Page 74 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Jax

The SUV sat like a sentinel in the gravel drive, black, silent, and still.

Inside the house, the team was finishing final checks.

Frequencies confirmed, gear inspected, radios tested, blades secured.

No one spoke unless it was mission-critical.

That’s how it always was in the minutes before we crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.

Precision replaced adrenaline. Breathing slowed. The noise moved inward.

Inside, the living room had transformed into a staging ground.

The coffee table was buried under stacked ammo clips and comms gear, Sully’s half-eaten protein bar wedged precariously between two flash-bangs.

Carrick stood at the far end, his back to us, sharpening a combat blade with the kind of calm that made you wonder if he was meditating or preparing to gut something. Maybe both.

Sully, sprawled on the floor like a sun-drunk lion, cinched the straps on his thigh holster while whistling the opening to Eye of the Tiger, off-key. Loud on purpose.

“Can’t believe I’m going into an op with a guy who doesn’t know the key of B minor,” Jax muttered.

Sully smirked. “Didn’t realize musical aptitude was part of breaching protocol, Beethoven.”

“I’ll revise the manual,” I said, flipping open my portable comms case.

Niko didn’t join in. He occupied his usual post by the window, syncing frequencies and triple-checking the comms grid like the entire mission hinged on shaving off a millisecond of delay.

It didn’t, but try telling him that. The man had calibrated his watch to GPS satellite time and still checked it every two minutes like it might betray him.

Deacon moved between us with quiet efficiency, loading weapons into the trunk case like they were sacred artifacts.

He didn’t speak or grunt or flinch, just worked.

You could always tell how serious Deacon was by how little noise he made.

In other words, he was almost always serious. Tonight, he was nearly a ghost.

There was comfort in the rhythm of it. Each man falling into pattern, each task holding a familiar choreography. Repetition made things feel controllable. Like if we loaded our gear the same way, and folded the maps down the same creases, maybe we could bend the outcome to our favor.

Carrick finished with the blade, held it up to the light, and gave a grunt of approval. Without turning, he held it out. Sully crossed the room and took it in silence. Ritual complete.

It was superstition disguised as habit. But after enough years in the field, you stopped questioning what kept you breathing.

My turn came next.

I ran a systems check on my HUD scanner, adjusted the wrist module, and pulled the folded schematic from my chest rig. I didn’t need it; I’d memorized the layout three days ago. But unfolding it, scanning it line by line, and then sliding it back into place? That was part of the ritual, too.

I noted movement and breath, Carrick’s fingers twitching once, Sully checking his belt clasp for the third time, Niko mouthing numbers under his breath, Deacon pressing his thumb to the mag with just enough force to stop short of bullets flying everywhere.

No one said be safe. No one wished each other luck. You didn’t jinx a job like this by pretending it was anything but surgical. I did one last sweep with my eyes and nodded to no one in particular. We were ready. Or close enough to fake it.

Just then I got a ping from the motion detectors at the end of our driveway. I flipped through a couple of screens on my tablet until I found the video feed that I wanted, and watched as a pickup truck made its way towards our house. “We have incoming.” I stated matter-of-factly.

The others looked up sharply, and I showed them the black and green video feed. “They’re right on time.” I added with a small smile.

Niko nodded, and headed towards the door. A few minutes later he returned with two people in tow.

Seth and Angela Boyd wore expressions more serious than I was used to seeing on their faces. They understood the gravity and danger of what we were attempting tonight, and knew how important their role was in it: staying here with Stella, Bellamy, and Maddy.

All five of the Reapers were needed to make sure this op was a success, but there was no way in hell that we were going to leave the girls behind here with no one to guard them.

The Boyds may have been out of the game longer than us, but they were both trained soldiers, and Seth was an EMT.

If anything went sideways here while we were gone, they’d handle it swiftly and efficiently.

We exchanged muted pleasantries, and then Niko took them towards his office to go over the security feeds and perimeter sensors. I took the opportunity to head outside for some fresh air.

Outside, I adjusted the straps of my vest again and let the night settle over me like an old scar.

The air was thick with ozone and the slow-building charge that always came before a Midwestern thunderstorm.

You could feel it in your teeth if you knew how to sense it.

I always did. The trees had gone quiet. The birds were already gone.

Somewhere past the ridge, thunder rolled like it had something to say, and just hadn’t decided how loud to get.

There’s always a moment before an op when the world pauses, not out of reverence, but calculation. Like it’s giving you one last moment to decide what kind of man you’d be when it hits. I’d lived inside that breath before. I knew what it cost.

Behind me, gravel shifted under bare feet. Light steps, deliberate. She wasn’t chasing. She was choosing.

“Hey,” Stella said, her voice barely louder than the wind.

I didn’t turn right away. I’d already known it was her; the rhythm of her approach, the cadence, the way something in my chest recognized her before my mind caught up.

She stopped just beyond the headlights, the soft light painting her in gray-scale.

My hoodie swallowed her frame, sleeves balled in her fists like they were all she could hold.

Her hair was wind-tossed, her face pale, her expression rigid with something that wasn’t fear, but carried the residue of it.

“I know you’re about to leave,” she said, still standing just outside my reach. “But I need you for one more minute. Just as yourself. Before you become whoever you have to be out there.”

Her voice cracked, and that was when I turned.

“You don’t have to ask,” I said.

She exhaled like the answer cost her something, then stepped into the halo of light. Not all the way, just far enough to decide if she could afford what came next.

“You’re all ready to go then, huh?” she said.

“We are,” I told her.

Her gaze drifted toward the tree line like she could see past it, like Violet’s name was etched into the bark or carved into the wind.

But I knew what she was really seeing: every exit wound that never healed, every what-if that had calcified into fear.

She looked back at me with eyes too sharp to be soft, and too vulnerable to keep pretending.

“What if it’s a trap?” she asked. “What if the Mole is watching? What if Quinn’s wrong?”

She wasn’t asking about tactics. She already knew the probabilities. She was spiraling through the math of what it would cost her if tonight broke wrong. I waited because she wasn’t done yet.

“What if I lose you before I even get to keep you?”

There it was.

The words didn’t surprise me. What landed so hard was how much they echoed something I’d heard before.

It was years ago, in the jungle, the night before an extraction.

Corporal Rogers, a recent addition to our squad, had pulled me aside, eyes steady and calm like he already knew the numbers.

He didn’t say he was scared. Didn’t ask me to stay safe.

He just said, “If it’s down to me, don’t flinch. ” And I hadn’t.

But I still saw the blood when I closed my eyes.

The memory came sharp and uninvited—the shrapnel, the chaos, Carrick screaming into comms while I ran the math in real time and still came up short.

Rogers had been five feet outside the margin I’d flagged as safe.

Five feet, and a fraction too slow. And then there was silence, and static, and blood soaking into jungle soil beneath a black sky.

I’d learned then that even perfect math fails.

And the silence after impact doesn’t leave.

It waits for the next person you’re afraid to lose.

Because when you’re on deployment, you lose people.

And it doesn’t matter if you’ve known them a day, or a month, or if you shared a bunkhouse in basic, losing a brother is never easy.

Stella didn’t know that story. She didn’t need to. But she wore the same expression Rogers’ sister had when we delivered the news, like she already knew the answer, and was asking anyway.

And still, she’d come outside barefoot. Still, she’d stood in front of me with her fists clenched in my hoodie like she could hold on to a different ending.

I let my eyes trace her features, tight with fear, but upright. Present. I remembered the first time I saw her when Quinn brought her to the house, pale and scared, eyes darting toward exits like they were escape hatches. She’d flinched at everything then. At me.

She didn’t flinch now.

Whatever fear she carried, she wore it differently. Not like armor. Not like surrender. Like a weapon she intended to wield.

She didn’t ask if I’d come back because she needed comfort. She asked because she needed data. A variable she could model against. Something solid to grip while the rest of the world dissolved.

And I knew that feeling too well.

Because I was holding onto her the same way.

I stepped forward, slow and steady, until the space between us disappeared. She didn’t flinch. Her fists gripped my vest like she needed something real to tether her to the ground.

“You won’t lose me,” I said. “I don’t play hero. I play precise.”