Page 88 of Jayson
“I thought I was ready to see it again,” she says softly. “But it still holds demons.”
I reach for her hand. She takes it.
“You don’t have to go back there,” I tell her.
She nods, quiet but sure.
The city hums around us—life moving on. But inside this car, everything has shifted. Whatever happened in that house today changed something in her.
And I’ll burn the whole damn world before I let it break her.
35
KEIRA
Rain needles the glass panes, thunder murmurs like a curse, and Jayson sits opposite me in a leather wingback, rolling a coin across his knuckles—left, right, back again—eyes fixed on a fire that’s mostly smoke.
I’ve tried to speak three times. My throat rebels each attempt, cords tight as piano wire. But the bruise on my arm, the one I got hauling myself out of a too tight window, throbs like a heavy pulse:tell him, tell him, tell him.
I curl tighter on the sofa, knees to chest, heart still knocking against bone.
“Jayson?”
The coin stops. It lands on the side table with a soft click. Still, he doesn’t speak. Not one syllable. His gaze lifts—dark, patient, lethal.
His eyes are the deepest shade of sea blue. Not soft or calm. Rather, the kind of turbulent blue that comes right before the ocean drags you under.
I swallow.
There’s nothing safe about the way he looks at me. Not because he’s angry—he isn’t. His expression is unreadable.Patient. Watchful. But there’s a stillness in him that’s worse than fury. A kind of lethal restraint.
This is the man who killed my father.
The baby-faced killer with blood on his hands and nothing but silence where his conscience should be.
And yet—when I look at him now, all I feel is warmth. Safety I don’t want to trust. Longing I don’t know how to justify.
He sits across from me in black slacks and a fitted shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, showing strong forearms dusted with scars and stories. His light brown hair is slightly mussed, like he’s been dragging his fingers through it—a tell I’ve learned only I get to see. Not his colleagues. Not Nina.Me.
And that face. God. That face.
He’s too beautiful to be real. Not in the obvious way. Not perfect. No, there’s a certain sharpness to him. Angled jaw. Faint bruise-colored shadows under his eyes. A mouth that rarely smiles, but when it does—it wrecks me.
Looking at him is like standing too close to the fire. You know it’ll burn. You can already feel the heat. But part of you wants to stay there anyway, just to see what it feels like when it touches your skin.
He scares me. Not because I think he’ll hurt me, because I know he won’t. If he wanted to, he would have already. He scares me because I want him. Even after everything. Even knowing the truth of who he is. What he is. And it’s a kind of longing that might be the end of me.
He hasn’t said much since we came back to the estate, but I can feel the thoughts moving behind his silence. Calculating. Reconstructing the day piece by piece, trying to find answers.
In the end, it’s my own silence that undoes me. My phone buzzes in my hoodie pocket. Just once. A sharp, short vibration that freezes me.
Jayson’s gaze cuts sideways as I bring the phone out and lookdown at the screen. My breath catches and my mind stumbles, even as I try to slow down my reaction to the unwanted intrusion.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” I say quickly. Too quickly.
He arches a brow. “You’re a bad liar, Keira.”
