Page 4 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Stella

Time doesn’t pass the same when you’re waiting to be forgotten.

It stretches. Warps. Becomes a slow-dripping faucet you can’t shut off, each second a drop landing somewhere soft and bruised.

I sat in that interrogation room, counting, not because I wanted to, but because my brain needed something to hold on to that wasn’t fear.

Fourteen minutes since Detective Mercado had said he’d be right back.

The walls didn’t care. Neither did the light above me, flickering just enough to make the shadows dance along the corners of the room like they knew something I didn’t.

Everything in here had edges. The table. The floor. The silence.

It was a space designed for surrender. And I was trying hard not to.

My leg bounced under the table, sharp and erratic.

My hands wouldn’t stay still. They twisted, folded, gripped the fabric of my sleeve, then started again.

I stared at my reflection in the double-sided glass and hated the way I looked, like a woman unraveling in real time. Pale. Hunted. Hollowed out.

The hum of the air vents had shifted, no longer steady, no longer benign.

It pulsed at uneven intervals, like lungs wheezing through illness.

Every mechanical breath carried the weight of something too human, too near.

Every sound in the room took on new meaning.

The distant scuff of footsteps down a hallway.

The soft exhale of a door easing shut. Every noise had become a blade.

I kept reminding myself I was safe. I was inside a station, surrounded by protocols and bulletproof glass, guarded by procedure and paper trails. I was supposed to be untouchable here.

And still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched, anyway.

The chair creaked beneath me as I shifted, both palms pressing to the cold steel tabletop like I could anchor myself there, or stop the tremor crawling up my spine. I tried to breathe. Tried to count. Seven breaths. Six. Five….

A sharp crackle from the ceiling cut through the stillness with the violence of a detonation, splitting the room’s hush.

The sound reverberated through my bones before my brain caught up, and I jerked back in my chair, fingers curling tight against the table’s steel edge as if that alone might protect me.

My heart lurched in my chest, a stampede, wild and frantic beneath my ribs.

“Well, well, well. Hello there, sweetheart.”

Something deep inside me seized, some long-buried instinct uncoiling with a scream I didn’t let out but still felt.

My gaze snapped to the mirror in front of me, and I didn’t recognize the woman staring back.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Not because of the words, but because of the voice that delivered them.

Smooth. Even. Detached in a way that made cruelty feel like policy.

I knew that voice. Had lived inside the sound of it.

I had heard it in the dark, in the quiet that came before pain.

I’d heard it behind latex gloves and the slap of zip ties pulled tight.

It lived inside memories I couldn’t fully remember, only react to.

It had never needed to shout. That kind of power never did.

It didn’t belong here, not in this station, not in this city, not in this version of my life where I was supposed to be safe. But it was here, spilling from a ceiling speaker as easily as breath, as if it had been waiting all along.

The room didn’t change, not physically, but I felt it happen anyway.

The shift in the air. A drop in temperature that came not from vents or ducts, but from inside me.

I shoved the chair back hard enough to make it scream across the concrete, forcing myself to stand even as my knees buckled beneath the weight of recognition.

My hands braced against the tabletop, fingers splayed, desperate to feel something real, something cold and solid and uncorrupted.

The intercom hissed again, quiet and confident.

“Don’t worry, Stella, I’ve disabled the recording feed, so we won’t have anyone asking any pesky questions later. We’re alone. Just you and me. Let’s keep this simple.”

It felt like drowning in slow motion. Like watching ink bleed through fabric.

Cold spread in tendrils across my chest, seeping down through my ribs, curling low in my gut, until I could no longer tell whether it was fear or memory that made my hands shake.

The mirror didn’t reflect anymore; it absorbed.

His voice lived inside the glass now, echoing beneath the surface like it belonged to the room itself.

I tried to speak. Tried to summon something steady.

“Detective Mercado?” His name came out brittle, barely audible, caught behind the tight press of panic against my throat.

I swallowed and tried again, louder this time, clinging to the syllables like rope, but there was no answer.

No response. Only silence. And beneath it, the mechanical rasp of the overhead vent, now off-tempo and unnatural.

“This is a police station,” I said, though the words felt weightless, a weak protest thrown against something too large to contain. “You can’t be here. You can’t…”

“But I can.”

There was no cruelty in his tone. No urgency. That was what made it unbearable. He spoke the way some men shut doors—quietly, completely, and without looking back.

I didn’t realize I’d stepped away from the table until my back hit the wall. The jolt of contact startled a breath from me, but I didn’t move again. I pressed against it like I could sink through cinderblock, like if I stayed very still, the room might forget I existed.

My voice cracked when it finally returned. “How are you doing this?”

He let the question sit unanswered, letting silence crawl across the room like mist. It filled the space between us, thick and watchful, and when he finally did speak, it felt less like a reply and more like a verdict.

“Did you really think we wouldn’t plan for this? That we’d let you walk away without a leash?”

I opened my mouth to argue, but my voice broke on the effort, and I didn’t have the strength to shape denial out of breath that wouldn’t come.

“That’s what I thought. Now, I’m here to give you your new assignment, so listen closely,” he said next, and there was something in the cadence of it, something final and dispassionate, that told me there would be no appeal.

“I’m not doing anything else for you.” The sentence trembled with everything I couldn’t control, but I said it anyway, because it was the only weapon I had left.

“Of course you are.”

There was no heat in the reply. Just fact.

Just certainty. A tone that didn’t believe in resistance because it had never needed to account for it.

I remembered that sound, the way it felt in my ears when I was tied down and too weak to fight, when the only thing I could do was listen and obey.

That voice was a straight line. It didn’t bend. It only cut.

“I tried to do what you asked,” I said, dragging each word into the light like a wound. “The clerk called the police, not me. I signed the paperwork and took it in, just like you said.”

The silence that followed stretched long enough to make the floor tilt again beneath me.

“Don’t worry about any of that right now. You have a far more important task now. Our dear, na?ve friend, the detective, is going to be placing you somewhere new,” he said at last. “A special safe house. Off-grid. They’ll believe they’re protecting you.”

The air turned tight and sharp. My vision narrowed.

“You’re lying,” I whispered, though the denial didn’t hold weight anymore.

“You’ll be moved soon. They won’t tell you where until it’s too late.

But we believe that the location they’ll be taking you to is also being used to house a few other…

important individuals. Individuals who my superiors would very much like to know the location of.

So, once you arrive at this special safe house…

” He paused just long enough for dread to bloom in my chest like rot. “We want to know where it is.”

“You want me to betray them.” It wasn’t a question. Just horror finding shape in my mouth. “You want me to spy on the people trying to keep me alive?”

“Precisely.”

“They’re innocent,” I said, though the word tasted like fiction.

“No one is innocent, sweetheart, least of all the detective. These other people they’re protecting? They’re simply in the way,” he answered. “And you are the key to removing them.”

“I won’t do it.”

“You will.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream. But before I could speak again, before I could gather the breath or courage or pain to shape a reply, he took everything from me in a single, scalpel-clean sentence.

“We have your sister.”

The words didn’t land. They hovered, precise and bloodless, too calm to be real. They sliced through the room with surgical intent, and it took several seconds before my mind caught up, before my body registered that the floor was still beneath me and the ceiling hadn’t collapsed.

I stared at the mirror, waiting for it to fracture, waiting for someone to step into frame and tell me I’d misunderstood, but nothing changed. The glass held. The silence deepened.

“No,” I whispered, not in refusal, but in disbelief.

“You’re lying.” I said it faster this time, but the shape of it crumbled on my tongue.

“She is our honored guest for the time being, to ensure that you comply.” He said evenly. “So far, she has been very cooperative, and is completely unharmed. How long she remains that way is up to you.”

The table offered no comfort beneath my palm. The wall behind me felt colder than before. My knees dipped. My breath caught.