21. Jayson
JAYSON
“ W hat the fuck was that about?” Keira screeches as she storms back into the kitchen, her voice bouncing off the tiled walls like a slap.
Her eyes are wide and blazing with something halfway between fury and fear. She snatches her phone off the bench, checks it, and scoffs like the mass of notifications is some kind of insult. Then she drops it—more dramatic than necessary—onto the counter.
I don’t blame her. I’d be screeching too if the cops showed up asking about a man I believed was dead and buried.
I lean against the sink, arms folded, watching her unravel.
She’s not shaking—but she’s close. Her spine’s straight, her jaw clenched, and that fire in her eyes is trying like hell to burn through confusion and fear. I know the look. It's the face of someone whose world just shifted, but they're not ready to admit it yet.
I wait a beat. Let her catch her breath. Let her stew in it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she snaps finally, turning on me. “My father’s dead, right? And you let them stand in my living room and talk about him like he just wandered off to get milk? ”
I sigh, slow and measured. “That was kind of the point.”
Her mouth drops open in disbelief.
I push off the sink, walk over, and stop just short of touching her. “We moved the body,” I say quietly. “Staged it to look like a disappearance, not a murder.”
“You moved the—” she chokes, shoving her hand through her hair. “Jesus, Jayson. You forgot to mention that?”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t forget. I chose not to tell you.”
That earns me a glare that could cut steel. But I don’t flinch.
“I needed your reaction to be real,” I say simply. “To throw off suspicion. You start putting on a performance and they’ll sniff it out. But confusion? Shock? That, they believe.”
She shudders. Not from the cold. From the weight of what we’ve done.
“You used me,” she says, quieter now. There’s hurt there, buried under the rage. “You let them blindside me. On purpose.”
“I protected you,” I bite back. “They left, didn’t they?
No one is in cuffs. There’s nothing here to lead them to believe this is anything other than a disappearance.
Or a middle aged runaway,” I say, pointing out the obvious.
The world needs to know, if it doesn’t already, that we’re not the only ones who were gunning for Mayor Bishop’s head.
There’s a long list of enemies that were lining up, waiting for their turn to take a shot at him.
She shudders. Full-body. Like my words are a draft crawling under her skin.
“You’re unbelievable,” she mutters, backing away until her spine meets the kitchen counter. “You just… manipulated me. Like a puppet.”
“This wasn’t about you, Keira.” I exhale hard through my nose. “It was necessary.”
“And what if I’d said something wrong?” she snaps. “What if I still do? What if they come back and they want to search the house? What then? ”
“They will come back,” I say bluntly. No use sugarcoating it now. “But you don’t have to worry.”
“Don’t have to—Jayson, they were standing right there. In the foyer. Right underneath the bloodstain that used to be my father.”
“There’s no bloodstain.”
She stops. Eyes narrow.
“What?”
“I said, there’s nothing left to find. The room’s been cleaned. Scrubbed down to the damn molecules.”
She stares at me like I’m a lunatic. Which, maybe I am.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” I say, pushing off the fridge and walking toward her. “We cleaned everything. Sheets. Floorboards. Mattresses. Walls. Bleach, vinegar, peroxide—name it. If it could kill a trace, we used it.”
She swallows hard, throat bobbing.
“They won’t find a thing, Keira. No matter how hard they look.”
Despite the barrage of questions she wants to ask—how, who, why, when—I don’t give Keira the courtesy of answers.
Not because I can’t. Because she doesn’t need them.
The truth is a luxury she’s not entitled to.
Not now. Not when every word could fracture the careful illusion I’ve spent days constructing.
Details are dangerous. They’re weight. And she’s already carrying enough.
What she does need to do is simple: follow the script.
Breathe like nothing’s changed. Move through the world like her father didn’t vanish off the face of it.
That’s the only way this works. The only way the cops sniff somewhere else.
Any stutter in her story, any flicker of fear in her eyes—and they’ll swarm.
Start peeling back the layers with scalpels and subpoenas until they hit bone.
And if the worst happens—if they start pressing too hard, digging too deep—she has the cleanest alibi blood money can buy. A brand-new husband and three unimpeachable witnesses who watched her sign her name away the same weekend her father disappeared off the map.
Married, tucked away at the estate, playing house.
It’s practically poetic.
She’s quiet on the ride back. Barely a breath, barely a blink. Just silence, thick and bruised between us. I don’t offer her reassurance. I don’t soften. She doesn’t ask, and I don’t give. Because some truths aren’t meant for her ears.
Like the fact that this was Ghost’s handiwork.
He didn’t like it when I brought Keira back. Unraveled faster than I expected. But he’s efficient in his rage—cold, brutal, and precise. And when he moves, he moves fast. The body was gone before I even had to ask. Before the blood could dry.
There’s no man better suited to disappearing the dead than Ghost. He’s had more than enough practice.
And after ten years of being caged like an animal, he’s perfected his process. Refined every step, every cut, every drop of bleach. He’ll never get caught again. Not in this lifetime.
When we pull up to the estate, the air feels heavier than it did when we left.
Night’s settled over the grounds like a warning.
I kill the engine, step out, and walk around to open her door.
She doesn’t thank me. She just steps out, spine straight, chin high, like I haven’t already broken her world in half.
I lead her inside, past the echo of silence that coats the floorboards, and head toward the staircase. She follows… until she doesn’t. Two steps up, she freezes .
“Where are we going?” Her voice isn’t fearful. Just suspicious. Defiant. Like she’s already bracing for the next battle.
I don’t break stride. “I’ll show you to your room.”
Her eyes narrow, brows lifting. “Oh? I get my own room now?”
The sarcasm is razor-edged, but I don’t flinch. I’ve bled too many times in my life to let words hurt me.
I sigh, sharp and short, more warning than exhale. “I don’t have time for this, Keira. I’ve got work to do.”
She blinks, brows ticking higher—not with snark this time, but something closer to disbelief.
She glances toward the windows. The sky’s ink-dark now, stars just starting to peek through the clouds.
She knows. She knows the kind of work that only happens at night.
The kind that stains your hands, your soul, your goddamn name.
She lingers there, in the foyer, her gaze dragging over the high ceilings, the columns, the ornate banister like she’s just now realizing the scale of the monster she’s married.
“What is it exactly that you do for work?” she asks, voice light, but there’s nothing casual in the way she tilts her head, as though genuinely curious. “Is that how you paid for this castle?”
I turn toward her slowly. Purposefully. Every inch of the movement is a warning. She’s testing me—again. Probing at the edges, looking for soft spots in the armor I never take off. She wants to know how far she can push, how close she can get before I push back.
I step into her space—close enough that she can feel the shift in the air. That drop in temperature that comes right before something breaks. She thinks I’m like the world she left behind. I’m not.
This house, these walls, this life—it’s built on blood and silence and bones buried so deep no one remembers their names anymore. She doesn’t belong here. But that’s the thing about cages—they’re only as strong as the souls they’re holding.
My eyes drag over her face, daring her to say something else. Daring her to keep poking the monster she now shares a last name with.
But before the words leave my mouth, the sound of a cane tapping across the floorboards cuts through the moment—sharp, steady, impossible to ignore.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
My grandmother’s presence hits the room like a raging storm.
We both turn instinctively, like children caught too close to the fire. And there she is—dripping elegance and danger in equal parts. Her silver hair swept into a severe twist, her cane carved from ivory and polished to a lethal gleam.
Her eyes—sharp as broken glass—land on Keira.
“No,” she says, her voice low, clipped, regal. “ I paid for this castle, Keira.”
She pauses at the base of the stairs, the floorboards catching the soft thud of her cane as she plants it once more.
“And Jayson,” she continues, her gaze slicing to me, “inherited it. Along with all the ghosts that live here.”
Her words hang in the air like smoke—elegant, suffocating, inescapable.
And Keira? She’s smart enough not to reply. But I can see it in her eyes. She just realized this house doesn’t have a heart. It has a throne.