Page 47 of Save Me

I glance at Ryan before my eyes settle on Jax again, and it takes everything in me not to be pulled into the depth of his gaze.

Jax has been exceptionally patient, never pressuring me to do anything I’m not ready to do, and always slowing things down when he feels we’re approaching my limits, always the voice of reason no matter how much I say I want more. I don’t know what he’s waiting for, what box needs to be ticked on his mental checklist before he’ll let us try having sex again, but I know he wants to make sure my healing is the priority.

“As he was saying,” Ryan starts, “we had a disagreement on how Rhett and Tanner should be handled. But we’ll figure it out.”

“I think they should both be killed,” I say nonchalantly, before picking up my fork and taking another bite of dinner.

I lift my eyes from my plate, only to see them both staring at me. “What?” I ask, glancing between them, feeling bold for the first time in a while. “If you guys don’t want to do it, I will.”

“You’re not a killer, love,” Jax says gently.

“No, but I could be,” I respond between mouthfuls. “For them, for this, I could be.”

Ryan shoots a look at Jax, one I can’t decipher, but Jax seems to understand his message.

“Killing someone, it… changes you. You can’t go back to who you were before you take someone’s life, no matter how hard you try.”

I keep my voice steady, despite the hurricane in my chest trying to get free, to explode into the world around me. I want to scream, to make them both understand what I went through, what I endured. But instead, I take a breath, steadying the storm in my chest as I look at them both. “Kind of like I can’t go back to who I was before they did this to me.”

I meet Jax’s eyes, not backing down as he stares at me, until a contemplative look sweeps over his features. He takes a breath, breaking the heavy silence that hangs in the air.

“We’ll come back to this conversation. But yes, the fate of Rhett and Tanner was what we were discussing, what we have been having different views on.”

“And these views are?”

Jax pauses, and there’s a sense of hesitancy etched into his features, something that almost looks like nervousness. But I’ve never seen him nervous in all the time I’ve known him.

“I respect the fact that you want to know about this, about what we do. I understand why. But once I tell you this, once I let you know about my world, there’s no going back. So, you need to ask yourself if any risk of being… associated… with the business is worth it for you.”

I respond without so much as a second thought. “All in or all out, right Mr. Turner?”

Jax gives a tight smile. “I knew you were going to say that. Make yourself comfortable love, I’m going to start from the beginning of everything and it’s a long story.”

Jax proceeds to tell me the story of his family name, starting right at the beginning, wanting me to understand the background of what he does before I learn of what he’s currently doing. He tells me of how the Turners started off as people involved in small crimes, like petty theft. But as time went on and bills remained tight, they turned to bigger and riskier endeavors to put food on the table. Eventually stealing cars, robbing banks and jewelry stores, and smuggling weapons and drugs became their main sources of income and has stayed that way for the past fifty years.

“We work with every major establishment you can think of,” Jax says.

“Wearea major establishment,” Ryan interjects.

“Dare I ask what crimes you’re involved in now?”

Jax is the one to speak this time. “Our operations have remained rather unchanged for the most part, but since I took over we’ve been steering away from narcotics and weapons, and focusing on more wholesome endeavors.”

“Wholesome?” I can’t help but smile at his choice of words.

They grin back at me. “More wholesome than what we were involved with,” Ryan says.

“And Poison Ivy fits into this… establishment… how exactly?”

“Fraud. Helping other organizations with money laundering and washing our own money when we print it.”

“Youprintmoney?” I ask Jax in disbelief.

Both of them give me mischievous smiles. “Only sometimes.”

“And you have people who work for you then, like, employees?”

Jax nods in confirmation.

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