Page 59 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

I found him just after midnight, the deck warm beneath my feet, still dissipating the heat of the late summer sun. Jax stood at the railing, squared and still, head bowed, as if he were reconstructing a battlefield from memory. He didn’t turn when the door creaked, or when I stopped behind him.

“I need to find her,” I said, voice worn thin.

“I have to.” He didn’t move, and I filled the silence with everything I hadn’t dared say.

“I know what you’re thinking. That the odds are bad.

That waiting’s safer. But she’s out there.

Maybe bleeding. Maybe calling for me. And I can’t stay still while that’s true. I won’t.”

I wrapped my arms around my ribs, grief folding in on itself like a storm. “She’s not just my sister. She’s the reason I survived long enough to get here. And if I lose her, if I waited too long, I’ll never forgive myself.”

Jax exhaled slowly and turned, his gaze heavy with something sharp and unspoken.

“You think you’re the only one who’d burn the world down for love?

” he asked. “You think I haven’t already lit the match?

” He stepped forward, every movement deliberate but free of anger.

“But if we move without intel, we could lose you . And if we lose you, we lose her. Because you’re the one piece on this board they can’t predict.

They don’t know that you’ve become a double agent. And that is power.”

I shook my head, tears falling unchecked. “That’s not enough. She’s not a game piece.”

“No,” he said. “She’s your reason. And you’re mine, now. Which is why I won’t let you run into a fire without knowing how to survive it.”

That broke me. Not the words, but how he said them; steady, quiet, unmoved. Like he’d already envisioned every possible ending, and hated them all. I looked up at him, shaking with fury and grief. “So what do we do, Jax? Just wait? Let the world keep turning while she disappears?”

“No,” he said, reaching for my cheek, his thumb brushing under my eye with a tenderness that didn’t belong in a world like this. “We trace the leak. We follow the trail. We'll make them regret ever touching her. And then, we bring her home.”

It wasn’t fear that made my breath catch. It was the ragged return of something I hadn’t felt since the moment that faceless voice echoed through the holding room. Hope. Not soft. Not whole. But alive.

He leaned in until our foreheads touched. “We’ll get her back, Stella,” he whispered. “But not if we lose you in the process.”

That was the hardest part. Survival required stillness. Love required waiting. And needing someone meant not throwing yourself into the fire just to prove you’re willing to burn.

I didn’t sleep. I lay in the dark, watching the ceiling, waiting for answers it couldn’t offer.

Violet lingered behind my eyes, bright and blistering.

Her sarcasm. Her softness. Her joy. She was the kind of girl who made armor out of whatever she had, even if it was just a sundress and a sharp tongue.

And someone had her. Someone who didn’t deserve a single breath she’d ever taken.

I pressed my hand against my chest, trying to quiet the ache, but it moved like static through bone.

A grief that stalked beneath my skin. When I couldn’t take the stillness anymore, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood, bare feet braced against the cold floor just to remember I was still here.

In the kitchen, I found a pen and a stack of paper by the fruit bowl. Jax’s, clearly. Neat. Lined. Perfect. That man could’ve been falling apart, and his handwriting would still look like it belonged in a textbook.

I sat, heart drumming a steady rhythm of do something , do something , and started to write. Not thoughts. Not feelings. Just fragments.

The smell of bleach and metal.

The constant hum of something mechanical.

Overhead flight paths, maybe an airport nearby.

The floor was concrete. Cold.

Voices with clipped vowels. No accents.

One called me “sweetheart” like it was a slur.

One said, “She’ll break. They always do.”

And someone laughed.

The pen snapped before I even realized how tightly I’d been gripping it.

Ink smeared across my fingers, staining the skin with something too honest to scrub away.

I folded the page, slipped it into the front pocket of my hoodie, and stood.

It wasn’t much, but it was motion, and motion was better than stillness.

The hallway stretched ahead, not peaceful but suspended, like a breath held too long. I stopped outside his door, heart stuttering under the weight of what I was about to ask. Not forgiveness. Not instruction. Just the right to be seen without flinching.

One knock, soft as a breath.

He opened it almost instantly. Shirtless. Hair mussed. Gaze sharp with something that wasn’t sleep. Maybe he’d rested in fragments, the way he lived, half alert, half elsewhere, always watching.

“I understand that I can’t just run off without a plan. But if I don’t have a purpose, if I don’t have something to do to keep me focused, I think I’m going to lose my mind.” I said. The words didn’t feel bold, but they didn’t shake. That alone felt like a beginning.

Jax didn’t just hear them. He studied them. Measured the silence, the shape, the weight. Waited like always, seeing if I meant more than I knew.

When he answered, it was quiet, certain. “I hear you, and I get it. We can find a purpose for you, but you have to follow my lead. That’s the only way we can do this together.”

Together. The word moved through me like heat finding its home.

I stepped inside. He didn’t question it.

Just closed the door like muscle memory, like it wasn’t intrusion but shift.

I didn’t sit or speak. I stood still, hoodie sleeves twisted in my fists, nerves lighting under my skin.

He watched me the way only Jax could, patient, steady, the kind of gaze that stripped you without laying a hand.

Then he moved to the table, pulled out a chair, and motioned me to sit. “So, let’s talk about how we can work together on this. What I need right now is information. Anything you can remember, even if you think it’s unimportant, let’s get it all on the table.”

I pulled the sheet of paper out of my pocket and handed it to him as I took the offered seat. “I’ve already started doing that, sort of. I tried to remember any random things I could, and I wrote them down. Does that help?”

He took the paper and looked it over, nodding to himself. He glanced up at me with a smile. “This is an excellent start, for sure. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Please ask me anything. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start, and questions help with that.”

We sat for almost an hour, going over the information in granular detail. He asked a thousand questions, and I answered as best I could. He took pages of notes, all collated and bullet-pointed and organized five different ways.

Eventually, the topic of conversation got around to Violet and our relationship. His questions here were less interrogation and more genuine interest. It made it easier to talk about.

“She was the only one who ever made me feel like I wasn’t wrong,” I said softly in answer to his most recent question. “Like I wasn’t already broken before I even began.”

His jaw tensed, the shift slight but clear.

“When someone hears they’re wrong long enough, the brain adjusts.

Shame becomes reflex. Apology becomes posture.

But you didn’t collapse. You adapted. You rewired.

You turned what should’ve broken you into armor.

” He stepped closer, slow and certain, until the air between us pulled tight with weight.

“You didn’t fail,” he said. “You evolved.”

Something cracked inside me. Not from weakness, but recognition. He didn’t see me as broken or brave, he saw someone who had learned to survive, even when faced with an impossible choice.

His hand reached out and took mine, and he gave me an understanding smile. “This is where we start the process. Not with rage or grief. With intel. What you gave me tonight, we map it, we build from it, and when we move, we don’t just find her. We dismantle the machine that took her.”

I nodded. Jax turned without waiting, already back at the table, already moving with that brutal focus that made chaos into order.

His hands didn’t shake. His breath stayed even.

He flipped through the pages of assorted reports like they were weapons, every one another plate in the armor he was building to hold the world off.

It wasn’t his gentleness that steadied me, it was the precision with which he carried pain, and the way he never pretended it wasn’t there.

I crossed to the doorway, heat still clinging behind me like breath on glass. My fingers grazed the frame. One more step, and I’d vanish into whatever silence the house required, until his voice caught me mid-thought.

“Stella.”

He didn’t look up. Just kept working, steady and sure, like saying my name was enough to keep me exactly where he needed me.

“This only works if you trust me completely.”

And I realized that I did. Not because he’d been gentle.

Not because he’d held me like I mattered.

But because he’d seen every crack, every reason to run, and still stood at my side without flinching.

Jax didn’t deal in hope. He dealt in facts.

And when a man like that asks you to believe, it isn’t faith he’s offering, it’s certainty.

I’d take that certainty into hell without hesitation, as long as he left the door open behind us.