FUCK.
I find my father’s eyes, wide and disbelieving but somehow still flaring with anger, as he gasps. I have no pity to offer him, no love, or despair. All I have in me is the cold detachment he’s honed in me when faced with death. He raised an enforcer, a cleaner, a fucking employee, not a son to mourn him. For a second, he seems to realize this, as I don’t place my hands on his wounds, as I don’t try to stop the bleeding. For just a second, there’s regret. And for just a second, my chest aches for thefather I never had. The moment stretches between us until I’m pulled from the delusion.
“Jax…?” Caleb whispers, and I look up.
He’s still at the table, frozen, eyes locked on James, who’s clutching his chest in silent resignation, unable to speak.
“Don’t look,” I say and stand, angling my body to block his view. The gurgles are soft behind me, and I tense. Rolling my shoulders to try to shake it off, I broaden like a shield between the two.
“Is he…? We have to call—” Caleb starts digging in his pockets.
“Don’t,” I say, and he freezes.
“But…”
I shake my head. “Don’t.”
He blinks, and tears roll over his cheeks. I swallow against the tightness in my throat because, no matter what James was, Caleb is still losing a father right in front of him. Squeezing my eyes shut, I grit my teeth and wait while the breaths behind me die out. It only takes seconds, but it feels like an eternity.
When I open again, I find that Nix is still holding the gun, now trained on me as I stand in the way of her and James.
I wrench it out of her grasp with more force than necessary. Her grip had gone limp, the adrenaline leaving her sometime in the seconds it took to listen to a man die. What she did to Marshal was self-defense, this was cold-blooded murder. Even if she recovers, she’ll never be the same.
I shove the gun in my waistband and scrub my hands down my face. “Fuck.”
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.
Whatevenhappened?! 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 youthinking?” 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 dothat!”
“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 madeMarshal 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.”
