Chapter Fifty-Five
Kira
Isit with my knees tucked against my chest at the dining table, arms wrapped tight around my shins.
My bones are cold, as if the dead body on the floor is permeating the air as it chills.
I watch Jax as he paces, running his hand through his hair, again and again.
The blood has seeped out of James in a pool on the marble as we’ve sat with what’s happened.
What even happened?! One second James was about to hit Caleb and the next Nix had a gun. My mind… it can’t… it can’t comprehend that this is happening again.
“What were you thinking?” I hiss across the table.
Nix sits with her face screwed up in that petulant scowl, the one where her eyes are narrowed and nose is scrunched up, the one I know so well from every time I ever scolded her. But I don’t know the girl sitting across from me now.
“He deserved it,” she says, avoiding my eyes.
“You don’t get to decide that!” I bite out. “You don’t just get to… get to…” I fling my hands, palms up, at the body of Jax and Caleb’s father. “That! You don’t get to do that!”
“Why not?” she snaps, and the sharpness in her voice is almost hateful. “Everyone else gets to do whatever they want. You don’t think he killed someone? You don’t think he made Marshal kill someone? Think about the shit he’s made Jax do. What he was probably going to make Caleb do!”
I open my mouth to fire back, but I can’t find a rebuttal. Because sure, yeah, she’s right. But fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
“He wouldn’t…” Caleb speaks in my absence, voice sounding far away. “He wouldn’t have made me do what Jax does.”
There’s dried tears in tracks down his pale cheeks, and he has a blank stare, not looking at anyone or anything. Jax stops and turns to assess him.
“Yes,” he frowns, “he would have. And it would have been worse for you.”
“I wouldn’t have done it.”
“That’s why it would have been worse.”
“You don’t know that. You,” he turns on Nix, head jerking, eyes wet and furious and betrayed, “don’t know that! I told you not to do this. I told you not to bring the gun. Why did you—”
“Caleb,” Nix pleads, and for the first time her voice cracks too, the bravado slipping, “he beat you! Multiple times! You said yourself that you wished he was dead. Now he is. Now you can be free and now Kira can stay out of jail. It’s better that he’s dead.”
I wince at the callous way my sister talks about just killing someone, at the way Caleb’s chin trembles as he looks away from her, as if he can’t bear to look at her.
“What?” Jax cuts in.
He prowls forward a step, and the movement pulls every nerve in my body tight.
“It’s better!” Nix stands up stupidly, and I can’t help but grimace at the hill she’s decided to die on. What is she thinking?! She just killed their father.
“I’m fucking sorry but it’s better,” she continues. “God, I don’t think I’m the crazy one here—”
“No,” Jax cuts her off sharply, and I brace for him to finally lay into her.
She would deserve it, needs it even, but God if it isn’t going to be hard listening to it. She’s still my sister, my baby sister, killer or not. I could never dish out the punishment this requires. I suddenly realize that maybe that’s why she’s done this, because I never actually disciplined her.
Nix shrinks back just slightly, clearly still in possession of one sane brain cell. “Wha—what do you mean? Just what I said.”
“About Kira,” Jax snaps. “Why would she get to stay out of jail?”
Nix blinks, her brows coming together before she seems to understand something, and then she juts out her hip.
“Are you serious right now?” My little sister all but scoffs at the son of the man she just shot, and I swear, I don’t know her.
“Nicole,” I try, but she doesn’t even look at me, and that right there shows how well I’ve done in the parenting department.
“He’s dead!” She motions to James’ body dramatically, trying to prove a point, but it’s the last point she needs to be drawing attention to right now.
What is wrong with her?! I take back my assumption that she had a brain cell left. She has none. Not one.
“I can see that,” Jax growls, his patience clearly wearing thin.
Despite this, Nix rolls her eyes and clicks her tongue in a way that insinuates we’re the stupid ones, and I’m just about to stand and wrench her from the room when she gets to the real point.
“Dead,” she repeats, emphasizing it like she’s teaching us a vocabulary word. “As in, you can go to the captain. You can make sure Kira doesn’t get arrested.”
Jax stills, his brows coming together, and I hold my breath. What?
“You’re the head of the Landon firm now,” she adds, like it’s obvious.
Jax blinks and turns his ear toward her, as if he didn’t hear her. “I’m the what?”
“His will leaves everything to you. Caleb said as much, but I double-checked. His last will and testament is in the third drawer of the black cabinet in his office. It’s not even locked.
” She rolls her eyes again. “How are you not following? You inherit everything, including all his connections. You. Are. The. Head. Of. Landon. Enterprises.”
Jax doesn’t move as Nix flips her hair over her shoulder, and my jaw goes slack, either at the fact that my sister is truly, truly crazy, or the implication that Jax can really keep me out of jail.
Guilt stirs that I can even be thinking about me when there’s a body on the floor, but…
the weight that’s been crushing my chest lessens a little, and I let my knees lower.
“Really?” I ask.
She shrugs. “You’re welcome, by the way. Now can we clean this up? The adrenaline crash is really kicking my ass.”