Page 18 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

She worked more quietly after that. Not still.

She was never still, but more narrowed. Focused.

The world collapsed to a point she didn’t let anyone reach.

Sparks flared in bright, furious arcs as she bent to the work, body tight with something between memory and obsession.

There was no flinching. No hesitation. Just fire and precision and the echo of pain turned into ritual.

It caught behind my ribs in a way I couldn’t name.

Not quite admiration. Not lust. Just that rare and dangerous ache that comes when you witness someone praying through motion.

I let myself speak without thinking.

“Small town in Iowa. That’s where I’m from.”

She didn’t look up, but her spine shifted—listening, not retreating. The arc buzzed a few seconds longer, then cut with a flick of her wrist as clean as breath.

“Farm co-op on one side. Motorcycle shop on the other. My mom ran the produce stand. My dad rebuilt engines in the barn. Good people. Faith, dirt, hard work. They just didn’t know what the fuck to do with me.”

Still, she didn’t answer, but her stance changed. Not defensive. Just wary, in that careful way people get when they’re offered something they didn’t ask for. Like she was waiting for the price tag.

“I couldn’t sit still to save my life,” I said, leaning against the bench. “Tested out of half my classes by twelve. Took apart a microwave at eight just to see how it worked.”

“And?” Her voice came from behind the mask as she reached for a fresh rod.

“Managed to blow the breaker. Melted half the fuse box. Dad grounded me for a month. Mom thought maybe I was gifted. I thought maybe I was broken.”

She flipped the mask up and met my gaze head-on. No softness. But no ice, either.

“Maybe you were both.”

Those four words hit like a mirror held too steady. There was heat in her tone, but no challenge. Just recognition.

“Couldn’t shut the noise off upstairs,” I said after a beat, tapping my temple. “I joined the Army thinking maybe someone else’s orders would drown it out.”

She adjusted the welder with practiced hands, her attention sharp, but not gone.

“And did it?”

“No. Just gave the noise better weapons.”

That earned me the ghost of a smirk. She tightened her gloves and didn’t speak again, but she didn’t need to. Her silence had weight. Agreement, maybe. Or understanding.

I watched her for another beat, then asked, “What about you? What dragged you into fire and steel?”

She hesitated for a half-second, then nodded toward the sculpture-in-progress. “Couldn’t paint. Too delicate. Too... pastel. Welding? Welding is visceral. Immediate. It lets me shape something that could cut you open and still be art.”

The way she said it made my pulse shift just a fraction. It wasn’t sensual. Not exactly. But it was intimate. Unapologetic. And that was hotter than anything else she could’ve said.

“I dropped out of college my first year,” she continued, brushing a streak of soot off her cheek with the back of her wrist. “Tried to make art work on canvas. It didn’t. I needed... resistance. Something with bite.”

I nodded slowly. “And the gallery stuff? You ever show your pieces outside of your own studio?”

She glanced down, fiddling with a clamp, the light catching the edge of her jaw. “Yeah. Once. A piece sold for four grand.”

I arched a brow at her sarcasm. “Right…”

She snorted. “My boyfriend actually had the audacity to say I owed him for all the ‘exposure.’ Took the check and paid off his student loans.”

My jaw flexed. “Let me guess. You dumped him immediately.”

“Three years later,” she said, dry. “Right after he told me he’d ‘allow’ me to change mediums if I wasn’t making us enough money.”

“I hope you welded something through his windshield.”

She laughed, full-bodied and unexpected. “No. But I did make a six-foot installation of a woman’s hand flipping the bird. Sold that one myself, no gallery needed.”

The smile that tugged at my mouth wasn’t about the joke. It was in the way her voice carried that pride. She wasn’t posturing. She was reclaiming something, and that was a hell of a lot more powerful than revenge.

“Most people get quiet when they don’t know what to say,” I murmured. “You only go still when you’re doing something that makes you feel alive.”

She didn’t answer. Just looked at me with eyes sharp enough to cut and restless enough to run. Like she couldn’t decide whether to thank me or tell me to back off, and maybe I wouldn’t have blamed her for either.

Still, I reached across the bench and tossed her the rag.

“You want this room again,” I said, voice rough now, low in a way that settled into the bones instead of the ears, “just ask.” The pause that followed stretched long enough to gather weight. “Next time,” I added, “I’ll bring you a TIG machine.”

The smile she gave me then wasn’t for show. It was quiet and earned and real, and it hit harder than I wanted to admit, because I knew it. I was already in trouble.

She didn’t finish the piece. Not even close.

But when she finally cut the arc, set the rod holder down, and peeled off her mask, the shift in her was unmistakable.

Hair clung to her cheek, soot streaked across her temple, a smear of rusty dust caught in the hollow of her throat.

And beneath it all, that glow—less adrenaline, more reverence.

The look of someone who’d made something out of nothing and bent lightning into form with her own bare hands.

She stood like a sculpture herself—raw, radiant, and too honest to stare at for long.

“You look like yourself right now,” I said before I could stop it. It wasn’t meant as a compliment. It was just true.

Her smile faltered, as if she hadn’t expected to be seen and didn’t know how to wear it. She looked down, dusted her palms on her thighs, and said nothing.

Good. I didn’t want gratitude.

I grabbed a water bottle from the far end of the bench and held it out. She took it, and her fingers brushed mine, warm from the torch, callused from whatever had shaped her before. The kind of hand that didn’t startle or shake. The kind that could hold heat and not break open.

“You okay?” I asked, not because I didn’t know, but because it still needed saying. This wasn’t a scene, but it still wasn’t the kind of space you walked away from without checking in.

She unscrewed the cap, took a long drink, then nodded. “Yeah. Good. That was… what I needed.”

She wasn’t talking about the sculpture. She meant the silence. The autonomy. The fire and the steel and the room that asked for nothing but purpose.

“I’ll scrounge up some more metal for you to use next time,” I offered, stepping around the arc welder to start flipping switches, shutting things down one by one. “Keep the gloves. No one else uses this setup.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that your way of saying I passed the test?”

I looked at her, and for a moment, I let her see it. The respect. The restraint. The heat still burned low in my chest even if I had no fucking right to it.

“No. Just means I trust you not to set the place on fire.”

She smiled again, smaller this time, and that one punched harder than the first.

As she packed up her sketchbook and gloves, I moved to coil the leads, stowing the rods, and swept the bench like routine would make this feel less… personal. But it was. The quiet between us wasn’t empty anymore. It was layered. Laced with something that didn’t have a name yet.

She walked toward the door, paused, turned back.

“Thanks,” she said. Simple. Not soft. But real.

I nodded once. “Anytime.” She left, the door swinging shut behind her with a muted click, and I stayed standing there, surrounded by the scent of hot metal and burnt ozone, staring at the half-finished sculpture on the bench like it had teeth, which it did.

It wasn’t done. Neither was she. And maybe neither was I.

The workshop felt wrong after she left. Not empty, just altered.

Like the air still held the heat of her hands and buzzed with the echo of her focus.

I sat on the edge of the workbench, elbows on my knees, a coil of lead held slack in one hand.

The sculpture sat a few feet away, sharp-edged and bleeding with intention.

It looked like she’d carved a piece of herself into the steel and left it there to pulse without her.

I used to love this. The control. The give of fire against metal.

The rhythm of a clean weld settling into shape like breath.

I’d built a life around the belief that anything could be forced into structure, if you held it long enough.

But now it felt hollow. Just movement I used to understand, a ritual stripped of meaning.

I ran my hand across the bench, grounding myself in friction and grain, trying not to think about her.

Useless. The image was already burned in.

Stella, with her hair pulled back and her jaw set, lip caught between her teeth, working like the world outside didn’t exist. She didn’t perform for anyone. She just was . Focused. Honest. She moved with gravity. It had weight. It had grit. And it wrecked me.

I didn’t know her. Knew almost nothing about her at all.

No psych profile. No mission log. No reason for her to be lodged beneath my skin like shrapnel.

But I knew the way she held a blowtorch like a prayer.

The way silence seemed to settle around her like it belonged.

She was pressure in containment. A storm in boots and soot.

A locked cage with the door already open.

And I was the idiot still wondering what she’d do with her freedom.

I leaned back. Closed my eyes. This wasn’t lust. It wasn’t simple.

It wasn’t safe. This was neurological patterning colliding with instinct.

A burn signal misfiring through unexamined trauma responses.

Connection without origin. Chemistry without permission.

And that, scientifically speaking, is how disasters begin.

A new variable introduced without warning into an otherwise controlled system.

Unfortunately, this house had begun to specialize in introducing variables.

The rope was still coiled in my bag from the night before, but I didn’t touch it. Didn’t need to. Because this wasn’t about restraint anymore. It was about clarity. About finding the one anomaly in a string of numb, data-stale days, and realizing I didn’t want to let it go.

I stood and switched off the lights one by one; the fluorescents dying slowly above me until only the desk lamp remained. The shadows it cast twisted long across the metal on her bench—unfinished, jagged, and alive. I stared at it for a second too long, then flipped the final switch.

“Perfect thermodynamic conditions,” I muttered. “Wrong goddamn chemicals.”

And then I shut the door behind me and walked into the dark, still hearing her laugh echo like static through the weld.