“He will be,” Ryker said, his voice firm. Certain. Like he could will it into existence. “Soon.”
Blake nodded once. Jace stared into the fire, his expression unreadable but intense. We all felt it—the Knox-shaped hole in our group. The brother, the friend, the founding member of the Sinners and Saints, who’d been locked away for over a decade for a crime none of us—save for maybe Ryker—fully understood.
“When he gets out,” Scarlett said quietly, “we’re throwing him the biggest party this town has ever seen.”
“With the worst possible music,” Axel added.
“And enough food to feed an army,” Tessa agreed.
“I’ll bake him a cake,” I offered. “A good one. Not the one Rainbow ate.”
Rainbow’s tail thumped against Axel’s leg like she knew we were talking about her.
The weight of the moment settled over us—this strange, beautiful family we’d built from broken pieces and second chances. We were all rooting for Knox. All waiting for him.
Jace cleared his throat, shifting forward slightly. “So, Faith, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”
I blinked, surprised by the sudden shift. The firelight played across his features, making him look every bit the serious CEO. “What about?”
“About the safe house you opened for the aged-out foster kids.”
My heart fluttered. The safe house was my baby. My purpose. The thing that made me feel like maybe I could take all the garbage from my past and turn it into something good.
I needed to see the kids again, soon, if only to wrap my arms around them and remind myself that I wasn’t going to be locked in prison, missing them forever.
“What about it?”
“Jace is a savvy businessman with basically unlimited capital,” Ryker explained, his hand moving to rest on my knee. A grounding touch. “And Axel, despite being a wiseass, runs a company that helps rehabilitate people coming out of the prison system.”
Axel shrugged, his fingers still buried in Rainbow’s fur. “I help ex-cons reintegrate into society. When I heard about your safe house, I wanted in. I’d like to expand my operations to include the foster care system. Open safe houses across the country. Rehabilitation services, counseling, addiction support, and more. Everything we offer to former inmates, we could extend to foster kids aging out of the system. Tailor it to their specific needs.”
I couldn’t breathe.
The words hit me like thunder in a beautiful rainstorm. The good kind. The kind that knocked the air from your lungs because you couldn’t believe what you were hearing.
For over a year, I’d been one girl with one house and three kids I talked to every single day. Three kids who called me when they were scared, when they couldn’t sleep, when the world felt too bigand too cruel. Three kids who deserved so much more than I could give them on my own.
And now …
Now Axel was talking about safe houses across the country.
“We’d like to call it The House of Faith,” Jace added quietly, his eyes meeting mine across the fire.
My throat closed up. My eyes burned.
The House of Faith. Not just my house. Not just my small corner of the world, where I tried to make a difference for three kids. But houses. Plural. Everywhere. A legacy. A movement. A chance for hundreds—maybe thousands—of kids who’d been forgotten by the system to have a soft place to land.
“You have no idea what this means to me,” I whispered, my voice cracking on the last word. Ryker’s arm tightened around me, holding me together.
Because they couldn’t possibly understand. They came from families—complicated families, sure, but families, nonetheless. They had people who loved them, who claimed them, who would burn the world down for them.
I’d had no one. Blake had no one.
Until we had them.
And now, they were offering to take the one good thing I’d built and multiply it across the country. To take my small act of defiance against a system that had failed so many of us and turn it into something that could actually change lives.
I pressed my hand to my mouth, trying to hold back the sob that wanted to escape.
