Page 73 of Jax
I leaned against the opposite wall, watching her door like it might shift, as if some missed detail might flicker into view. But there was nothing. No breath. No shadow. No creak of floorboards. Just stillness, sealed tight.
“I’ve run the odds. Accounted for pressure, history, the trauma written into both our blueprints. I know how rare it is for something to survive that. But you made me believe it could. That belief—that uninvited, uncalculated hope—that’s what you walked away from. And I’m still trying to understand what it cost you to let yourself want it in the first place.”
I pushed off the wall and stepped forward, hand lifted, not to knock, not to reach, just to mark the space between us. When I spoke again, my voice dropped, stripped of performance. “I’ll give you the silence you asked for. But I won’t rewrite the story to make it cleaner. I won’t call what happened between us a misstep, just to make the leaving easier to carry. You let me hold somethingreal. And now you’re pretending it never existed, like that’s the only way to stay intact. But erasure isn’t survival. It’s just another kind of grief.”
I stepped back. There was nothing left to salvage in that hallway. No revised protocol. No new intel. Just the echo of something dissected, redacted, and archived before either of us had the nerve to fully claim it.
I turned and walked away, not because I wanted to, and not because I was ready to stop caring. But because I’ve learned that standing at a locked door too long teaches you the wrong lesson about worth. And I refused to mistake someone else’s fear for my failure.
17
Stella
The ceiling hadn’t changed.It was the same pale paint. The same faint crack in the corner that looked vaguely like a lightning bolt, if you stared long enough.
I’d been staring long enough.
I was curled at the edge of the bed, my spine against the wall like it might hold me up. I hadn’t left the room since silence began to feel safer than softness, since I woke up next to a man I didn’t deserve to have. Since I’d decided that if Violet was gone, I didn’t deserve anything but hunger and guilt.
I hadn’t showered. Hadn’t changed. The hoodie swallowing my frame probably used to belong to Sully—oversized, clean, too warm. My hair was still braided from two days ago, knotted and half-matted. I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to be clean, or whole. I was a girl made of sparks and steel, rusting from the inside out.
My stomach growled. I ignored it. Hunger was something I understood. It gave me an excuse for the ache in my chest. You don’t get comfort when your sister’s missing. You don’t get soft mouths and tangled limbs and mind-shattering orgasms when Violet might be zip-tied in a basement. You don’t get to be heldwhen the only person who’s ever really known you might be screaming in the dark.
I closed my eyes. But memory didn’t ask permission.
Jax’s voice in my ear. The rope dragging across my skin. His touch, reverent, like I wasn’t carved out of tension. Like I could be more than a body that only knew how to hold itself together.
It was the first time since I’d arrived that my shoulders dropped and my lungs remembered how to pull a full breath.
I rolled to my back, lungs heavy. It wasn’t sadness. It was more like guilt had weight, and had picked my chest as its throne. Jax had been good. Gentle. Not because I earned it, not because he wanted anything, but because that’s who he was. He didn’t treat me like a problem. He treated me like art. Something worth touching. Learning. Holding.
And I hated him for it. Not because it hurt. Because I let it feel good. Because while my sister might’ve been dying, I let someone touch me like I mattered. Worse, I wanted it again. That twist inside wasn’t grief. It was longing. And that made me keeps still. Made me starve.
My hands—still marked with rope-burn and the grit of steel—curled into fists. I was supposed to be made of iron. I welded steel the size of cars. Worked with fire hot enough to melt bone. I didn’t flinch at sparks, or pressure, or the sound of metal screaming. My life was forged, not felt. And still I lay curled in a hoodie that wasn’t mine, crying like a kid too ashamed to scream.
I’d spent years insisting softness belonged to Violet, the steady one. The one who soothed what I never tried to hide. Now, she was gone, and all my edges turned inward.
Our parents never got it. They called her organized, and me intense. Thought that was balance. But Violet always got me. She never asked me to be less. When I picked up a torch at fifteen, she didn’t call it dangerous. She called it genius.
She drove me to my first gallery show in boots she couldn’t afford. Wrote my artist bio. Sent thank-you notes when I forgot. She didn’t just fix my mistakes. She cleared the wreckage before I even saw it.
And I let her. Because it was easier. Because I was the chaos, and she was the order. Because she made it look effortless, like she was built to carry what I found so difficult to manage.
And now she was gone.
The woman who ran my life like a synchronized system, who buffered my blowups with Outlook reminders and slotted my breakdowns into color-coded blocks, was probably chained to a concrete floor, alone in the dark. And I couldn’t bring myself to check the inbox.
I let her disappear behind me again and again, not just a few weeks ago, not just at the gallery event where the art collector flirted with her more than he looked at my work, and not just when I had the harebrained idea that I could afford to buy and run an art studio in the Kansas City Industrial District. I let her vanish behind my ambition, my art, my fire. And she let me, because Violet loved me with a devotion that asked for nothing. And now I didn’t even know if she was alive.
It didn’t hit me all at once. The night with Jax had ended in quiet peace, the kind that seeps into bone without permission. I’d fallen asleep in his arms, wrapped in a warmth that didn’t feel like surrender, so much as surfacing after too long underwater. But the moment I opened my eyes and remembered who I was, the shame returned sharp enough to bruise.
I’d let someone hold me. Let him touch me like I was holy. Let him see me, when the only person I owed myself to might’ve been screaming in the dark. And it hadn’t just been closeness. I had begged. I had cum. There’s no metaphor pure enough toabsolve that kind of betrayal. No god who’d call it mercy. No forgiveness I could wear without it bleeding through.
My body had sung while Violet might’ve been silenced, and that was the part I couldn’t forgive. I rolled onto my side, forehead to the mattress, jaw locked against the sound clawing its way up my throat. This wasn’t guilt, not the kind you earn by accident, because deep down, I didn’t want to undo it. That was the rot.
Jax had given me something no one ever had—control without condition, attention without demand, reverence without agenda. He hadn’t just touched my body; he’d held it like he understood it. Like he valued it. Like I wasn’t dangerous to love. And I wanted that again. Even now. Even with Violet missing. Even if her blood was drying on concrete somewhere, I wanted him.
That was the part that gutted me. Not the memory. The wanting.
