Page 37 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

The gym sat at the far end of the basement, past storage, past the game room.

Down here, the air changed. Lower ceilings.

Rubber floors. No clocks. No windows. Just pressure and control.

I didn’t turn the music on. Didn’t need rhythm.

I came to bleed. The heavy bag hung from the beam, thick enough to punish if you struck it wrong.

I wrapped my hands quickly—tight, automatic—and started swinging.

No warmup. No technique. Just a purge. Each hit landed with more force than form.

Left. Right. Left-left. Right. A rhythm that vibrated through muscle and bone.

There was no outlet. No pause. Just my body trying to scream louder than my mind could whisper.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when Carrick came in. I didn’t even notice him at first. He moved like he always did—smooth, quiet, and unassuming. But Carrick’s danger lived in your blind spot. He waited for you to notice.

“Want to talk?” he asked, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.

I didn’t stop moving. “No.”

“Good. Didn’t want to hear it, anyway.”

The bag absorbed my next hit with a dull whomp , the sound reverberating through the floor. I could feel my knuckles starting to bruise under the wraps. I didn’t care. That was the point.

He let the silence stretch just long enough for it to settle under my skin.

“At least normally I wouldn’t. But you’re dripping pain all over the floor, brother,” he added, almost conversational, like he was just observing weather patterns, or the rotation of the earth.

I struck the bag once more, then held it, arms braced, breath ragged.

My shoulders rose and fell, my heartbeat a metronome somewhere behind my teeth.

Sweat rolled down my back, dampening the hem of my shirt.

I hadn’t worked out this hard, for this long, in years.

Just another piece of data I tucked away, evidence of how much Stella was affecting me.

“I don’t fracture like the rest of you,” I said eventually, my voice rough. “I don’t lose control. I catalog it. Compartmentalize it. Line everything up so the damage is measurable.”

Carrick moved closer, but he didn’t interrupt. Just stood a few feet away, gaze steady, letting me fill the space on my own terms.

“She found the pattern,” I continued, eyes fixed on the center of the bag. “Every weak point. Every shatter line. Mapped me like a field op and then walked away like none of it meant a thing.”

Carrick tilted his head. “And what if it did?”

I glanced at him. “Then why shut down? Why erase it like it didn’t happen?”

He shrugged slowly, the gesture fluid and infuriating. “Because it scared her. Because it mattered. Because she’s been trained, like all of us, to retreat from the things that threaten her control.”

I stared at the bag, but didn’t move.

“I didn’t push her,” I said. “I didn’t corner her. I let her lead.”

“And that,” Carrick said, “is probably why it hit harder. She had agency. She walked into the fire and still burned herself, and now you’re the collateral.”

I exhaled hard. My hands flexed. “You ever think you’re smarter than your instincts? Like you could avoid the crash because you saw it coming from a mile away?”

Carrick’s mouth quirked. “That’s called being human, Jax. Smart or not.”

“I thought I’d be smarter,” I admitted. “I saw what the stress of living under threat did to Maddy. To Bellamy. I thought I’d be the exception. That I could care without falling. That I could hold space for someone, and still keep my distance.”

“And?” Carrick asked, arms folded tighter.

“And I was wrong.”

I leaned my head against the bag, eyes closed, breath heavy. Sweat slipped down my temple, mixing with the pressure behind my eyes. Every tendon, every joint pulsed with strain. I wasn’t falling apart. Not visibly. But something in me had shifted, something foundational.

“I didn’t want to be her fantasy,” I said, voice low. “I wanted to be real.”

Carrick let the silence stretch. “Then you were. And that’s the part she’ll remember, even if she never says it out loud.”

I nodded, small and tight. His words hit home.

But it didn’t help. What she touched wasn’t some abstract part of me I could wipe clean.

It was the part I kept sealed off. The part that still believe that maybe connection was possible, if you built it slow enough.

And now all I had were bruised knuckles and silence.

The house had gone still hours ago. The kind of quiet that only comes after midnight, layered in thick walls and long-buried tension. No traffic. No buzz. Just wind against the siding and floorboards creaking like the house itself remembered too much.

I had cleaned up from my extended workout session, showered, and had spent the rest of the day holed up in my cave, following leads and updating surveillance records.

At least I’d tried too. I’d caught myself multiple times staring off into space, replaying the events of last night, wondering where I’d gone wrong.

I was missing too many variables to be able to figure out the pattern.

With a stretch and a sigh, I decided that I needed some caffeine, and headed towards the kitchen.

I found Maddy already there, perched barefoot on the counter, eating cereal from a bowl too big to belong in any cabinet.

One leg tucked under her, the other swinging loose like this was just another Tuesday in the Reaper Retreat of Emotional Dysfunction.

She looked up as I walked in, spoon frozen midair, curls piled on her head in a chaos of defiance against gravity and logic.

She didn’t ask why I was awake. She didn’t have to.

“You look like you went ten rounds with something that didn’t even fight back,” she said, chewing.

I gave her a half-smile. “It didn’t. That was the problem.”

She watched me for a beat too long, something patient and perceptive in her gaze. Maddy wasn’t nosy, not exactly, but she didn’t miss much. And when it came to pain, hers or anyone else’s, she was a sponge. Quiet. Absorbent. Soaking up more than she let on.

“You okay?” she asked finally, tone deceptively light.

I leaned against the counter opposite her and reached for the nearest mug. No coffee. Just something to hold. Something to fill the space between us that wasn’t silence or sympathy.

“She’s gone without leaving,” I said, staring at the cabinet. “It’s an impressive skill set.”

Maddy crunched slowly, then set the spoon down with a soft clink. “Yeah. She seems to be good at that.”

“She’s not angry. Not cold. Just… absent.”

“People don’t vanish like that unless they’ve had practice.”

I nodded, not at her, but at the logic of it. “I didn’t push.”

“I know,” she said softly. “That’s probably why it hit harder.”

Her voice stayed even, and her eyes didn’t waver. She wasn’t placating me. She wasn’t trying to offer comfort. She was offering truth, the kind that didn’t come with a Band-Aid, or a silver lining.

“I thought…” I exhaled, rolling the mug between my hands. “I thought I could keep my distance. Be smart about it. That I could handle what happened without expecting anything. Without wanting more.”

Maddy just waited.

“I observed what it did to you, you know?” I added, glancing at her. “To Niko. To Carrick. I thought I’d be the one who didn’t get tangled. The one who stayed objective. Detached.” I huffed out a laugh with no humor. “Guess not.”

“No offense taken,” she said dryly, picking up her spoon again. “Though I will point out that when Niko and I crashed, we did it in slow motion. You two went from zero to intimate in what…less than a week?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You think that’s what’s throwing her?”

“I think you didn’t give her time to build walls,” Maddy said. “She never got to pace herself. You made her feel safe, and she wasn’t ready for what that would unlock.”

I thought about that. About the sound she made when she fell apart in my arms. About the way she looked at me afterward, like I’d seen something she wasn’t sure she wanted found.

“I didn’t want to be her fantasy,” I said. “I wanted it to mean something.”

Maddy tilted her head, cereal forgotten. “And it did mean something.”

“Not enough.”

“Jax,” Maddy said gently, “ you were enough. That’s the problem. You gave her something real. And now she has to decide if she can survive without it.”

I stared down at my mug, thumb circling the rim like I could wear it smooth. “She’s already decided.”

“No,” Maddy said. “She’s coping. That’s different.”

We let the silence hang, unsettled, not comforting.

Then she slid off the counter and stepped closer.

No speech. No hug. Just her hand on my shoulder—warm and steady—and somehow that made it worse.

Because I realized this kind of anchoring stillness was what Stella couldn’t hold.

Couldn’t trust. And I wasn’t angry with her for that.

I just didn’t know how to stop wanting her in spite of it all.

I hadn’t meant to stop in front of her door again.

I thought I’d head to bed, file the evening away in that mental folder marked ‘emotional anomalies’, and focus on the case.

Her safety. Anything but the pressure lodged in my chest. But my feet carried me down the hall anyway, like the silence around her room had its own gravity.

The light outside her door was off. Small detail. But it made the hallway feel thinner, like this part of the house had detached from the rest of us. Her door was closed, of course. Probably not locked, but shut with intent. Not to punish. Just to draw a line.

I stood there, listening. I didn’t expect her to speak. Didn’t need movement to know she was awake. I just listened. And somehow, that mattered.

I didn’t knock. Didn’t try the knob. I just leaned forward, letting my forehead rest against the door—light, steady, eyes closed—and let myself be there. Not analyzing or calculating. Just there. With her on the other side, and everything between us suspended in the ache of what we were.

I thought of her breath on my neck. Her voice in my ear. The panic in her eyes after, like she’d given too much and didn’t know how to take it back. And maybe she hadn’t. Maybe the moment had just swallowed her. The way it swallowed me.

I didn’t speak right away. The words came in pieces. I had to sort through them carefully, the way I handled intel, slow and deliberate, filtering for what was true, what was safe, and what would only make things worse.

When I finally spoke, my voice was low. Not a whisper. Just the same calm I used in confessionals and interrogations. Measured. Honest.

“You don’t have to come out. I’m not expecting that.” I exhaled through my nose. Pulse steady. Contained. “I’m not here to change your mind. I just…” I paused, hand flexing at my side. “I needed to stop pretending this doesn’t hurt.”

The silence didn’t shift. But I hadn’t come for answers. I just needed to say it somewhere that still felt like her. “You don’t owe me anything. Not an explanation. Not closure. I know you didn’t promise more. And I didn’t ask.”

I stared at the wood grain. “But I hoped for more. And that hope… it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t delusion, or a misread signal. It was real. It was mine.”

My fingers brushed the doorframe, just to feel something solid.

“I know you’re scared. I know connection feels like exposure. I get that more than I ever wanted to admit. But what happened between us, you didn’t imagine it.”

I stepped back slightly, giving the words space to carry. “I felt it too. Every second. Every inhale. Every look. Every shiver when I touched you. And the part that hurts, the part I can’t explain neatly and file away, is that you let me hold all of it… then shut the door like none of it mattered.”

I ran a hand down my jaw, swallowing the pressure that built behind my throat. The lump didn’t rise fully. I was trained better than that. But it lived there, all the same.

“I keep running these calculations,” I said, quieter now.

“Trying to isolate the variable that broke the equation. But there’s no clean answer.

No single data point I can erase. You didn’t collapse.

You didn’t malfunction. You left, quietly, deliberately, and I was never built to navigate absence that doesn’t announce itself.

I can track a moving target. I can analyze risk, solve for the unknown.

But I can’t model the kind of silence that chooses itself. ”

I leaned against the opposite wall, watching her door like it might shift, as if some missed detail might flicker into view. But there was nothing. No breath. No shadow. No creak of floorboards. Just stillness, sealed tight.

“I’ve run the odds. Accounted for pressure, history, the trauma written into both our blueprints.

I know how rare it is for something to survive that.

But you made me believe it could. That belief—that uninvited, uncalculated hope—that’s what you walked away from.

And I’m still trying to understand what it cost you to let yourself want it in the first place. ”

I pushed off the wall and stepped forward, hand lifted, not to knock, not to reach, just to mark the space between us.

When I spoke again, my voice dropped, stripped of performance.

“I’ll give you the silence you asked for.

But I won’t rewrite the story to make it cleaner.

I won’t call what happened between us a misstep, just to make the leaving easier to carry.

You let me hold something real . And now you’re pretending it never existed, like that’s the only way to stay intact.

But erasure isn’t survival. It’s just another kind of grief. ”

I stepped back. There was nothing left to salvage in that hallway. No revised protocol. No new intel. Just the echo of something dissected, redacted, and archived before either of us had the nerve to fully claim it.

I turned and walked away, not because I wanted to, and not because I was ready to stop caring. But because I’ve learned that standing at a locked door too long teaches you the wrong lesson about worth. And I refused to mistake someone else’s fear for my failure.