Page 144 of Jax
Outside, I adjusted the straps of my vest again and let the night settle over me like an old scar. The air was thick with ozone and the slow-building charge that always came before a Midwestern thunderstorm. You could feel it in your teeth if you knew how to sense it. I always did. The trees had gone quiet. The birds were already gone. Somewhere past the ridge, thunder rolled like it had something to say, and just hadn’t decided how loud to get.
There’s always a moment before an op when the world pauses, not out of reverence, but calculation. Like it’s giving you one last moment to decide what kind of man you’d be when it hits. I’d lived inside that breath before. I knew what it cost.
Behind me, gravel shifted under bare feet. Light steps, deliberate. She wasn’t chasing. She was choosing.
“Hey,” Stella said, her voice barely louder than the wind.
I didn’t turn right away. I’d already known it was her; the rhythm of her approach, the cadence, the way something in my chest recognized her before my mind caught up. She stopped just beyond the headlights, the soft light painting her in gray-scale. My hoodie swallowed her frame, sleeves balled in her fists like they were all she could hold. Her hair was wind-tossed, her face pale, her expression rigid with something that wasn’t fear, but carried the residue of it.
“I know you’re about to leave,” she said, still standing just outside my reach. “But I need you for one more minute. Just as yourself. Before you become whoever you have to be out there.”
Her voice cracked, and that was when I turned.
“You don’t have to ask,” I said.
She exhaled like the answer cost her something, then stepped into the halo of light. Not all the way, just far enough to decide if she could afford what came next.
“You’re all ready to go then, huh?” she said.
“We are,” I told her.
Her gaze drifted toward the tree line like she could see past it, like Violet’s name was etched into the bark or carved into the wind. But I knew what she was really seeing: every exit wound that never healed, every what-if that had calcified into fear. She looked back at me with eyes too sharp to be soft, and too vulnerable to keep pretending.
“What if it’s a trap?” she asked. “What if the Mole is watching? What if Quinn’s wrong?”
She wasn’t asking about tactics. She already knew the probabilities. She was spiraling through the math of what it would cost her if tonight broke wrong. I waited because she wasn’t done yet.
“What if I lose you before I even get to keep you?”
There it was.
The words didn’t surprise me. What landed so hard was how much they echoed something I’d heard before.
It was years ago, in the jungle, the night before an extraction. Corporal Rogers, a recent addition to our squad, had pulled me aside, eyes steady and calm like he already knew the numbers. He didn’t say he was scared. Didn’t ask me to stay safe. He just said, “If it’s down to me, don’t flinch.” And I hadn’t.
But I still saw the blood when I closed my eyes.
The memory came sharp and uninvited—the shrapnel, the chaos, Carrick screaming into comms while I ran the math in real time and still came up short. Rogers had been five feet outside the margin I’d flagged as safe. Five feet, and a fraction too slow. And then there was silence, and static, and blood soaking into jungle soil beneath a black sky.
I’d learned then that even perfect math fails. And the silence after impact doesn’t leave. It waits for the next person you’re afraid to lose. Because when you’re on deployment, you losepeople. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve known them a day, or a month, or if you shared a bunkhouse in basic, losing a brother is never easy.
Stella didn’t know that story. She didn’t need to. But she wore the same expression Rogers’ sister had when we delivered the news, like she already knew the answer, and was asking anyway.
And still, she’d come outside barefoot. Still, she’d stood in front of me with her fists clenched in my hoodie like she could hold on to a different ending.
I let my eyes trace her features, tight with fear, but upright. Present. I remembered the first time I saw her when Quinn brought her to the house, pale and scared, eyes darting toward exits like they were escape hatches. She’d flinched at everything then. At me.
She didn’t flinch now.
Whatever fear she carried, she wore it differently. Not like armor. Not like surrender. Like a weapon she intended to wield.
She didn’t ask if I’d come back because she needed comfort. She asked because she needed data. A variable she could model against. Something solid to grip while the rest of the world dissolved.
And I knew that feeling too well.
Because I was holding onto her the same way.
I stepped forward, slow and steady, until the space between us disappeared. She didn’t flinch. Her fists gripped my vest like she needed something real to tether her to the ground.
