Page 40 of Deacon

No. She had never been his. He hadn’t kept her long enough to earn the claim.

The thought struck jagged and wrong, blurring the memory at its edges. He felt the pull beneath it immediately, something stripping the night away from him, and anger followed fast.

No.

He forced himself deeper into the moment.

Lila laughed at something Matty had done, rolling her eyes while Jackson held on to the sound with everything he had. The lake moved quietly behind them, moonlight spreading silver across the water. He touched her face and watched her expression soften, the way it always had when she looked at him as though no one else in the world mattered.

That had been real.

He needed it to remain real.

Then a voice crossed the water.

“My brother would be so mad to find out he is here.”

Everything inside him stilled.

The lake remained beneath the moon. Grass bent around his boots, and Lila stood before him, young and warm and untouched by the years that followed. But the voice belonged somewhere else, threading through the memory like a fracture through glass.

Older. Softer. Worn down around the edges.

Lila.

He turned toward the sound before he could stop himself, and the entire night shivered.

“He was so angry when Jackson left.”

The name hit like a fist.

Jackson.

Not Deacon. Not Vice President or brother. Not the patched man who carried other men’s trust across his shoulders. Jackson was the name he wore when he still believed wanting Lila hard enough might allow him to fit inside a world built by people like Richard Morgan.

The lake dimmed.

He fought to hold it. Not yet.

Instead of retreating, he moved toward her voice, and the memory shifted into a football field beneath white lights. Matty stood beside him, younger and faster, grinning like life had yet to put its hands on him. Lila watched from the stands while pretending she wasn’t.

“They were inseparable for a while. Jackson and him. Always together. Always moving too fast.”

Her voice wrapped around him from outside the memory, carrying something that almost undid him.

Fondness remained there, incomplete and threaded through old hurt, but alive all the same.

He reached for it.

Pain answered.

It burst behind his eyes in a flash of white, though he had no eyes here. The pain belonged somewhere beyond the memory, inside the body waiting for him, where the dark had stopped being shelter and become distance instead.

Jackson folded against nothing, furious as the football field vanished beneath him.

He forced the lake back into place. Moonlight spilled over the water. Lila lay beneath him in the grass, whispering his name, and for one terrible, beautiful second, he had her again. He pressed his face to her throat and breathed her in, memorizing the shape of her against him as though effort alone might keep her from being taken twice.

Then the older Lila spoke again.