JAX
Something was wrong.
It was more than a feeling, more than a constant sense of foreboding. It was like missing a step and free-falling, like gravity itself had turned on me and I was scrambling to keep upright.
Nate was shot.
Madoc and Olivia had gone silent.
There was blood on my hands and salt on my tongue and in my eyes. Everything was burning.
“Hold him still,” Ryle hissed in frustration as he battled a delirious Nate spread out on the dining room table. I moved on autopilot, pinning his torso down, cupping his head in the crook of my arm. His eyes found mine feverishly, wild and white, like the man I’d killed earlier.
Was this my karma?
He needs you.
Right.
I forced myself back to the present. My hands softened on Nate’s jaw, finding his pulse hammering erratically beneath it. “Hey, you’re good. You hear me?” My voice was rough as shit. Not exactly the most comforting sound.
Even so, Nate’s body softened.
Zola hovered at his other side, holding his hand and trying not to cry.
She was losing the battle. Meanwhile, Callum and Ryle were patching him up as best they could with what they had on hand.
The bullet had punctured muscle and bone, but nothing vital.
It was the shock and infection that worried us, plus whatever else the idiot had been funneling into his body lately.
“I better have a cool scar,” Nate said weakly.
Zola smacked his chest. “You fucker.”
“Ow,” he whined, reaching up with his free hand to nurse his pec. “I’m wounded here. Be nice to me.”
“I hate you,” Zola said, her voice breaking. Nate fell silent, watching her. The rest of us pointedly ignored the tension between them, the wordless grief of nearly losing each other.
The silence in my ears was deafening.
Ryle appeared in front of me. “Your turn.”
I shoved him away with a scowl. “I’m fine.”
“Nope. We’re not doing that anymore.” Ryle glared at me. The expression was so odd on his usually grinning face that I found myself wanting to smile. The weak imitation made Ryle glare harder. “Just accept my mother-henning, asshole. It won’t kill you.”
So I gave him my arm and watched him clean and bandage the wound with too much aggression. Still, I didn’t complain, and once we were all in reasonable condition (i.e., not bleeding out on the nice hardwood floors), it was time to bounce.
Rounding up the girls was easy. They were lifeless, puppets pulled on strings, obedient in a way that made my heart hurt. It was the sheer number of them that proved challenging. Callum did a head count, and the first girl we’d rescued continued to howl and plead for her sister still on the boat.
Madoc can handle it.
The assurance did nothing to soothe the pit of snakes in my belly.
Moving such a large group through the mansion and back into the rainforest was slow going. Ryle and I carried Nate between us, pausing often to adjust him or check his condition. He was pale but still a whiny bitch, so I knew he wasn’t both boots in the grave yet.
Time was continuing to rush away from us. I crunched the numbers in my head. Five hours until our boat returns. Then two hours across the sea to the mainland. We’d take the girls, hand them over to the authorities. Then we’d run.
The question was: Where the hell did we go?
It made sense to lie low for a while. Even though we’d secured the painting, Dr. Z wouldn’t be thrilled when word got out that Salvadore had been exposed.
He’d immediately look at us, and the Compound was the first place he’d search.
Thankfully, I’d had the foresight to start stashing away large wads of cash just in case things went awry.
I had a few reliable contacts who could give us new identities.
We’d have to split up for a while, change our appearances, set up new lives somewhere far off the grid.
Even then, it was unlikely any of us would make it to the end of the year. Dr. Z didn’t keep heroes, and if this job proved anything, it was that he was a damn spiteful bastard.
As if hearing my thoughts, Ryle glanced over at me in the dark. “I hear Haiti is nice this time of year.”
Nate groaned. “No more islands.”
“Agreed.” I stumbled over a thick bramble. My ankle rolled, and pain lanced up my calf. “No more fucking islands.”
The girls moved in a single file in front of us, Zola leading at the front, Callum’s thick silhouette guiding from the rear.
“Okay, well. Alaska is also nice.”
“Too cold, dude,” Nate whined.
“But puffins.”
“I’m not freezing my balls off for some bootleg penguins.”
“I bet Madoc would love it,” Ryle said, and I felt them both glance at me slyly. I very deliberately didn’t look back at them. “All that nature and open air. I mean, we’d lose him once the local wolf pack adopted him.”
“We could always make fur coats from the sick ones,” Nate piled on.
“You’re a fucking monster.”
The two of them devolved into arguing, the sound soothing and familiar. I breathed properly for what felt like the first time in days.
The relief was short-lived.
There was a vibration in my back pocket.
I stumbled again, catching myself, the two of them laughing at me.
I wasn’t laughing. I could feel the shape of it, the implication weighing heavily on my every step.
There was a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow down.
It had been there for hours, choking me with unspoken grief.
I saw the opportunity in the dip ahead, between the trees. Pretending to stumble on my rolled ankle, I hissed and bent down, relying on Ryle to hold Nate steady.
“Jesus, you good, man?” Nate asked. “You sneak a few beers while my back was turned or what?”
The knife slipped out of my boot and into my palm. “Let’s rest up ahead for a minute.”
“You sure? What about Callum and Zola?”
Callum, my stoic giant, didn’t falter, didn’t look back, already knowing what I was about to do.
“He’ll reach the beach and protect the girls. We won’t be long.” My voice was steady. My pulse was not. We came to the dip and carefully lowered Nate to a nearby rock, where he sagged in on himself. While Ryle fussed, I stalked a quick path around the clearing, mentally gearing up.
Then I stopped, took a beat. “Ryle?” I called.
“Yeah?” He wandered over.
As soon as he was within my reach, I shoved him hard against the tree and pinned my knife to his throat.
“What the fuck?” Nate started to rise, wincing, but I snapped at him over my shoulder.
“Stay out of it.”
Ryle went completely slack against me, completely unresistant. His wide eyes swam over my face, confused and hurt and too fucking convincing.
Had I really been so blind this whole time?
“Tell me everything,” I growled at him. “Who are you working for?”
“What!?” His voice was a squeak. “You, Jax. Only you.” His hand came up, his fingers sweaty and nervous as they wrapped around my wrist. He didn’t try to pull the knife away. “What’s going on?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know, I swear.”
“Jax.” Nate’s voice was tinged with unease. “What did you find?”
I didn’t loosen my grip. The knife was sharp, beads of blood already welling around the tip. I could see his pulse hammering beneath his skin. “You have five seconds,” I warned him. “You will tell me everything. Starting with the burner phone.”
Ryle’s eyes bugged. “What burner phone?”
With my free hand, I pulled out the cursed device from my pocket. Ryle gawked at it, not in panic but in stark disbelief, like I was presenting him with a dead fish. “This yours?”
“No,” he said, face furrowing in confusion. “No, Jax. I swear.”
I pressed the button on the side, illuminating his pale face. His eyes whizzed over the message thread.
14:01: is the package secured?
14:03: ?
“Funny,” I said humorlessly as he blanched under my knife. “Can you guess what the passcode was?”
“Jax, plea—”
“It was the same combination to the safe.”
Ryle was shaking. Sweat dripped down his temples, catching fragments of moonlight where it siphoned through the overhead canopy.
I looked at him, and for a moment all I saw was my kid brother—the same kid who rescued old cats and injured birds, who made us watch Christmas movies all year round, who insisted on eating at the dining table like a real family because he’d never had one, because that was all he’d ever wanted.
Family.
My chest tightened. I blamed myself as much as him. I should’ve seen it earlier—I should’ve protected him from whatever manipulative influence had got to him. Ryle was impressionable. He was eager to please, more eager to prove himself.
He’d betrayed me, but in a way, I’d betrayed him.
I sucked in a brutal breath, my throat working around the grisly lump. “Five,” I warned.
Ryle just stared at me.
“Four.”
He stared and stared, and then his eyes filled with tears and his mouth opened, but there was no sound.
“Three.”
“Where,” he choked, then wet his lips. “Where did you find it, Jax?”
“Your backpack.”
Ryle shuddered, like that was the last thing he wanted to hear. He looked down, tears clinging to his lashes. “I swapped out my pack before we left the motel,” he said in a quiet, wounded voice. “I carried the tech instead.”
I stared at him, processing that. “Then who carried your pack?”
Something clicked behind me.
My spine stiffened before my brain made the connection between the sound and the immediate danger.
Slowly, I loosened my grip on the knife and turned, keeping it slotted in my palm.
With each second that went by, a new crack opened, the foundations of everything I knew becoming unreliable beneath me.
Nate didn’t smile as he leveled the gun at me.
There was no hint of amusement or warmth on his face as he aimed it. My heart splintered, and I moved on autopilot, taking a purposeful step in front of a wide-eyed Ryle. The knife weighed like an anvil in my hand. But the betrayal sat heavier.
“Why?” I gritted out. Salt bled onto my tongue. I’d bitten something, or maybe I was coming undone at the seams, unraveling like a frayed crash test dummy.
Not him, my mind pleaded.
Nate’s arm shook. His face was pale and anguished. “Fuck,” he moaned. “Fuck, fuck.”
“It’s not—it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said in a rush, the gun quivering at my face. “I didn’t know about the girls, Jax. I didn’t know about the goddamn tunnels, what they were…” He swallowed thickly. “I didn’t know.”
I said nothing.
Behind me, Ryle pressed a hand to my back, a subtle reassurance. My protective instincts roared. “Put the gun down, Scooby.” I didn’t recognize my own voice.
Nate blanched and jerked the gun downwards. “I’m not going to shoot you. I would never—I’m just wigging out.”
I’d seen him wigged out before. I’d seen him high and miserable and obnoxious. But I’d never seen him like this.
Never so broken.
Without a gun at my face, the words came easier. “What did you know?”
“I knew about the safe,” he said, looking down, avoiding my eye. “I swear, it wasn’t—it wasn’t planned or anything. Not the way you think.”
“You don’t want to know what I think.”
He flinched. His eyes darted up, dark and haunted. I thought Ryle had been the weakest link, but I was wrong. It was him.
“One of Dr. Z’s men contacted me after the last job,” Nate said quietly, defeated. “He told me that Dr. Z was unhappy, that he was looking to eliminate us. If I didn’t—if we didn’t deliver—he would make the call. Unless I did what he wanted.”
My jaw clenched. “What did he want?”
“He wanted me to destroy whatever was in the safe.”
Ryle ghosted up beside me. “You mean that weird book?”
“Yeah,” Nate whispered. “You can guess why.”
It took a minute, and then it clicked. My fists clenched, raw knuckles stinging. “He’s in the book, isn’t he?”
Slowly, Nate nodded.
“This was never about the painting,” I said in a hoarse voice. “This whole job has been a goddamn ruse from the beginning.”
My mind flashed to Olivia, the giant question mark that surrounded her. The coward in me wanted to remain oblivious. I didn’t want to know.
Unlocking my jaw, I grunted out: “Was Olivia in on it?”
Nate made a face, and my fucking heart lurched into hyperspace, before he shook his head. “No. She’s just a weird coincidence. She was never supposed to be here.”
Madoc didn’t believe in coincidences. Neither did I.
“I’m sorry,” Nate said, sniffing. “I’m so fucking sorry, Jax.”
I’d heard enough pointless apologies to last a lifetime. “Is this why you’ve been using?”
Nate nodded, forehead scrunching. “I don’t know how to live with myself,” he croaked. “It was just easier to numb everything, to stop feeling for a while.” He shifted, staring down again. “I never wanted to betray you, Jax, I swear. Any of you. I just—he didn’t give me a choice.”
A harsh exhale left me. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
He looked up glumly. “I know.”
I stepped forward, ignoring the gun, and reached for his collar, giving him a rough shake. His teeth clicked, and he winced. “Why, in all fuck, didn’t you tell me?” I growled at him.
His eyes widened. “I couldn’t.”
“Jesus.” I scrubbed the back of my hand over my face. The constant surge and dip of adrenaline was making me woozy.
“I’m sorry,” Nate said again.
“Shut the fuck up.”
He slumped against me, looking resigned to whatever punishment I inflicted on him. For a second, I considered it. The prick more than deserved it. But he wouldn’t fight back, and the idea of breaking him while he stood there, already broken, made me hesitate.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to murder the fucker later.
I shoved him hard, and he stumbled back awkwardly, clutching his side. The gun dropped to the ground between us. Quickly, Ryle dipped around and scooped it up.
I inhaled sharply. “You’re out,” I said.
Nate went rigid. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Jax, please—”
“The second we return to the mainland, you’re on your own.”
Nate’s knees buckled, and he went down, hunching over on himself. His face contorted in agony. “Just shoot me,” he spat. “I’m nothing without the crew. I’ve got no one, Jax. You know that. Please, please.”
“You had a choice.” My voice cracked, but I forced the words out. “You could’ve told me the truth. We could’ve handled it together. You chose wrong.” The lump in my throat swelled, choking me. “You don’t betray family.”
“Jax.” He moaned my name like a hymn.
“Good luck, Nathanial.” He flinched at the use of his full name, which felt just as wrong and tacky on my tongue. “I never want to see you again.”
And then, because I needed some outlet, some way to ease the rupturing in my body, I smashed my fist into his face. He went down easily, crumpled on the dirt. Ryle made a pained noise but didn’t move, remaining loyal by my side. I needed that. Now more than ever.
We stared down at our lost brother for a long moment.
When I moved, it was like wading through wet cement. My body resisted, but my mind was quiet. I walked out of the clearing and didn’t look back.