Page 83 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Niko lounged against the SUV, boot resting casually on the running board, but the calm was camouflage.

His eyes tracked Eddie without flickering, every movement sorted and catalogued.

A silent predator running calculus under the surface.

Deacon lingered near Sully and Violet, posture indistinct, expression unreadable, but nothing about him was idle.

He watched like he always did. Fully. Quietly. Permanently aware.

Then Eddie’s gaze reached me and held there. Not hostile. Not probing. Just a pause weighted with unspoken assessment. He didn’t know where we fit, and that made him uneasy. Not cops. Not military. Not civilians either. Just a group of unknowns with guns and no ID.

I didn’t nod. Didn’t shift. Let the moment breathe. Long enough for him to decide I wasn’t worth interrogating. Not yet. He turned.

He wasn’t dismissing us. He was working a crime scene, marking positions, and calculating probabilities.

He didn’t like unknowns; that much was obvious.

Didn’t like teams that moved faster than his squad, or answered to names not listed on rosters.

The kind of variable that wasn’t assigned a rank or department made his systems itch.

He walked off loose-limbed, like none of it mattered. But his breath had shifted. Slight hitch. Slight lift. Not panic—preparation. Like his mind was rewinding, dissecting every image for missing context.

He didn’t trust us. I didn’t need him to say it.

A man like Eddie worked in a world of process.

Chain of command. Verified paperwork and clean conclusions.

We didn’t fit. We weren’t meant to. And the fact that Quinn had brought us in without clearance, without protocol, without even names he could trace, made us a violation he couldn’t report.

He wouldn’t argue. Wouldn’t shout. He’d watch. He’d wait. And when things fell apart, he’d be there with a notepad and a question that sounded like hindsight. A man like him didn’t need to chase trouble. He just needed to know where to find it when the dust cleared.

He walked over to Quinn with a kind of calm that looked casual, but wasn’t.

There was weight in it, the careful patience of a man who had learned the hard way not to rush.

I caught their reflections in the SUV’s side panel—soft light, wet pavement, two outlines cut from the same history but bent in different directions.

Both cops. Both seasoned. Quinn still looked inward, tethered to something he believed could be fixed.

Eddie carried himself like someone already counting the cost if it couldn’t.

“Where are they taking her?” he asked, voice pitched low. Not hostile. Not gentle. Just steady, the question of a man who wanted an answer he could use.

Quinn didn’t blink. His body held the line, but his voice thinned. “No idea,” he said. “Somewhere safe.”

It came too smoothly, like a line repeated one too many times. Not quite a lie, but not free of doubt either.

Eddie’s jaw tightened, not in anger but in effort, holding something back. “You sure?”

The pause that followed stretched thin as wire. Quinn carried it for a beat, maybe two, before answering. “I trust the Chief.”

The words landed heavily between them, fragile in their own way.

One man offering faith. The other weighing what to do with it.

Eddie didn’t nod. Didn’t argue. He stepped back with the same controlled ease with which he’d arrived, as if he had what he needed—for now.

But the tension in his shoulders said it hadn’t settled him. Not even close.

Quinn stayed where he was, jaw tight, shoulders still squared like belief could shield him from erosion.

But I knew that posture. I’d worn it myself once, before I understood how fast trust could become a fracture. Before I realized that not all foundations break with noise. Some of them just shift silently under your feet until the floor you built everything on no longer holds.

I watched all of it from my post behind the van, half-shadowed, rifle still resting against my chest. Quinn didn’t look over, which told me enough.

He didn’t doubt the Chief. None of us did. The man had earned that much. What Quinn was doubting was everything around the Chief: the channels, the chains of command, the hands reaching for strings we couldn’t always see.

That was the problem. The system didn’t bleed where you could track it. It bled in silence, under clean signatures and sealed files. And Quinn, for all his grit and suspicion, couldn’t force an answer out of shadows that refused to take shape.

Eddie didn’t return to the group. He veered off toward his car instead, slicing through the fog-damp air like a man who didn’t plan to double back.

The door shut with a muted thud, and his headlights swept the lot—brief flashes of Sully’s restless pacing, Carrick’s clenched jaw, Niko’s stillness calibrated to threat.

Then he eased forward, tires hissing on wet asphalt, disappearing without ceremony.

Quinn didn’t follow. He lingered at the edge of his car, hand braced against the open door like it was the last solid thing in the lot.

His fingers clenched the frame just tight enough to blanch the knuckles, and for half a breath the mask slipped.

The set of his shoulders sagged, the weight of it all pressing through in a quiet crack only someone looking for it would notice.

Then, it was gone. Classic Quinn. Steady, quiet, broadcasting nothing. But I knew better. Behind the calm, his mind was already running every angle, already bracing for whatever came next.

“Alright, boys, let’s head out. Follow me back to the Annex, and as soon as Violet is ready, we’ll take her out to your place.

We need to stay radio silent for now, just in case.

We can’t risk anything going wrong here in the final stretch.

” He met each of our eyes for a moment. “You did good work tonight, team. This could have gone a hell of a lot worse.”

Around me, the team fractured into quiet preparation for extraction. Not relaxed, but locked in the quiet space that comes after the noise fades. Adrenaline gone, instincts allowed to idle.

We all knew the truth. Violet was safe. The Chief would see to that.

But the handoff had been too clean, too polished, too official.

It was the kind of process designed to reassure, and maybe that was the problem.

Danger doesn’t always come with blood and broken doors.

Sometimes it comes wearing the right badge, using the right words, carrying the right clipboard.

Sometimes, safety feels too much like surrender.

I kept replaying her face just before the door closed. Not relief. Not panic. Just exhaustion. A kind of bone-deep resignation that said she’d been here before. That she knew how little control she had over where she landed, even if this time we swore it was different.

That look stayed with me, heavier than any rifle across my chest. It didn’t matter that the op was clean, that the timeline held, that we could call it a win on paper. None of that erased the quiet truth settling in my gut.

She was safe. But safe didn’t mean free.

And that, more than anything, was the part none of us said out loud.