Jax hesitates. And that hesitation answers everything.
O stares at him.
“Yes,” Jax says finally. “Mostly kids.”
O exhales sharply. “Doomed pitfire. And you didn’t think to mention it?”
Jax bristles. “I hurt people all the time. I barely help anyone. I didn’t think it mattered.”
“Have you ever thought,” O shoots back, “that every time you fix something, something else breaks? That’s how this works.”
Jax frowns. “Why do you think that?”
“Why?” O barks a laugh. “Because the tar doesn’t thrive on happy customers.”
“But it’s different with me,” Jax insists. “I get to?—”
“That’s because you’re a St. Clair,” O cuts in. “You still think the rules don’t apply to you.”
“That’s not it?—”
The room tilts. Enough for me to notice that my body finally remembers everything it’s been through: the club; the alley; the hospital; the sky going wrong.
I move without a plan. I walk past them, brushing Jax’s arm as I go. He reaches for me automatically, fingers grazing my wrist. “Sisk?—”
“I’ll be right back. One minute.”
The adjacent room is barely a room at all. More like a storage closet with stacked boxes, junk left and right, and the couch. It’s old, threadbare, indented like it remembers bodies that needed it just as badly as I do.
I sink into it and my eyes close immediately. I’ve slept on this couch before, woken up on it more times than I can count. O might be a grumpy ass to customers, but he never closes the door to the ones who need it, and that carves out a place in my heart for him that no one else can touch.
From the other room, their voices blur together.
“You don’t get it?—”
“You’re not listening?—”
“You’re playing with balances you don’t understand?—”
I should get up. I should go back in there and ask questions. Important ones. The kind that feels like they might change everything. But my body refuses.
The last thing I register is Jax’s voice. “…she didn’t deserve that.”
Then darkness takes me and I fall asleep.
Forty-Three
THEN | JAX
She doesn’t need to say she’s scared. It’s in the tremor I can feel through her hand, the way her eyes are doing gymnastics to avoid mine, the way she’s walking like she’s trying to sneak past a goddamn sleeping dragon.
I stop her, yanking her into the first empty classroom I see. I cage her against the wall. “Look, as creepy as that asshole is, this doesn’t mean anything, okay? He can’t touch you. I got you. Got it?”
Her breath hitches. “He’s always been nice. I know he’s a little creepy but…”
I don’t let her finish. I duck my head and kiss her. A hard press of my lips against hers, a reminder I got her. “He’s not nice, he’s manipulating you.”
She tries again, her voice shaky. “I don’t know, Jax. Something was really wrong with him back there. He was fine until you showed up. I mean, mostly…”
