Page 72 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Jax

Storms don’t arrive unannounced. They build in silence first; barometric shifts, a drop in pressure, a static weight that settles into your bones long before the first crack of thunder. Most people only notice when the sky starts to scream. But I’ve always been better at reading the quiet signs.

I stood at the window and watched the sky reshape itself into something feral.

The clouds didn’t drift, they advanced. A low, deliberate crawl across the hills, in bruised shades that looked like old war stories and unfinished prayers.

This wasn’t just weather. It was nature baring its teeth, dense with consequence, curling above the horizon like it had finally been given permission to arrive.

Behind me, the room held a quieter kind of tension, less volatile, but more earned.

Stella slept in the center of the bed, tangled in the aftermath.

Her limbs caught in the sheets, body curled from instinct rather than rest. One leg tucked like she was still sleeping on concrete, the other stretched into the space where I’d been, as if she could hold on to the heat I left behind.

The tousled blankets covered much of her still-naked form, but they didn’t hide what was already written on her skin.

The rope marks on her thighs had faded to the color of old wine, faint curves clinging like runes, neither angry nor raw.

Just there. Unapologetic. Ghosts that hadn’t decided whether they meant to haunt or heal.

Her breath moved in a rhythm that wasn’t peaceful, but had steadied. She hadn’t shifted in hours, and I hadn’t stopped watching her. Something was coming. I could feel it in my spine.

I’d stayed long after she drifted off, tracking the moments her breath hitched and eased again, not into calm, exactly, but into something hard-won. She hadn’t said goodnight. Just curled toward the pillow and let the dark hold her in a way she no longer resisted.

Stillness looked strange on her. Beautiful. Foreign. Not fragile in the way of weakness, but in the way of something that finally allowed itself to rest.

Then the phone buzzed. One sharp vibration on the dresser, loud enough to crack through the quiet like a warning shot. I didn’t check the screen. I didn’t need to. Only one person called this late.

I crossed the room and answered. “Tell me you’ve got something.”

“I do,” Quinn said. No small talk, no buffer. Just, “Put me on speaker.”

I was already moving. The hallway stretched ahead, floorboards dark beneath the weight of shared tension. I didn’t flip on the lights. The others were up. We’d all felt the shift.

The living room glowed with low tactical light, the rest lost to shadow.

A single lamp poured gold across the center table, catching on gear and movement.

Niko stood near the whiteboard, hands smudged with marker.

Carrick hovered over his laptop, jaw tight, fingers typing with urgency.

Sully had half-assembled weapons spread around him, Rifles, blades, bolt cutters—all of it arranged with the discipline of someone preparing for war.

The air smelled of metal and oil, seasoned with adrenaline.

Bellamy sat curled in the chair by the fire, Kindle forgotten on her thigh. Her eyes lifted the moment I entered—quiet, focused, waiting. Deacon stood watch at the window, arms folded, his jaw working like he hadn’t stopped grinding it in hours.

“We’ve identified what we’re fairly certain is the correct warehouse,” Quinn said through the speaker. “One of the locations we got from Rayden’s flash drive is registered to the same shell company Stella was nearly forced to sign her property over to. Industrial district. Riverfront.”

The words landed like confirmation. The kind that tightens your chest and drags memory into focus. We’d known, just not with proof solid enough to believe it out loud.

Then I felt her.

Soft footsteps behind me. Bare feet on hardwood.

Stella moved like a shadow pulled toward pressure, not woken by sound, but drawn by the shift.

She always felt the storm first. She didn’t speak or look at me.

She stood in the doorway, wrapped in one of my hoodies and a pair of sweatpants, her hair loose over her shoulders, skin pale with sleep, eyes locked not on the room, but on what was coming.

Silent. Still. Waiting for the nightmare to take shape.

“It matches everything Stella told us,” Quinn said. “The hum. The cold. That metallic scent. Planes overhead. I pulled the records. The property was purchased eleven months ago through a Mafia front. The paper trail’s clean, but it’s fake. It’s a shell.”

The room didn’t move. Even the air felt suspended mid-breath.

Niko’s fingers flexed around the marker, then capped it without a word and stepped back.

Carrick muttered something low, voice tight.

Sully leaned over the table, weight braced on his forearms, breath slipping out like a valve released.

Bellamy closed her Kindle and set it aside, the motion small but precise.

But all I could see was Stella. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked. Her shoulders didn’t shift. One hand curled into her sleeve, knuckles white, jaw locked, lips parted like a sentence had climbed halfway up her throat and stalled.

“I can’t bring in the department,” Quinn said. “Too many leaks. Too many risks I can’t plug. But you guys? You’re ghosts. And I trust you.”

Quinn wasn’t giving us an order. But he was asking. And his words rang true.

Across the room, Niko’s nod came first, immediate and certain.

Carrick’s fists curled against the table, jaw clenched like he was holding back something jagged.

Sully exhaled again, this time with purpose.

Bellamy leaned in, her posture unreadable but focused.

Deacon hadn’t moved from the window, but his stance said enough.

I didn’t raise my voice, but it almost shook with the strength of my conviction. “We’re in.”

I ended the call, but Quinn’s voice didn’t leave. It echoed with consequence, not sound. The order didn’t need repeating. We were already moving.

Niko moved first, re-centering. He set the marker down and shifted to the corkboard, overlaying zoning maps with the new data.

His hands moved with a rhythm carved from instinct.

Pins and string followed, paths and angles.

Entry. Exit. This was how he made sense of chaos, grinding it into lines and order.

Carrick opened the backup laptop. The screen hadn’t caught up, but his fingers were already typing, running tactical programs, calculating routes. His jaw didn’t flex. His posture didn’t shift. But his spine had straightened like a weapon being drawn.

Sully pushed off the table and made for the gear locker. His voice slipped into the room in a low cadence, too fluid to be casual. Radios. Thermal. Grip tape. Fallback kits.

Bellamy stayed in her chair, still and alert. Her stillness wasn’t passive. It was clinical. She tracked every shift in the room with surgical calm, watching for the moment things tipped from planning into action. She wasn’t absent. She was measuring the edges of impact before it came.

Deacon reached for the cold coffee on the windowsill and took a long sip. He didn’t comment. He never did. But anticipation radiated off of him like gravity. He didn’t need to announce his readiness. He just was.

And Stella, her voice broke into the moment, softer than it should have been, but absolute in its clarity. A single breath shaped into truth.

“That’s it,” she said. “Where they kept me. That’s where she is.”

It wasn’t a question. Her voice didn’t rise or falter.

It landed with impact, recognition cutting clean through the last thread of disbelief.

The shift in her wasn’t loud, but it was gravitational.

Her body didn’t stagger or collapse. She didn’t grab for something to hold.

She simply went still, anchored in a way that warned against mistaking composure for peace.

I moved toward her and brushed a hand across the small of her back. Just a tether. My way of saying I’m here. You don’t have to do this alone. She didn’t turn or lean in, but she didn’t pull away either. And for her, that was enough.

Niko grabbed a fresh marker and started framing the plan in color-coded logic.

Red for breach. Black for fallback. Blue for systems we’d have to cut on the fly.

We didn’t have every answer. We never did.

That was the job, interrogating the unknown until it gave up something useful.

You planned for failure, for fallout, for the kinds of mistakes that didn’t announce themselves until it was too late.

And through it all, Stella moved like none of it could stop her, like forward was the only thing that made sense, like slowing down wasn’t in her vocabulary.

I watched her, this woman who no longer looked like someone surviving.

Shoulders squared, eyes fixed on something only she could see.

She didn’t look fragile or afraid. She looked inevitable.

Not the girl who once flinched at her own heartbeat.

Not the woman who shook beneath my blanket.

This version had been forged by everything that failed to break her.

Her posture didn’t ask for permission. It announced readiness.

She would walk into hell to drag her sister out, and if she didn’t make it, she’d go down swinging, because standing still would cost more.

The room adjusted around her like it always did when the stakes spiked without warning.

Carrick shifted the projector. Niko dragged in a second board, maps and routes already pinned.

Sully disappeared toward the hall, inventory low in his throat.

Deacon stepped in closer, quiet taking shape as resolve.