Page 17 of Jax
The latch was newer than the frame. Installed recently. Tight and secure, no give when I pressed my fingers against it. The glass was thick, maybe double-paned. I didn’t test it yet. Didn’t need to. I’d already assumed it wouldn’t break easily.
I checked the angles. Sight lines. Whether anyone could see in. Whether I could see out.
Beyond the window, the tree line waited like a dare.
The thirty-yard stretch between the house and the woods felt longer the more I stared at it. No fence. No trip wires. Nothing was visible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
Sully moved toward the door and paused. “You’re free to move around the house,” he said, gentler this time. “Kitchen’s stocked. Bathroom’s yours. You can go where you like, just not outside alone. Not until Niko gives the all-clear.”
I turned toward him, suspicion slipping out sharper than I intended. “Why? What’s waiting out there?”
His expression softened, but the honesty cut sharper than any warning. “That’s the problem,” he said quietly. “We don’t know who’s watching. Could be nobody. Could be the wrong somebody. Until we’re sure, you stay inside.”
The words landed harder than I expected. Not a comfort, not a lie. Just unvarnished truth.
Maddy followed Sully towards the door, but gave me a big grin. “Hey, I know that the reason all of us are here is really scary, but I’m really happy to meet you. I think we’re going to get along really well. Now, you get some rest, okay? If you need anything, my bedroom is just down the hall.”
I thanked her quietly, and Sully pulled the door mostly closed behind him, leaving me in the center of a room that wasn’t mine, with a stranger’s bag on the bed and a lock on the inside I hadn’t asked for but already knew I’d use. I wasn’t here by choice. But I wasn’t entirely trapped either. Not yet.
The quiet wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t comforting. It pressed in—constructed, deliberate. Like air in a place that watched back. It clung to my skin like humidity, trailing down my spine like it had opinions about me being here.
I stayed still a beat too long, caught in a moment of strange hesitation. It wasn’t the quiet that got to me. It was the effort they’d obviously made to make me feel comfortable. The neatly folded blanket. The unopened water bottle, placed just within reach. A space arranged with care by someone who hadn’t asked what I needed. Kindness like that never landed right. It didn’t sink in. It hovered, soft and weightless, like a label I hadn’t earned. I didn’t trust comfort that came uninvited.
So I moved. Not because I had to, but because something under my skin insisted I couldn’t stay still. Unease hummed through me, subtle but constant, driving each step with a little too much control. My breath caught high in my chest. My palms itched. I didn’t know what I was searching for, only that I couldn’t sit there pretending comfort didn’t feel like surveillance dressed in civility.
At the door, I pressed my ear to the wood and closed my eyes like it might sharpen the rest of my senses. I wasn’t listening for danger, exactly. I was listening for life, for the creak of a chair, the sigh of a floorboard, a cough, a laugh, something to prove the house wasn’t just a shell built to observe.
But there was nothing.
No voices. No movement. Just stillness. The kind that didn’t soothe but studied, like the house was holding its breath, waiting to see what I’d do next. I cracked the door an inch and scanned the hall. Everything was quiet and still.
But it was the wrong kind of stillness. Not rest. Restraint. Like someone had hit pause and stepped just out of frame, waiting to see which version of me would show up now.
I leaned out farther, holding my breath like I was on a wiretap, straining for the world below. There—a laugh. Low. Too short to be real. A boot on tile. The soft clink of metal. Someone was washing a glass.
That’s when I heard it. Footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Even. A rhythm too controlled to be careless.
Then a low mutter, almost under their breath. Too quiet to make out the words, but the voice was unmistakable. Jax.
The recognition hit deeper than instinct and sharper than logic. My body had registered him long before my mind caught up. The cadence of his steps, the measured air around him, the quiet calculation in everything he did. It all fit. He did not need to raise his voice to be heard.
Of course it was him. The one who had not spoken all day was the one pulling strings now. Silent, exacting, unsettlingly in control. His presence did not announce itself. It seeped through the air, deliberate enough to make me wonder if this was a test, and if I had already failed.
No retreat. No footsteps now. Just his presence, heavy on the other side of the door, daring me to open it.
I stood there feeling hollow, caught between instinct and silence, facing a man who was nothing to me, yet already in the way. A man I didn’t know, and, more dangerously, one I didn’t yet know how to stop if he blocked me from my sister.
I could scream. I could open the door and demand answers. I could throw the bolt and pretend that made me safe.
I did none of those things.
I waited, like prey, like a girl in a horror movie who knows better but can’t make her legs move. After what felt like a full minute, though it was probably less than fifteen seconds, the breath outside the door vanished. I heard him walking away. Calm. Unhurried. Like the whole thing had gone exactly the way he intended.
And maybe it had.
The footsteps faded down the hall, and I let out a breath that felt jagged. My hands stung from how hard I had pressed my nails into my palms, half-moon grooves stamped into skin. My chest burned from holding still too long, like I had welded myself in place and forgotten how to move.
I hated that. Hated the way my body betrayed me, freezing while some stranger walked by. Jax hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t done a thing beyond being there. And still, I’d come apart in the silence, fear pulling at me seam by seam until I barely recognized myself.
