Page 84 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

Stella

Grief makes noise in the beginning, a raw, ripping sound that fills rooms and chests and voicemails with something wild and undeniable.

People know how to move around loud grief.

They offer you casseroles and folded blankets, soft hands and softer voices, because they understand how to meet a storm when it’s raging.

But the kind I was sitting in now was the kind that comes after, that lingers once the adrenaline bleeds out.

This grief didn’t roar. It sat. It pressed in behind your ribs and rearranged the way your lungs expanded.

It didn’t need to shout, because it never left.

That was the version I’d come to know in the hours since they left, not the sobbing kind, not even fear, exactly.

Just a silence so complete it wrapped around my spine and whispered worst-case scenarios into the hollow where hope used to sit.

A silence that bloated and stretched until it grew teeth.

Every second slipped by like a needle beneath skin—quiet, precise, and impossible to stop.

There was no room to scream. Just the wait. Just the ache.

Four weeks since Violet had been taken. Three days since Quinn had said they had a lead.

Almost eight hours since the team had packed up and driven into something none of us had words for.

And not one call. No updates. No voice cutting through the static to say: she’s okay.

Angela, one of the two people left here to watch over us while the guys were gone, had tried to reassure me multiple times that this is often how operations like this went.

It didn’t help. The lack of information was killing me slowly.

I hadn’t eaten. Couldn’t. The idea of food felt obscene, like trying to bandage a bullet wound with sequins. I hadn’t slept either. Just sat in the same clothes as yesterday, body fixed in place, stationed at the porch’s edge like a sentry who’d forgotten what peace looked like.

I didn’t know if she was alive. And worse, I no longer knew how to pray.

The words wouldn’t come, and even if they had, I wouldn’t have known where to send them.

Belief felt extravagant—something soft and distant, reserved for people who weren’t drowning.

All I had was wood beneath my feet, the throb behind my eyes, and the fragile, furious breath of someone surviving out of spite, long after the part that believed in miracles had rotted through.

And then, just as morning cracked open into that gray-gold hush that sometimes follows the worst of it, the SUV appeared.

Not fast. Not triumphant. It moved like it had been summoned by something older than grief, rolling in one tire at a time. It rounded the gravel bend slowly and quietly, like it didn’t belong to this world. Like it belonged to a better one, where people came back. Where hope still survived.

The shape of it emerged in pieces. Rain-slick windows.

No headlights. No rush. Just the crunch of gravel and the sound of the earth remembering how to breathe.

My hand tightened on the porch railing, not to brace, not to steady, but because I knew, somewhere bone-deep, that if I didn’t hold on, I’d fly apart completely.

With each inch the vehicle moved towards me, the ache in my chest sharpened. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. I wanted to believe. I wanted to be wrong. Because if I hoped, and was wrong again, I wasn’t sure I’d survive it.

The SUV stopped. Silence followed, heavy and electric. The air thinned. The porch shrank. The world narrowed to the stretch of space between that door and the possibility of her.

The driver’s door opened first.

Deacon climbed out slowly, movements heavy with exhaustion, his frame still carrying the weight of whatever had happened.

He stretched, spine cracking, then scanned the yard like a soldier just returned from war—worn, but standing.

The rear passenger door flung open next, and Sully burst out like the van had barely contained him, all elbows and urgency, too big, too loud, too full of motion.

But the seat behind him was empty.

My heart bottomed out. No silhouette in the glass. No shadow of movement. No Violet. Just the rest of the guys, exiting the vehicle with the postures of men who had just survived something harrowing.

Panic rushed in hard and fast, a dizzying, breathless free-fall into the place I’d been avoiding for days. I barely registered the second sound, the softer purr of a different engine. Another vehicle, sleek and quiet, rolled up behind the van and stopped. Black. Polished. Too official.

Quinn stepped out.

He closed the door with the kind of precise control that always meant the stakes were higher than anyone wanted to admit.

He didn’t speak. Not to me. Not to the house.

Just exchanged a few low words with Niko, too quiet to hear, but their posture said everything.

No grief. No collapse. Just stillness. Braced.

Then Quinn moved. He walked to the rear passenger door of the second vehicle. Opened it.

And then she was there, stepping out of the vehicle on unsteady feet.

My knees almost buckled, not because she looked bruised or broken, although she did, but because she looked real .

Violet. Alive. Moving. Breathing. She seemed smaller than I remembered, thinner and paler, wrapped in a police jacket too big for her frame, like it belonged to someone larger.

Her hair was brushed but knotted at the ends.

One sneaker, one hospital slipper. But she stood upright, blinking into the gray morning like she hadn’t seen the sky in days.

Then her eyes found mine. Unblinking, as if she’d been staring through fog and finally saw something worth holding on to.

The connection didn’t crash; it blossomed.

Quiet and steady. A thread, drawn tight across distance and time, reminding us that somehow, after everything, we hadn’t lost each other.

Neither of us cried. Not yet. But something between us cracked.

We ran.

Across the yard, through the breathless space between belief and proof, between survival and reunion, we sprinted towards one another. I didn’t feel the ground. Didn’t register the grass, or gravel, or the ache in my knees. Just the pull of her, of getting there before anything else could.

She hit me like a storm, and we dropped to the earth, folding around each other like lungs closing around breath. My arms locked tight. Her fingers clutched the back of my neck, shaking. She buried her face in my shoulder. Her whole body was trembling.

“You’re here,” I whispered, voice breaking as the tears finally came. “You’re here. You’re here. You’re here.”

And then, soft as breath, her voice reached through the space between us—smaller than I remembered, frayed at the edges but unmistakably hers.

“I didn’t know if you were real anymore.”

I held her like she was. Like she was the last real thing left.

My hands clenched the back of her jacket, fingers locked in the fabric like I could keep time from moving if I just didn’t let go.

Her ribs moved against mine in a shallow rhythm.

My body curled around hers without thought, instinctive and absolute, as if it had always known this shape.

There was no fear between us anymore. Only the quiet miracle of something fractured remembering how to hold itself together again.

She stayed. And I stayed with her.

Even as silence gathered thick and reverent.

Even as the others kept their distance to give us space.

I didn’t loosen my grip. My forehead rested against hers, the damp of her hair seeping into my skin, and I held on like letting go might dissolve the moment entirely.

I didn’t need the world to turn. I just needed her to stay real in my arms.

But then she started to shiver, a creeping tremble that traveled from her shoulders downwards, pulling what little strength she had left from her bones. Her fingers twitched against my sides. And when I finally leaned back to look at her, I saw it. That distant haze behind her eyes.

I knew that look. Disassociation. She was still here, but only barely.

I smoothed her hair back, kissed her forehead, and pulled away slowly. My hand found hers—cold, scabbed, small—and I laced our fingers tight, like that might be enough to keep her anchored. “Come on,” I whispered, too soft for anyone else to hear. “Let’s get you inside.”

She blinked up at me, and for a moment I wasn’t sure she’d move.

Her breath caught; her body stilled like it couldn’t remember how to answer.

But then she gave a small nod, and together we stood and walked—slowly, unsteadily, every step costing her something.

Her feet dragged over the gravel, and she stared at the house like it might vanish if she looked away.

Her mouth opened, then closed again, like she wanted to speak but couldn’t remember how.

We made it halfway to the porch before her knees buckled. She didn’t fall, so much as fold, like her body had hit the end of what it could carry. I caught her with a quick step sideways, pulling her into my arms as she sagged heavy and boneless against me.

“Hey,” I breathed, holding her close. “I’ve got you. You don’t have to do this alone.”

She didn’t speak. Didn’t resist. Just collapsed into me, her head tucked under my chin, her whole body trembling, not from fear or cold, but from everything she hadn’t been able to feel until now. The adrenaline was gone. The ordeal was over. What remained was the cost.

Sully was already moving. I didn’t hear him, but I felt him. The shift of air as he knelt beside us, solid and steady as always. “Let me,” he said quietly.

Violet didn’t fight it. She let him lift her without a word, limbs limp with exhaustion, head resting against his chest. Her fingers clung to my shirt until the last possible moment, reluctant to let go.