Page 94 of Carrick
“That’s him,” I whispered. “That’s Rayden.”
“You’re sure?” Jax didn’t look up. Just kept typing, pulling up the waveform, isolating frequencies.
“I know his cadence. He said, ‘watch it’—like someone bumped him. It’s short, clipped. But it’shim.”
Jax finally looked at me. And for once, he smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “Then we’ve got a location to triangulate.”
“You think he was moving?”
“Probably in a crowd. Maybe evading Dom Krovi enforcers. Or being moved against his will.”
The words hit me like ice.
Jax saw it. “We’ll find out. And we’ll use this. Thank you.”
“No,” I said, voice soft but steady. “Thankyou. For trusting me. For letting me in. For seeing me as something more than a burden.”
Jax didn’t answer, just nodded and turned back to the screen, already muttering about amplitude and location tags. Brilliant, unreachable, and strangely kind in his neurotic way—that was Jax.
I left him to it and padded barefoot into the hall, adrenaline bleeding off, exhaustion setting in, a quiet ache still lodged in my chest. Outside the sliding glass door, Carrick sat on the steps in a worn t-shirt, legs stretched over the porch, head tipped toward the sky. I slid the door open and stepped into the night.
He didn’t turn. “There’s a storm rolling in.”
I looked up. The clouds were low and heavy, like they were holding something back.
“Fitting,” I said quietly. I sat beside him, not touching, not crowding. Just near.
“I heard you found his voice,” he murmured.
I nodded. “Jax is already running it through his magic machine brain.”
There was a pause, then he said, “You did good today.”
I let out a shaky breath. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
Carrick turned to me then, and in the dark, his eyes were soft. “You burned it down to the studs, Bellamy. That takes courage.”
“I almost broke us.”
“You didn’t.” His voice was gentle. “You brought the truth into the room. We needed that.”
I looked down at my hands, still trembling slightly in my lap. “I hate needing people.”
“I know.”
“I hate that I can’t control this. That I can’t protect him. That I couldn’t even keep it together without turning into a complete psycho.”
“You weren’t a psycho,” he said simply. “You were grieving.”
I blinked. “Why do you always say the right thing?”
He gave me a tired half-smile. “I don’t. I say what I mean, Bellamy. You just finally let yourself believe it.”
We sat in silence for a long moment. The kind of silence that doesn’t hurt. That says:you don’t have to talk right now—I already hear you.
Eventually, I leaned my head on his shoulder. Just for a second.
