Page 79 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Jax

There’s a moment in every op, right after the breach, right before the fallout, when time folds in on itself.

Not slow, not fast. Just precise. Measured in breath intervals and micro-decisions, in the arc of a trigger finger and the slope of a boot print on wet concrete.

It’s not adrenaline. It’s calculus. A low-grade hum behind your molars, telling you every variable is still in play and the equation hasn’t been solved yet.

We were in that moment now, with the mission incomplete, the objective unsecured, the data untouched, the building uncleared, and Violet still just a hope rather than a certainty.

The door stood ahead of us, quiet and unremarkable in its design, but undeniably significant.

It wasn’t labeled or reinforced, yet the air around it shifted, a subtle drop in pressure, the way the world recalibrates right before impact.

Carrick felt it too. His posture changed, grounded with certainty, as if stepping through wasn’t a decision, but a consequence already in motion.

Niko was lowering his tools, mouth tight, gaze sharp.

The rest of the hallway dimmed, not in brightness, but in relevance.

This was the pivot point, the moment when the mission would stop being a checklist of actions and start showing its cost. Not just in risk, but in reality.

Because behind that door, there weren’t tactics waiting.

There wasn’t a plan to outmaneuver. There was a person. And people never follow the math.

The lock released with a quiet click, the kind that felt deliberate, like it had been holding its breath.

Niko stepped back in silence, already folding his kit with that steady rhythm that said nothing and meant everything.

Carrick took his place, shouldering the door open.

It groaned as it moved, metal scraping metal, reluctant and raw.

The sound stretched into the space ahead, ancient and full of teeth, like the door had been holding back more than air.

What spilled out wasn’t just atmosphere.

It was memory, turned fetid. A crawlspace of time collapsed inward, humid with old breath and older pain.

The scent was suffocating—mildew soaked deep into concrete, the sharp tang of metal gone sour, and the unmistakable trace of blood that had never been fully scrubbed from the walls.

Behind us, the single bulb stretched our shadows forward, but the room didn’t yield to the light.

It absorbed it, swallowed it. This wasn’t the kind of darkness that hid something dangerous.

It was the kind you used to bury what you didn’t want found.

The room had a single occupant.

She was there, in the corner, folded in like origami undone halfway through completion.

Knees pulled up, arms wrapped tight, shoulders sunken.

Her shirt clung to her like fabric too tired to hold shape, stained and stretched across a frame left hollow by time and neglect.

One of her feet was bare, the other clad in an old, dirty sneaker, as if they’d kidnapped her in the middle of getting dressed.

Her skin, where visible, held the dull hue of prolonged hunger.

Hair, dark and tangled, veiled most of her face, dusted with fragments of the room itself.

But her eyes, those didn’t hide. They watched us.

They had from the second the door cracked open and our silhouettes breached the edge of her world.

She didn’t flinch or speak. Didn’t cry out or recoil.

Just watched, calm in the way that only comes after terror has long since stopped offering surprises.

Her silence wasn’t stunned. It was surrender.

Resignation was embedded in every breath.

Whatever fire had once lived behind her eyes had dulled into something harder to name.

No plea lived in her face. No hope. Just a quiet bracing, like she’d counted her ends so many times they no longer startled her. She wasn’t expecting to be saved. She was waiting to disappear.

Sully moved first, the way he always did, anchored and deliberate, like salvation had chosen him as its personal ambassador.

There was something about the way he stepped into that room, hands empty, posture open, that made even the stale air feel less cruel.

No bravado. No noise. Just energy, tuned to the frequency of a man who understood the language of trauma.

He crouched low without hesitation, folding into her line of sight but not breaking it, his voice soft enough to pass through walls built from silence and suffering.

“You’re safe now,” he said, the words carrying no command, only certainty. As if the statement had always existed here, carved deep into the bones of the building, and he was just giving it back to her. “We’ve got you now.”

She blinked—slow, cautious, her lashes glued from dried tears.

There was no reaching, and no recoil. Her face didn’t collapse, but something fractured at the edges.

A shift, not a shatter. Like a surface held together too long finally allowing a fault line through.

Her voice rasped up from a place unused to sound, rough and tentative.

“Stella.” The name came out brittle, like it had to scrape its way past damage just to be heard. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even a call. It was belief and desperation twisted into a single word, and it cracked something open in me I didn’t know was still soft.

I moved into the room on instinct, quiet despite knowing she wouldn’t startle.

Some places demanded reverence, and this was one of them.

My rifle hung heavy at my side, my eyes sweeping corners already cleared, not because I needed to, but because routine gave shape to things that otherwise wouldn’t hold.

There was no enemy left here, only echoes.

“She’s alive,” Sully said tenderly, and even that truth felt intrusive, like the building itself might reject it. Hope sounded unnatural in a place that had forgotten what it looked like. “She’s waiting for you.”

That was when she broke—not loud, not dramatic, just a rupture. One sob, sharp and sudden, like something snagged inside her chest finally gave out. It dragged another one behind it, and then more, until the weight of it overwhelmed her body, and she buckled beneath it.

Sully caught her without hesitation. He didn’t scoop her up or fold her in, just anchored her with quiet steadiness, his arms a brace rather than a rescue.

There was no urgency in the gesture, no dominance, only that solid, grounded stillness that made him who he was.

When she tried to stand, her legs trembling beneath her and her breath catching in uneven bursts, he adjusted to support her without overtaking her, lending just enough of himself to steady the rise without stealing the choice.

But it wasn’t Sully who kept her upright.

Deacon crossed the threshold like a tide, quiet and inevitable, his med pack already slipping from one shoulder and landing on the concrete with a soft thud.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t ask. Just knelt and unzipped the bag with movements as clean and practiced as a ritual.

The emergency blanket he pulled free was utilitarian, worn, but he handled it like something sacred.

When she didn’t reach for it, he didn’t hesitate.

He simply draped it over her shoulders, unassuming, precise, as if offering care without drawing attention to it was its own kind of reverence.

Next, he retrieved a sealed water bottle, cracked the cap, and handed it to her.

The sound seemed too loud in the silence.

Violet took it like she half-expected it to vanish.

Her fingers trembled. Plastic crinkled. She drank in shallow swallows, each one costing more than it gave, her throat relearning the mechanics of normal operation.

Still, she drank. Then came a crushed granola bar, torn slightly at the edge.

She peeled it open with mechanical focus and ate with the halting rhythm of someone trying to remember how.

I stayed near the door, back to the wall, rifle slack at my side. The immediate threat was gone, but readiness grounded me. It wasn’t about violence. It was about control. About ritual. I couldn’t erase what had been done to her, but I could stand between her and whatever came next.

The room around her told its own story: stains down the walls, rust bleeding from bolts like decay.

No shackles. No locks. But captivity had left its print.

It lived in the stillness, in the posture of a girl still standing though her body had every reason to collapse.

This wasn’t just a prison of steel, it was built from time.

From silence. From fear so thick it rewrote reality.

And still, she stood.

Not by her own strength. Not yet. But by ours. Sully’s stability. Deacon’s quiet care. The simple, defiant truth that someone had come.

When Deacon checked her pulse, he didn’t ask.

Didn’t warn. Just reached for her wrist and touched her so gently it felt more like a memory than motion.

He didn’t look at her face. Her body told him more than her eyes ever could.

And she didn’t flinch. That was the first thing I noticed; she didn’t pull away.

She just let him read her, like some part of her recognized him. Not the man. The intent.

It was trust. The kind that doesn’t come from words. The kind that lives in movement. In silence. In care that doesn’t ask to be acknowledged. Something about Deacon made surrender feel less like a gamble, and more like an inevitability.