11
Deacon
The dark was never truly empty.
That had been its first lie.
At the beginning, it felt like peace, deep and undemanding. No blood or brothers. No roads, choices, or mornings that might reveal what had broken while he slept. It wrapped around him, warm and soundless, carrying him wherever it wanted, and because pain had yet to find him there, he let it.
Then the memories began.
They never brought the ugly ones first. The dark knew better than that. It offered him the pieces he would reach for.
Lila laughing with her head tipped back, sunlight caught in her hair and her eyes bright with a recklessness she never knew was killing him.
Matty running his mouth in the driveway while Jackson leaned against his bike and pretended to listen, waiting for Lila to come outside.
Stadium lights over worn grass. Summer air thick with gasoline and the sound of her saying his name as though it belonged in her mouth.
That was the trick.
The dark gave him her, so he stayed.
Maybe stayed wasn’t the right word. He sank into it.
Circled through it. Haunted the same places until the memories became more solid than whatever waited beyond them.
He returned to the nights when Lila was young and close, looking at him as though he might be something more than a mistake waiting to happen.
Somewhere beneath it all, he knew something was wrong.
The knowledge reached him in sharp flashes, light slipping beneath a door in a room that should have had none. Sound traveled toward him as though through deep water, followed by pain too distant to name but close enough to promise its return.
Whenever it happened, Jackson shoved harder toward the memories.
Toward Lila.
The truth beyond them carried machines and metal, blood and grief.
It carried the taste of something left unfinished, and he wanted no part of it.
He wanted the clean brutality of loving her before he ruined everything.
He wanted their final night by the lake, grass crushed beneath them and her breath against his throat, the stunned wonder in her face when she trusted him with something sacred.
That was where he always tried to go.
Sometimes he found her at sixteen, barefoot in the yard with her hands planted on her hips, ordering him and Matty to stop trying to kill each other during a game of tackle football with no equipment.
Other times, she was seventeen and standing too close in the Morgan kitchen after one of Richard’s barbecues, her eyes lifted toward his while adults laughed outside and the world narrowed to the inch of air between them.
Sometimes, the lake opened for him.
That was the memory he wanted most, the one he would have carved into his bones if pain were the price of keeping it.
He pushed toward it now, through the dark and the strange tearing sensation that came more often lately, through the pressure of something trying to pull him backward.
The memory formed gradually. Warm air settled against his skin.
Summer filled his lungs with grass, lake water, and the faint sweetness of her.
Then Lila appeared in his arms, younger than the ache inside him but no less real.
His girl.
No. She had never been his. He hadn’t kept her long enough to earn the claim.
The thought struck jagged and wrong, blurring the memory at its edges. He felt the pull beneath it immediately, something stripping the night away from him, and anger followed fast.
No.
He forced himself deeper into the moment.
Lila laughed at something Matty had done, rolling her eyes while Jackson held on to the sound with everything he had.
The lake moved quietly behind them, moonlight spreading silver across the water.
He touched her face and watched her expression soften, the way it always had when she looked at him as though no one else in the world mattered.
That had been real.
He needed it to remain real.
Then a voice crossed the water.
“My brother would be so mad to find out he is here.”
Everything inside him stilled.
The lake remained beneath the moon. Grass bent around his boots, and Lila stood before him, young and warm and untouched by the years that followed. But the voice belonged somewhere else, threading through the memory like a fracture through glass.
Older. Softer. Worn down around the edges.
Lila.
He turned toward the sound before he could stop himself, and the entire night shivered.
“He was so angry when Jackson left.”
The name hit like a fist.
Jackson.
Not Deacon. Not Vice President or brother. Not the patched man who carried other men’s trust across his shoulders. Jackson was the name he wore when he still believed wanting Lila hard enough might allow him to fit inside a world built by people like Richard Morgan.
The lake dimmed.
He fought to hold it. Not yet.
Instead of retreating, he moved toward her voice, and the memory shifted into a football field beneath white lights. Matty stood beside him, younger and faster, grinning like life had yet to put its hands on him. Lila watched from the stands while pretending she wasn’t.
“They were inseparable for a while. Jackson and him. Always together. Always moving too fast.”
Her voice wrapped around him from outside the memory, carrying something that almost undid him.
Fondness remained there, incomplete and threaded through old hurt, but alive all the same.
He reached for it.
Pain answered.
It burst behind his eyes in a flash of white, though he had no eyes here. The pain belonged somewhere beyond the memory, inside the body waiting for him, where the dark had stopped being shelter and become distance instead.
Jackson folded against nothing, furious as the football field vanished beneath him.
He forced the lake back into place. Moonlight spilled over the water.
Lila lay beneath him in the grass, whispering his name, and for one terrible, beautiful second, he had her again.
He pressed his face to her throat and breathed her in, memorizing the shape of her against him as though effort alone might keep her from being taken twice.
Then the older Lila spoke again.
“They came from such different places.”
The memory splintered around him.
A porch flashed into a yard, then the inside of Richard Morgan’s house.
He saw the narrow side hall where Lila once looked at him like she already knew what he was fighting to hide.
The lake returned for an instant, carrying her breath against his throat and the trembling courage with which she chose him.
Every image appeared too quickly and shattered before he could hold it.
“Him from the club. Matty and I from a house where my dad wore a badge and believed rules fixed everything.”
Jackson tried to answer. He wanted to tell her he had always understood, and that understanding had been the problem.
He took her home after the lake believing that maybe wanting something and having it could belong to the same life.
Then he returned to the clubhouse and heard enough to realize Richard Morgan had tangled himself in things that made Lila impossible for him from that night forward.
If Jackson stayed, she would fight for him.
Eventually, fighting for him would force her to see too much.
No sound escaped him.
The dark shifted beneath his feet while the memory continued tearing apart.
“Two worlds that never stopped rubbing wrong.”
Something inside him lurched.
A twitch followed, small and distant yet impossibly close. His hand seemed to belong to a body beyond the dark, held there by someone warm.
Lila.
The woman, not the girl inside the memory.
He recognized the difference now, and the recognition made everything worse.
She continued talking about football and Matty, girls in the stands and boys moving too fast for their own good. Her words should have held the memories together. Instead, her voice felt wrong in a way that turned his stomach.
Too close. Too real.
This wasn’t the Lila by the lake or the girl watching from the bleachers. This was Lila now, somewhere beside him when she had no reason to be there.
Unless she wasn’t.
Perhaps his mind had stolen her voice to keep him from noticing the dark splitting beneath him. He tried to believe that, but each word dragged him closer to something bright and merciless beyond the memory.
His breathing changed.
He felt the hitch and the rough pull of a body remembering it possessed lungs.
He hated it.
Jackson wanted the lake. He wanted the night she loved him, when he had been weak enough to accept what she offered and selfish enough to believe wanting might create a future. He wanted the dark to leave him there.
“You hearin’ me, Jacks?”
Her voice came sharp and close.
Everything stopped.
No football field or lake. Only her voice, the dark, and the force pulling him toward both.
Jacks.
The name reached deeper than Jackson. It found the boy she knew before the world put its hands on him, the one who still believed he might stand near her without destroying everything she loved.
He moved toward it before he could stop himself.
Light flared ahead.
This wasn’t moonlight or the soft glow from the Morgan porch. It was hospital light, machine light, the harsh brightness of pain waiting for him.
Jackson recoiled, and the dark surged around him as though protecting its claim. For one moment, it worked. Grass returned beneath his hands. Water moved behind him, and Lila laughed somewhere just ahead.
He lunged toward her, desperate now.
She was already fading.
The younger version of Lila blurred first, her face slipping in and out of focus. The lake flattened into a mechanical hum, and the stars fractured into cold white points, too bright and steady to belong to any sky.
“No.”
The word tore through him as both plea and threat.
The dark gave him one final fragment.
Lila at eighteen, her eyes wet and brave, her mouth trembling around words too quiet to possess the power they carried.
I love you.
The memory struck hard enough to drop him.
He had loved her too.
That was the truth he never outran. War hadn’t erased it. Roads, patches, violence, and time had only buried it beneath other names.
He loved her, and it hadn’t been enough to make him stay.
Maybe loving her had been the reason he left.
The truth pulsed through the dark like a wound tearing open.
Then her voice returned from the other side, softer now, as though she spoke more to herself than to him.
“That’s enough. No more pushing.”
No.
He wanted her to continue. Even if her voice dragged him toward pain, he wanted it because it was real. After seventeen years of silence, he couldn’t bear losing the sound of her now that he had found it again.
Don’t go.
The thought tore through him so violently that he almost believed she might hear it.
Jackson reached toward her.
This time, the light caught him before he could retreat.
It split the darkness in a blinding seam, and sound rushed through behind it. Machines beeped. Air hissed. His body returned in pieces, carrying the deep animal ache of flesh broken hard and healing slowly.
Grief arrived with it.
Reality told him the memories were finished. They weren’t gone. They would never be gone. But the lake no longer waited around him. Twenty was seventeen years behind him, and the girl he loved had lived an entire life without him. She had become a woman he no longer knew how to reach.
Rage burned through him, trapped inside a body that still refused to answer.
He tried once more to force the memory back, searching for grass beneath his palms and Lila’s laugh instead of the machines. For one flicker, the night almost returned.
Then pain struck with everything it had.
It tore through his chest and side, splitting across his skull until the memory disintegrated around him.
The darkness remained, but its purpose had changed. It no longer offered refuge or a place to hide. It had become a threshold, and something waited on the other side, pulling with steady hands.
Lila.
Her voice. Her touch. The sorrow she had carried all these years.
Come back.
The words held no trace of memory. They felt like command and prayer, the last thing in the world he had any right to want and the one thing he wanted anyway.
Jackson turned toward her, and wanting Lila became stronger than wanting the dark. He wanted out.