Nick’s voice reverberated from far away—muffled—as if speaking under water.
“Sir?”
Jack stared at the swirling text on the page. Detached words floating. Muscles too heavy to move. Eyes too still to blink. He sat in a sort of paralysis, book in hand, clothed, but he wasn’t there. Just his mind. His ceaseless mind and the echoes of her screams that never faded.
“Jack, you have a phone call.”
Slowly, he looked up at Nick, staring from the doorway of his study, and frowned. “How long have you been standing there?”
Concern flashed in his eyes. He lifted the phone to his ear. “Mr. Thorne will have to call you back.” He clicked off the phone and sighed. “Jack, maybe you should talk to someone.”
He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted to talk to her.
Two weeks dissolved like smoke. Fourteen days of sitting in the same chair, in the same study, reading the same page of a book he couldn’t absorb. The fire had long since gone cold. Grey ash settled over the hearth like the residue of something cremated. His bourbon sat untouched on the side table, the amber liquid catching what little light bled through the curtains he refused to open.
He was a master of secrets. A manipulator. A choreographing maestro who conducted nightmares for some and wet dreams for others. A sick, twisted fuck who played jazz over people’s screams. A blemish. A lie. A coward who hid behind masks and balconies.
Jack learned early in life, he could scream until his throat bled and no savior would come. For years, the chancellor’s servants moved like ghosts, deaf and blind to the suffering of a child.
So he learned to suffocate hope before it could breathe.
Learned to live without expectation the way a body learns to live without a limb.
Learned not to reach for what wasn’t there.
Until her.
She crawled under his skin and rearranged every defense he spent decades constructing. Dismantled him with the efficiency of someone who didn’t know her own power, and when the dust settled, when she finally saw the monster he warned her of, none of it mattered.
Nick lingered in the doorway, backlit by the hall. His posture carried the same patient authority it always had.
“Jack—”
“Leave me alone.”
Nick stepped into the study with quiet defiance. Not the obedient retreat of a man following orders. “Jack. Please.” His voice roughened at the edges. “You can talk to me.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Nick lowered himself into the leather chair across from Jack’s desk without waiting for permission. His hands settled on the armrests, fingers loose. “I know you better than anyone, Jack.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, resembling the tutor who once sat on the floor, teaching a brutalized boy the names of constellations so he’d have something beautiful to hold when the dark pressed in. “I’ve watched you defeat giants.” His voice carried the low, measured weight of a man choosing each word carefully. “Even as a boy, you stood up to those twice your size. What makes you think you can’t conquer this?”
Jack’s throat constricted. The silence that followed was heavy enough to bruise.
Something shifted behind his sternum, cracking wider under the pressure of Nick’s faith.
His mouth opened. Closed. The muscles in his jaw trembled. “I can’t face her.”
Nick didn’t move. Didn’t rush to fill the silence with comfort or platitudes.
“Then you wait. The people in this world that love you will find you, Jack.”
“She doesn’t love me.”
Nick was quiet for a long time. Then he rose from the chair.
He paused with his hand on the frame. “I’ll hold your calls.”
Days bled into one another. Grey mornings into dreary afternoons into darker nights.
