Page 7 of Jax
“What happens now?” I asked, barely able to hear myself.
The detective leaned back. His gaze never left mine.
“Now?” he said. “Now we get you somewhere they can’t reach.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I believed in places like that anymore.
Not for women like me.
2
Stella
Time doesn’t passthe same when you’re waiting to be forgotten.
It stretches. Warps. Becomes a slow-dripping faucet you can’t shut off, each second a drop landing somewhere soft and bruised. I sat in that interrogation room, counting, not because I wanted to, but because my brain needed something to hold on to that wasn’t fear. Fourteen minutes since Detective Mercado had said he’d be right back.
The walls didn’t care. Neither did the light above me, flickering just enough to make the shadows dance along the corners of the room like they knew something I didn’t.
Everything in here had edges. The table. The floor. The silence.
It was a space designed for surrender. And I was trying hard not to.
My leg bounced under the table, sharp and erratic. My hands wouldn’t stay still. They twisted, folded, gripped the fabric of my sleeve, then started again. I stared at my reflection in the double-sided glass and hated the way I looked, like a woman unraveling in real time. Pale. Hunted. Hollowed out.
The hum of the air vents had shifted, no longer steady, no longer benign. It pulsed at uneven intervals, like lungs wheezing through illness. Every mechanical breath carried the weight of something too human, too near. Every sound in the room took on new meaning. The distant scuff of footsteps down a hallway. The soft exhale of a door easing shut. Every noise had become a blade.
I kept reminding myself I was safe. I was inside a station, surrounded by protocols and bulletproof glass, guarded by procedure and paper trails. I was supposed to be untouchable here.
And still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched, anyway.
The chair creaked beneath me as I shifted, both palms pressing to the cold steel tabletop like I could anchor myself there, or stop the tremor crawling up my spine. I tried to breathe. Tried to count. Seven breaths. Six. Five….
A sharp crackle from the ceiling cut through the stillness with the violence of a detonation, splitting the room’s hush. The sound reverberated through my bones before my brain caught up, and I jerked back in my chair, fingers curling tight against the table’s steel edge as if that alone might protect me. My heart lurched in my chest, a stampede, wild and frantic beneath my ribs.
“Well, well, well. Hello there, sweetheart.”
Something deep inside me seized, some long-buried instinct uncoiling with a scream I didn’t let out but still felt. My gaze snapped to the mirror in front of me, and I didn’t recognize the woman staring back. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Not because of the words, but because of the voice that delivered them.
Smooth. Even. Detached in a way that made cruelty feel like policy. Iknewthat voice. Had lived inside the sound of it. I hadheard it in the dark, in the quiet that came before pain. I’d heard it behind latex gloves and the slap of zip ties pulled tight. It lived inside memories I couldn’t fully remember, only react to. It had never needed to shout. That kind of power never did.
It didn’t belong here, not in this station, not in this city, not in this version of my life where I was supposed to be safe. But it was here, spilling from a ceiling speaker as easily as breath, as if it had been waiting all along.
The room didn’t change, not physically, but I felt it happen anyway. The shift in the air. A drop in temperature that came not from vents or ducts, but from inside me. I shoved the chair back hard enough to make it scream across the concrete, forcing myself to stand even as my knees buckled beneath the weight of recognition. My hands braced against the tabletop, fingers splayed, desperate to feel something real, something cold and solid and uncorrupted.
The intercom hissed again, quiet and confident.
“Don’t worry, Stella, I’ve disabled the recording feed, so we won’t have anyone asking any pesky questions later. We’re alone. Just you and me. Let’s keep this simple.”
It felt like drowning in slow motion. Like watching ink bleed through fabric. Cold spread in tendrils across my chest, seeping down through my ribs, curling low in my gut, until I could no longer tell whether it was fear or memory that made my hands shake. The mirror didn’t reflect anymore; it absorbed. His voice lived inside the glass now, echoing beneath the surface like it belonged to the room itself.
I tried to speak. Tried to summon something steady. “Detective Mercado?” His name came out brittle, barely audible, caught behind the tight press of panic against my throat. I swallowed and tried again, louder this time, clinging to the syllables like rope, but there was no answer. No response. Onlysilence. And beneath it, the mechanical rasp of the overhead vent, now off-tempo and unnatural.
“This is a police station,” I said, though the words felt weightless, a weak protest thrown against something too large to contain. “You can’t be here. You can’t…”
“But I can.”
There was no cruelty in his tone. No urgency. That was what made it unbearable. He spoke the way some men shut doors—quietly, completely, and without looking back.
