Page 70 of Jackson

The other shoe had to drop eventually.

Right?

It had to. That was how much my luck worked.

“There is one thing,” Nina went on. “About the program.”

Here it comes...

God, if the program actually got shut down because of me and Barker, I was never going to forgive myself. A decade’s worth of work to be put into it, only for a couple of dumbasses to fuck up and get the whole thing completely disbanded. I had no doubts that Jackson would find another path to help people as he always had, but being the cause of collapsing something that he’d taken pride in for so long would fucking kill me.

Nina’s gaze darted over to Jackson expectantly.

It dawned on me then, though, that if the programhadbeen shut down because of us, then why was Jackson here in the first place?

I would’ve assumed he’d be too angry at me to want to wait around in a hospital room for me to wake up.

There could be an argument made that he was simply waiting for me to wake up in order to yell at me, but then again, why go through the trouble in soothing me?

If he was angry at me, he wouldn’t have bothered. Jackson was a good man, a compassionate one. But he wasn’tthatnice.

He slowly turned to me and sat down on the bed again, hiking up his leg so that it was resting against my side. There was no hesitation in him when he reached out toward me and dragged his hand along my forehead and into my hair once more. Clearly, he wasn’t worried about Nina tattling or about her caring in general.

Though, I was kind of curious on how that conversation even went.

“Yeah, I’m sleeping with one of the inmates in my program.”

“Oh wow, really?”

“Yeah, can you take a look at his case file and get the charges dismissed?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem.”

How was she not freaking out?

Jackson pulled in a slow and deep breath before he spoke. “They’re sending you back, Ayen.”

My brows furrowed.

Sending me back where?

“To SAC,” he clarified after a moment.

Oh.

And there was the other shoe.

“We’re going to get you out of there, though.” He blinked hard a few times, his voice growing gruff from emotion. “I swear it. You just need to hold on over there a little longer.”

I had half a mind to ask him to come visit me. I’d only ever had one visitor come and see me, and that had been Alex’s mom. The entire hour had been spent in silence while she cried silently to herself, her eyes fixated on my uniform and the SAC logo stitched at the breast.

Finally, when time was called and the hour was up, she’d gotten up from her seat and left without a single word said. For some reason, that had hit harder than if she’d come to scream at me for ruining her son’s life. Just watching the pain and devastation on her face as she wept was enough of a message to get across that I’d irrevocably ruined their family more than any kind of speech ever could.

Better to keep Jackson away from any of that, though. Not to mention if any of the COs that attended the program with us caught wind of it, it’d rouse suspicion.

Because why in the world would he randomly be visiting an inmate from his program in prison?

Actually.

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