Page 2 of Jax
He rose. I heard the soft stretch of leather, the scrape of boots across cement. The door closed behind him, not with a slam, but with the deliberate click of something final. Like a coffin lid.
Silence settled in again, thick and heavy. I sat in it, bound, blindfolded, and bleeding. Not dead, just sharpened. They hadn’t killed me. That would’ve been wasteful. No, they’d carved something new out of what was left. They had bent bone and broken will until I fit the outline of their design.
And now they were waiting to see how well I wore it.
I sat in the echo of the man’s footsteps, in the void where his voice had been, breath rasping, heart hammering. I wasn’t a person anymore; I was a deliverable. A name on a list. A task in motion. Something to be checked off.
The chair bit into my spine, and my wrists throbbed against the zip ties. Sweat clung to my skin, soaking into bruises I hadn’t even had time to count. Heat built beneath my jaw, fury and fear braided so tightly I couldn’t pull them apart. My eyes burned, not from tears, but from the pressure of holding them back.
I didn’t scream. Who would hear it? No one. There was nobody here. No other sound broke the silence. Just the creaking, dripping heartbeat of whatever building I was in. That, and the pulse thudding behind my ribs, cruel and relentless, reminded me I was still alive, whether I wanted to be or not.
A shift. The air changed. Pressure behind me, near my neck, so subtle I almost didn’t catch it.
I hadn’t heard anyone return. But I felt them. The silence thickened, and something cold touched my skin. A sting. Quick. A needle.
My body jolted, too late. Cold spread from the injection site in a fast, vicious bloom. My limbs went heavy. Thoughts slowed. My heartbeat skipped, echoed, softened.
The last thing I felt was the chair tilting back. The scrape of wood against cement. The sound of surrender, manufactured.
Then…nothing.
I wokeup to sunshine and birdsong, and for a moment, I thought I was dead.
Not because it was peaceful, but because it waswrong. Too bright. Too warm. Altogether too ordinary. My braincouldn’t process the sound of chirping over the phantom echo of dripping pipes and leather soles on concrete. I blinked open sore eyes and looked up at the ceiling. Familiar. Cracked. Morning sunlight filtered through the blinds as if nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t been tied to a chair with blood in my mouth and someone whispering threats into my ear.
But my body told the truth.
The pain hit in layers. First, the pounding behind my eyes, then the heavy ache in my shoulders, and finally the raw, searing throb that pulsed around my wrists like a siren. I moved, and felt everything—sore thighs, a bruised spine, and the stiff pull of tendons that had been stretched past capacity. My mouth tasted like metal and cotton. Even the skin along my neck itched like something had been pressed there too long, too hard.
I sat up slowly, and the room tilted sideways. I grabbed at the sheets, forcing my breath to steady even as panic tried to climb back into my throat. My feet found the floor, bare and too warm beneath me. Everything looked untouched. Staged.Sterile.
The silence was sharp, surgical. The hum of the refrigerator. The whisper of a breeze through the cracked window. Nothing out of place, but that only made it worse. Someone had put it all back. Like I was a doll that had been knocked off a shelf, and carefully repositioned so no one would notice.
I stood painfully, and moved through the apartment like a stranger in my own space, like I might bump into someone still watching. My breath stayed shallow, chest tight, every step echoing too loud in my ears. Entering the bathroom, I turned on the tap, and let the water run until it was ice cold. Splashed it on my bruised face, again and again, like that could wash it off. The memory. The contact. The helplessness. But it clung. It had soaked in too deep.
I wrapped my arms around myself and backed out of the room. Everything felt too quiet. Too still. I didn’t know if I’d been alone the whole time. I didn’t know if I was now.
My stomach turned before I even saw the envelope.
I knew it would be there. Knew it like I knew my own heartbeat. I walked into the kitchen already braced for it, but it still knocked the breath out of me.
A manila envelope. Unsealed. My name scrawled across the front in thick black marker: STELLA. No last name. No instructions. Just the kind of deliberate familiarity that didn’t ask for obedience, because it simply expected it.
My hand hovered, unwilling. But the silence pressed in, and I touched it anyway, like the choice had never really been mine.
Inside was exactly what I’d feared: a pre-filled-out transfer of ownership. My name, my building, the business that had my blood baked into its foundation, ready to be signed away to a faceless company I’d never heard of. The only thing not filled out was the signature line, like it was already theirs and they were just humoring the formality.
Taped to the front was a scrap of yellow notepaper, torn from the top of a legal pad.
You’ve got five days, sweetheart.
Sweetheart.
The word made my stomach twist. It didn’t read like a nickname. It read like a leash. A warning wrapped in sugar. I held the paper for too long, stared at the curve of the handwriting, the weight of the ink. It wasn’t what was written; it was whatwasn’t. There were no threats. No reminders. Just the assumption I understood exactly what happened next, if I didn’t comply.
I looked around the room and felt it—that sense of being watched, even in the solitude. The windows were shut, the doors locked, but it didn’t matter. They, whoevertheywere, had already shown me they didn’t need to break things to take them. Their weapons were quieter than force. Sharper. Calibrated with precision. I stood there barefoot on the cold tile, the envelope still clutched in my hand, holding the price tag of my own survival. The restraints were gone. The bleeding had stopped. But I had never felt more contained, more carefully boxed in by choices that weren’t mine. They hadn’t killed me, not because they couldn’t, but because I was more useful alive. A better tool. A quieter weapon.
Now, somehow, I was supposed to play the role. Show up. Sign on the line. Smile, like gratitude had replaced fear. Like this wasn’t coercion dressed in clean lines and legal ink.
