Page 156 of Jax
Quinn didn’t blink. His body held the line, but his voice thinned. “No idea,” he said. “Somewhere safe.”
It came too smoothly, like a line repeated one too many times. Not quite a lie, but not free of doubt either.
Eddie’s jaw tightened, not in anger but in effort, holding something back. “You sure?”
The pause that followed stretched thin as wire. Quinn carried it for a beat, maybe two, before answering. “I trust the Chief.”
The words landed heavily between them, fragile in their own way. One man offering faith. The other weighing what to do with it. Eddie didn’t nod. Didn’t argue. He stepped back with the same controlled ease with which he’d arrived, as if he had what he needed—for now. But the tension in his shoulders said it hadn’t settled him. Not even close.
Quinn stayed where he was, jaw tight, shoulders still squared like belief could shield him from erosion.
But I knew that posture. I’d worn it myself once, before I understood how fast trust could become a fracture. Before I realized that not all foundations break with noise. Some of them just shift silently under your feet until the floor you built everything on no longer holds.
I watched all of it from my post behind the van, half-shadowed, rifle still resting against my chest. Quinn didn’t look over, which told me enough.
He didn’t doubt the Chief. None of us did. The man had earned that much. What Quinn was doubting was everything around the Chief: the channels, the chains of command, the hands reaching for strings we couldn’t always see.
That was the problem. The system didn’t bleed where you could track it. It bled in silence, under clean signatures and sealed files. And Quinn, for all his grit and suspicion, couldn’t force an answer out of shadows that refused to take shape.
Eddie didn’t return to the group. He veered off toward his car instead, slicing through the fog-damp air like a man who didn’t plan to double back. The door shut with a muted thud, and his headlights swept the lot—brief flashes of Sully’s restless pacing, Carrick’s clenched jaw, Niko’s stillness calibrated to threat. Then he eased forward, tires hissing on wet asphalt, disappearing without ceremony.
Quinn didn’t follow. He lingered at the edge of his car, hand braced against the open door like it was the last solid thing in the lot. His fingers clenched the frame just tight enough to blanch the knuckles, and for half a breath the mask slipped. The set of his shoulders sagged, the weight of it all pressing through in a quiet crack only someone looking for it would notice.
Then, it was gone. Classic Quinn. Steady, quiet, broadcasting nothing. But I knew better. Behind the calm, his mind was already running every angle, already bracing for whatever came next.
“Alright, boys, let’s head out. Follow me back to the Annex, and as soon as Violet is ready, we’ll take her out to your place. We need to stay radio silent for now, just in case. We can’t risk anything going wrong here in the final stretch.” He met each of our eyes for a moment. “You did good work tonight, team. This could have gone ahellof a lot worse.”
Around me, the team fractured into quiet preparation for extraction. Not relaxed, but locked in the quiet space that comes after the noise fades. Adrenaline gone, instincts allowed to idle.
We all knew the truth. Violet was safe. The Chief would see to that. But the handoff had been too clean, too polished, too official. It was the kind of process designed to reassure,and maybe that was the problem. Danger doesn’t always come with blood and broken doors. Sometimes it comes wearing the right badge, using the right words, carrying the right clipboard. Sometimes, safety feels too much like surrender.
I kept replaying her face just before the door closed. Not relief. Not panic. Just exhaustion. A kind of bone-deep resignation that said she’d been here before. That she knew how little control she had over where she landed, even if this time we swore it was different.
That look stayed with me, heavier than any rifle across my chest. It didn’t matter that the op was clean, that the timeline held, that we could call it a win on paper. None of that erased the quiet truth settling in my gut.
She was safe. But safe didn’t mean free.
And that, more than anything, was the part none of us said out loud.
36
Stella
Grief makesnoise in the beginning, a raw, ripping sound that fills rooms and chests and voicemails with something wild and undeniable. People know how to move around loud grief. They offer you casseroles and folded blankets, soft hands and softer voices, because they understand how to meet a storm when it’s raging. But the kind I was sitting in now was the kind that comes after, that lingers once the adrenaline bleeds out. This grief didn’t roar. It sat. It pressed in behind your ribs and rearranged the way your lungs expanded. It didn’t need to shout, because it never left.
That was the version I’d come to know in the hours since they left, not the sobbing kind, not even fear, exactly. Just a silence so complete it wrapped around my spine and whispered worst-case scenarios into the hollow where hope used to sit. A silence that bloated and stretched until it grew teeth. Every second slipped by like a needle beneath skin—quiet, precise, and impossible to stop. There was no room to scream. Just the wait. Just the ache.
Four weeks since Violet had been taken. Three days since Quinn had said they had a lead. Almost eight hours since theteam had packed up and driven into something none of us had words for. And not one call. No updates. No voice cutting through the static to say: she’s okay. Angela, one of the two people left here to watch over us while the guys were gone, had tried to reassure me multiple times that this is often how operations like this went. It didn’t help. The lack of information was killing me slowly.
I hadn’t eaten. Couldn’t. The idea of food felt obscene, like trying to bandage a bullet wound with sequins. I hadn’t slept either. Just sat in the same clothes as yesterday, body fixed in place, stationed at the porch’s edge like a sentry who’d forgotten what peace looked like.
I didn’t know if she was alive. And worse, I no longer knew how to pray. The words wouldn’t come, and even if they had, I wouldn’t have known where to send them. Belief felt extravagant—something soft and distant, reserved for people who weren’t drowning. All I had was wood beneath my feet, the throb behind my eyes, and the fragile, furious breath of someone surviving out of spite, long after the part that believed in miracles had rotted through.
And then, just as morning cracked open into that gray-gold hush that sometimes follows the worst of it, the SUV appeared.
Not fast. Not triumphant. It moved like it had been summoned by something older than grief, rolling in one tire at a time. It rounded the gravel bend slowly and quietly, like it didn’t belong to this world. Like it belonged to a better one, where people came back. Where hope still survived.
The shape of it emerged in pieces. Rain-slick windows. No headlights. No rush. Just the crunch of gravel and the sound of the earth remembering how to breathe. My hand tightened on the porch railing, not to brace, not to steady, but because I knew, somewhere bone-deep, that if I didn’t hold on, I’d fly apart completely.
