Jackson #2
I wanted to close the distance. The want hit so hard and so fast it set my hands shaking, and I was furious at her for standing there looking like that, and furious at myself for noticing, and furious at my dead mother for putting us in a house together and expecting anything other than exactly this.
"Your family is not my burden to carry, Kimberly. And mine is certainly not yours to fix. So stay away from my life, from Logan’s, and from our entire family for good!"
I walked out before she could respond. The click of the latch was the loudest sound I had ever heard.
Kimberly
The estate went back to freezing cold. The fragile truce we’d traded over soup and garden shears dissolved as if it had been nothing but a fever dream. Jackson and I went back to being strangers both at home and at the office.
On Thursday, I found myself sitting at the back of the primary shareholders’ presentation, taking redundant transcript notes. Jackson was at the podium, dominating the room, his voice carrying the kind of control that made every executive go still.
My phone vibrated against my thigh.
I pressed it to my ear, ducking my head. "Katelyn?"
"Kim. It’s Penny," my sister’s voice came through, high and fractured, stripped of its usual bravado. "You need to get to the hospital. I’m stuck in traffic and..."
The room tilted. "What happened? Is she—"
"The new gene protocol— her body is rejecting it. They’ve pulled her off the line. Her white count is spiking and the oncologist won’t talk to me without the primary guardian present." A sharp, terrified sob broke through her filter. "Just go, Kim. Please."
I stood up so fast my chair shrieked against the hardwood. Sixteen major stakeholders turned their heads. Jackson stopped mid-syllable, his eyes locking onto me from across the long boardroom.
Whatever looked back at him from my face made his entire expression change.
"We're adjourning," Jackson announced, his voice dropping an octave.
A senior board member blinked. "Jackson, we haven’t covered the Q3 infrastructure capital—"
"I said we are done," he barked, already ripping the lapel mic from his suit jacket. "Clear the room. Everything else moves to email."
He crossed the floor before the double doors had even swung shut, his hand closing around my elbow, steering me toward the private executive elevator. "Talk to me. What is it?"
"Penny. The hospital called—she’s having an acute reaction to the gene modification. I need to get a cab, Jackson, your meeting—"
"Quiet," he snapped, shoving the elevator button. "You’re not waiting twenty minutes for a cab in downtown traffic. Move."
He drove the twin-turbo SUV like a man who had decided traffic laws were merely optional suggestions.
Dr. Reeves met us in the sterile glare of the corridor. He looked exhausted but spoke in that low, professional cadence designed to manage panic.
"The targeted therapy triggered a massive, systemic autoimmune response," he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Her body identified the modified vectors as a foreign threat. We’ve suspended the protocol and stabilized her vitals with heavy immunosuppressants, but the reality is we’ve reached the end of this specific pathway. "
He didn’t use the words running out of time. He didn’t have to. The silence at the end of his sentence was deafening.
"Can I see her?" I whispered.
"Give us five minutes to finish the central line adjustment. She’s alert, Kim. She’s fighting." He gave my shoulder a brief, professional squeeze. "We aren’t throwing in the towel. We’re just forced to look for another road."
He turned back through the double doors.
I stood there in the center of that terrible, sterile hallway, the fluorescent glare flattening every color to gray, the smell of isopropyl alcohol filling my lungs. The last twelve months came down on me like an avalanche. My knees simply ceased to function.
I didn't hit the floor.
Jackson caught me with his entire body, scooping me against his chest before my weight could settle, pulling me flush against the expensive wool of his suit.
And I didn’t fight it. I turned into him like a drowning person, my fingers knotting into his lapels, my forehead buried in the crook of his neck, the first sob tearing out of my chest like jagged glass.
"I can’t lose her, Jackson," I choked out, the words raw and ugly. "I can’t. She’s all I have left."
He tightened his arms until I could barely breathe, his chin resting hard against the top of my head, one large hand flat against my shoulder blades, holding me together while the world broke apart.
When the sobbing finally slowed into ragged breaths, the silence of the corridor rushed back in. I lifted my face to apologize, to pull away, to re-establish the boundary.
But he didn’t let go.
His face was right there, inches from mine, his silver-gray eyes dark with an emotion so raw it looked like pain.
His thumb came up and wiped a tear off my cheek.
His breath hitched, warm against my lips.
My fingers tightened on his shirt, pulling him closer by a fraction.
The hospital, the lights, the terror—everything went quiet except the pull between us.
A heavy stainless-steel supply cart slammed through the double doors behind us.
We jumped apart—Jackson stepping back three paces, his hand coming up to straighten his cuffs, while I pressed my back against the cold drywall, both of us breathing as if we’d just run a sprint.
Katelyn rounded the corner a second later, her coat half-falling off her shoulder. She stopped dead, her eyes darting between my flushed face and Jackson’s rigid, unreadable posture.
She grabbed my hand. "They’re letting us in."
Penny was propped up against three pillows, looking devastatingly small amid the tangled maze of IV lines and heart monitors. But her eyes were bright, and the second I stepped through the threshold, she pointed a pale finger at me.
"If you start leaking from your eyes, Kim, I’m pulling this catheter out and hitchhiking back home."
"I’m not leaking," I lied, swallowing the lump in my throat.
"Your eyeliner looks like a raccoon defense mechanism." Her eyes drifted past my shoulder, widening as Jackson stepped into the room, his large frame making the small cubicle feel instantly crowded. She squinted, her mind working through the haze of heavy narcotics. "You’re the billionaire."
"Jackson Whitlock," he said, his tone surprisingly devoid of its usual edge.
"The one who lives in the fortress and tried to sue my sister for existing."
"Penny!" I hissed, my cheeks burning.
Jackson, however, didn’t flinch. He looked at Penny, then his eyes slid to me, and something shifted in his expression. The hard line of his mouth went soft for a breath, and for once he didn't bother hiding it.
"I was operating under a series of profoundly mistaken assumptions," Jackson said, his voice level and dead honest. "I was wrong about your sister. In almost every capacity."
Penny stared at him, running her own internal diagnostic on his sincerity. Finally, she gave a single, firm nod. "Acceptable answer. You can stay. But if you make her look like a raccoon again, I will personally haunt you."
"Understood," Jackson murmured.
We stayed until the night shift nurses cleared the floor.
Katelyn sat on the edge of the mattress, reading a trashy fantasy novel aloud in dramatic voices, while I held Penny’s cold fingers until she finally drifted into a deep, medicated sleep.
Jackson never left the vinyl chair by the window.
He just sat in the shadows, watching over the room.
I didn't know why he was still here, not after what he’d said in my bedroom, that my family wasn’t his burden, that his wasn’t mine to fix.
By his own logic, he shouldn’t have insisted on driving me here at all.
But he was here. In a vinyl chair.
I didn't know what it meant. But for the first time in months, the weight didn't feel like mine alone.
Katelyn left, pressing her lips to Penny’s forehead and whispering something I didn’t catch.
She squeezed my shoulder on the way out and shot one long, loaded look at Jackson that communicated about fourteen questions she was absolutely going to ask me later, and then she was gone, and the room was quiet.
I sat there for another twenty minutes, watching Penny’s chest rise and fall in that steady, medicated rhythm. When I finally looked over at the window, Jackson was asleep.
I stared.
He looked younger. That was the first thing.
The permanent tension in his face had loosened, and without the set jaw and the calculating eyes and the whole elaborate architecture of control he wore like a second skin, he looked like a man in his early thirties who was just tired.
His hair had fallen across his forehead. His hands were relaxed in his lap.
The tyrant was vulnerable. Asleep. In a vinyl chair, in a hospital, for a girl who wasn’t his sister, next to a woman who wasn’t his anything.
I almost took a photo to commemorate this moment. Instead, I stood and walked to the nurse’s station to request an extra blanket.
The corridor was empty, save for two graveyard-shift nurses charting behind the desk, their voices carrying clearly across the quiet floor.
"Did you see the chart notation? That’s Jackson Whitlock. From the family foundation."
"Yeah. His private trust covers the experimental orphan-drug grants for the entire regional program. It’s supposed to be completely anonymous, but accounting leaked the billing codes last month when the new gene vectors arrived from Switzerland."
I froze mid-step, my hand catching the edge of the doorframe.
The anonymous foundation.
The sudden, miraculous grant that had stepped in the exact moment our insurance crashed, cutting our out-of-pocket costs to something we could actually survive. The one the billing department told me was handled by a private benefactor who refused to be named.
Jackson Whitlock.