door. This one was held shut only by a padlock. It took me all of ten seconds to pop it open with my bumper pick. I removed the lock and glanced atCarrick. He held his rifle at the ready, preparing to take point as soon as the door opened.
I quietly obliged him, and he moved into the deeper darkness of the room. A few moments later he called the all clear, and I joined him inside, the rest of the group a few paces behind. The space wasn’t fortified. Which made it more dangerous. The people who used this room didn’t expect intrusion. That meant they were confident. Protected.
Two folding tables formed a crude L-shape, cluttered with overlapping data: paperwork, flash drives, laptops still powered on. One screen blinked through strings of Cyrillic inside a custom encryption shell I recognized from a failed intercept months ago—uncracked codebase, rerouted through four foreign embassies. Another screen ran a logistics dashboard in English: shipment manifests, dock schedules, inbound clearance codes.
That alone would’ve been enough.
But Niko was already three layers deeper.
Carrick moved past me, silent, heading for the file cabinets. Always the hard copies. Digital trails degrade. Paper holds weight. If you want to indict a system, follow what they forgot to burn.
I took a position near the door, eyes tracking them both—their movements, the layout, the frequency of updates. Every piece of intel in this room was active. This wasn’t storage. This was live.
The first manifest Carrick pulled was shrink-wrapped in a weatherproof sleeve, the laminate frayed and smudged with fingerprints. He unfolded it and slid it across the table. My eyes moved automatically.
Crate counts. Serial ranges. Destination tags labeled by NATO region and insurgency designation. No laundering companies. No distance. Just direct lines—equipment reroutedfrom legitimate supply through falsified de-comm orders. Too advanced for street use. Too dirty for federal deployment.
“Not cartel,” Carrick muttered, tapping a cell listing optics systems three years ahead of what our boys were using overseas. “Not local either.”
“This isn’t Mafia-level anymore,” Nikolai said, voice lower now.
“No,” I agreed. “It’s infrastructure.”
