18. Jack
Jack
I check the mail, before the sun is up, and that’s when I find the envelope. It’s taped neatly in the front of the letterbox where Silas’s security cameras’ wide-angle lens has a blind spot.
Just a plain, thick manila envelope with no return address. My name scrawled across the front in block letters.
JACK.
I head back inside, standing in the kitchen, my fingers already shaking by the time I pulled the flap open. Inside aren’t bills, or junk mail. It’s a stack of photographs. Glossy, recent prints that made the air instantly leave my lungs.
The top photo is of me, I’m standing at the register smiling at a customer, the morning light cutting across my face while I laugh at something they said.
The angle was tight, zoomed in through the front window, shot from someone standing right on the sidewalk.
I remember this moment, it was yesterday and it was one of our neighbours’ who had popped in.
Below that was one of Hale. It was of him at school. He was walking across the asphalt courtyard, carrying his binder against his chest, completely unaware that a camera lens was tracking his every step. The timestamp in the corner of the digital negative was crisp and undeniable.
Two days ago.
CJ and Silas had spent hours locking down the cafe and school. Setting up security that was water tight. They had told us we were safe. They told us nobody could touch us.
Looking down at these photos, I realise the cold, crushing truth: They were trying to protect a glass house with a hammer already swinging toward it.
Ray and Dale aren’t hacking our firewalls or systems. They’re old school. They’re walking the streets, sitting in parked cars across the street. They are right here in Campbell River, watching us breathe, taking inventory of our lives like predators mapping out their territory before the kill.
I bury the envelope inside my jacket and head back to Silas. Crawling in beside him, he shifts beside me, pulling me closer to him. His fingers flex against my hip, “Morning,” he murmurs, voice rough with sleep.
I swallow hard. “Morning.”
He opens his eyes, blinking slowly, and the second he sees my face, his expression sharpens. Concern. Focus. That terrifying, gentle intensity he only ever uses on me.
“What’s wrong?” he says quietly.
I should tell him about the photos, but the word that comes out is, “Nothing.” I can’t look at him, because if I do, I’ll tell him. “I just have a lot on my mind,” I say, forcing the words out.
Silas studies me, eyes dark, searching. He knows something is wrong. He always knows.
He brushes his thumb along my jaw. “Baby? What’s wrong?”
I let out a heavy sigh, and look up at him. “I got a delivery.”
He sits up, grabbing my hand, ‘What kind of delivery?”
Rolling onto my back, I scrub a hand over my face. “An envelope. Full of photos. It was from Ray.”
“Where is it?”
“My jacket pocket. It had photos of Hale and me, at school and the cafe.”
Silas jumps up and I hear him running down the hallway to the kitchen. He comes back a minute later, envelope in his hand. Climbing back into bed, he sits with his back against the headboard.
I watch as he pulls out photo after photo. His expressions grows angrier by the second.
I freeze, every muscle in my body locked tight, my breathing hitches as the photos fall to his lap. Me in the cafe, gym, and walking with Finn. Hale, at school, arriving home.
Our every day lives documented in pixels and colour.
They’re watching, a voice whispered in the back of my skull, echoing my uncle’s cold, mocking tone.
You can hide in the dark all you want, Jackie. But you can’t outrun us.
A heavy, suffocating weight settles over my chest. I stare out into the blackness, realising the terrible, inescapable truth of it all.
As long as I am here, as long as Silas and the guys from PalMerc keep fighting my battles, my family is going to keep tightening the noose.
They aren’t going to stop until I break.
The only way to keep Silas from putting a bullet in my uncle and ending up in a jail, the only way to keep Hale from being beaten into a bloody tool; is for me to walk back into the cage myself.
I will have to run. I know I’ll have to leave before they tear this whole life down around us.
* * *
A while later I leave Silas in snoozing in bed and go to check if Hale is up, but the sight greeting me makes my stomach drop into a bottomless pit. Empty bed. Perfectly neat sheets. A single piece of paper resting on the pillow.
I lift it, reading it, and I turn running straight to Silas. Jumping on the bed, he wakes, sitting bolt upright.
“What’s wrong?” He asks, his voice groggy.
“He’s gone.” Handing Silas the piece of paper.
Silas reads it, his face twisted with fierce agony.
I have to go.
Keep you safe.
Thank you Silas for taking me in.
I’ll never forget you.
Love, Hale.
Silas jumps from the bed, pulling his phone off the charger, his fingers hitting the screen as he stands.
“CJ. Need your help. Hale’s gone.”
My heart sinks, broken for the little boy who left thinking he still has to protect me.
Within half an hour CJ, Eli, Deck and Finn are the kitchen table planning a grid search of the city and within an hour, we have half of Campbell River out looking for Hale.
Silas is on the phone with Callan, and he and Mack are already searching.
“Find him now,” Silas snarled, ending the call with Callan.
Panic didn’t just rise in my chest; it has exploded. Hale. Just a kid who had finally started to heal, who had started laughing at school, who had let his guard down. Ray got to him. I know he did.
“Jack, stay here,” Silas ordered, already shrugging his heavy jacket over his good shoulder, wincing as the motion pulled at his healing stitches.
“Like hell I am,” I snapped, my voice shaking as I stand from the couch. “That’s our boy out there, Silas! They took him because of me!”
Silas stopped, his dark eyes locking onto mine with a fierce, terrifying intensity.
For a second I think he’s going to argue, lock me in the room and throw away the key.
But he sees the absolute, shattering terror in my face, and instead, he crosses the room, grabbing my face in his large, calloused hand.
“Okay, we go together,” he said, his voice hard as iron. “We find him. Nobody touches him.”
* * *
It took two hours of driving through relentless, gray coastal rain before Eli’s call came through.
The rain was coming down in sheets, blurring the windshield as the wipers fought to keep up, as we search. My phone rings, and I answer it, putting it on speaker, my hands trembling so hard I almost drop it.
“Jack? Silas?” Eli’s voice was breathless, shouting slightly over the sound of wind and crashing waves.
“Eli? Do you have him?” I yell over the engine.
“I found him,” Eli pants. “A nurse from the hospital said she saw a kid matching Hale’s description walking down toward the point hours ago, soaked to the bone. I drove out. He’s here, guys. At the spit.”
“Don’t let him move,” Silas commands, hitting the gas pedal harder as the truck fishtails slightly on the wet asphalt. “We’re two minutes out.”
When we pull up to the gravel turnout near the water, the wind is howling off the water, salt spray and rain stinging our faces like buckshot. Mack’s and Callan’s SUVs are already parked haphazardly off the road.
We jump out of the truck, the freezing rain soaking through my clothes in seconds.
Down on the rocky shoreline, past the jagged driftwood piles and the wind-beaten sea grass, sat a massive, weathered art installation; an old wooden cougar sculpture carved out of a hundreds of pieces of driftwood, its dark hollow eyes staring out toward the dark ocean.
That’s when I see him. Hale huddled directly beneath its wooden belly, soaked through to the bone, shivering so violently his teeth clicked like loose glass.
“Hale!” I scream, my voice cracking as I scramble down the slippery embankment, sliding the last few feet into the mud and gravel, my knees slamming into the mud beneath them.
Eli is already there, kneeling in the dirt beside the boy, trying to wrap a heavy wool blanket around his thin shoulders. Hale looks up, his face pale, still bruised along the jawline where Ray had left his mark, his eyes wide and hollow with a terrifying, adult-sized despair.
Eli moves aside, and Silas, careful on the slick rocks, crouches in front of Hale. His voice cracks around his words.
“Hale, what the hell are you doing? Are you insane?” Tears mix with the rain hitting his face as he leans closer to the boy. “Do you have any idea how worried we were?”
“You shouldn’t have come,” Hale whispered, his voice small and broken against the roar of the surf. “If I’m out of here… if I leave with them… they said they’d leave you alone, Jack.”
My breath caught. My knees hit the wet stones, and I drop right into the mud beside him, grabbing his freezing, trembling hands. “Hale… what are you talking about? Who talked to you?”
“Your uncle,” Hale sobbed, a single tear cutting a clean track through the grime on his cheek.
“He saw me at school yesterday. He told me… he told me I was the reason you were always looking over your shoulder. He said if I walked away, if I went back with him and your dad, you and Silas would be safe. He promised.”
The blood drained entirely from my face. The absolute selflessness of it; a ten-year-old willing to throw himself back into the grinder just to buy me a few days of safety, shattered whatever was left of my heart.
Silas drops heavily to his knees beside us on the other side of Hale, his breathing ragged, his face dark as a thundercloud.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t curse. He reached out with his one good arm, pulling Hale’s shaking, waterlogged frame into his side with a fierce, unyielding strength that defied his own injuries.
“Listen to me, Hale,” Silas said, his voice low, gravelly, and carrying an absolute, terrifying weight of authority that cut straight through the storm. “You are not going anywhere with them. You are not a sacrifice, and you are not a trade. You belong right here. With us.”
Hale looks up at Silas, his dark eyes shimmering with rain and tears, searching the hard lines of Silas’s face for any sign of hesitation or deceit.
“You mean that?” Hale whispered, his voice trembling. “Even though I’m just… I’m just a foster kid with nowhere to go? Even though I mess everything up?”
Silas’s jaw tightens, and for a split second, I see a raw, fierce vulnerability flash across his face; the terrifying realisation of just how much he had come to care for the boy who had wormed his way into our lives.
“I mean it more than anything I’ve ever said in my life,” Silas swore, his voice dropping to a fierce, solemn vow. “I’m keeping you, Hale. You’re mine now. Nobody takes you.”
Hale lets out a choked, ragged sob, burying his face into Silas’s wet jacket, his small arms wrapping around Silas’s waist and holding on for dear life.
Across the rocky clearing, Eli, Mack, and Callan stand guard in the rain, silent sentinels forming a ring of absolute protection around us against the dark, encroaching world.
Hale pulls back slightly… looking between Silas and me with a sudden, devastatingly clear expression that only a ten-year-old who has had to grow up too fast could muster.
“Do you guys… do you guys love each other?” Hale asks softly, his voice barely carrying over the wind.
The question hangs in the freezing air, heavy and absolute, stripping away every defense, every rule, every wall we had built to keep ourselves safe.
Silas looks down at me, the rain plastering his dark hair to his forehead, his eyes burning with an intensity that makes the cold around us vanish entirely.
“Yeah,” Silas answers, his voice steady, proud, and completely unashamed. He looks back at Hale, then back to me. “I love him. More than my own life. More than the air I breathe.”
I let out a shaky, watery laugh that turns into a sob, my hand reaching out to tangle my fingers into Silas’s jacket, anchoring myself to him as the truth settles deep into my bones.
“I love you too,” I whispered, looking straight into Silas’s eyes. “Always.”
Hale gave a small, watery nod, a ghost of a smile touching his bruised face. “Good. Because you guys are shit at hiding it.”
Silas lets out a deep, rumbling sound that’s almost a laugh, and he tightens his grip, pulling both of us closer against the wind, wrapping us in an unbreakable circle of warmth and grit, I knew the storm outside our little family was still raging, and Ray and Dale were still out there, waiting.
But sitting here in the mud, holding the ten-year-old boy who had somehow become the heart of our broken home, I knew one thing for certain.
I was never going to let them take him.