I put the key in.
Take it out.
I showed up here as Nova Shaw every single day. Did the work. Kept my head down. Built something clean with my own hands.
And it still doesn’t matter, because the piece is still out there. Griffin knows. Katarina is his sister. Jax is standing in the middle of a career decision that could change everything, and I’m sitting in the Cyclones parking lot with the truth sittingheavy in my lap like something I should have handed over already.
I know I have to tell him, but not like this.
Not today, when the Enforcers are already in his head. Not when telling him would turn his decision into my confession. Not when the only clean thing I managed to give him was ownership of something I once helped take away.
One more day.
The lie is small enough to fit behind my teeth.
That’s what scares me most.
Chapter twenty-two
Jax
Idon’thaveaspeech.
Never have.
I’ve got six flights of stairs in socks.
One thing that’s true. If she hears it and walks away, that’s her choice. But I’m not letting the elevator doors close on it.
She’s still in the lobby when I get there.
Stopped just past the doors. Like she got outside and her feet had a different opinion about what came next.
I stop.
She turns around.
We look at each other.
“I didn’t tell you,” I say, “because if I said it out loud it became a real thing I had to decide.”
She waits.
“And?”
“I don’t want to go back.”
Quiet.
Florida afternoon doing its thing outside. The lobby empty around us. Her with her bag on her shoulder and her camera and everything she carries everywhere she goes.
“That’s about the team,” she says.
I look at her.
“It’s not only about the team.”
I say it once. She heard it.
