Chapter 208: Jake
Once the scream burns out of her, the sobs don’t. Her body keeps shaking—small at first, then those big, ugly tremors that roll through the bones. I know what I’m looking at; so does Reid. PTSD isn’t always the movie version. Sometimes it’s a quiet earthquake that just won’t stop.
I slide onto the mattress beside him. He shifts, lifting her legs so they spill across my thighs while her torso stays strapped to his chest, and now we’ve got her bracketed—weight shared, heat shared, breath shared. We talk her down the way you talk a storm down, slow and even, our voices overlapping so there’s no space for the dark to squeeze back in.
“Color?” I ask when her breathing stops hitching and starts ragged instead.
She drags in air, eyes glassy. “Red.”
We both sigh, not annoyed—just… hurting for her. I smooth a damp curl off her cheek; Reid tips his mouth to her hairline and keeps rocking. “We’ve been trying to give you time,” I say, keeping it low. “But we know something’s wrong.”
She looks down, shame rising like tide. It guts me.
“Why won’t you tell us what’s going on?” I ask, careful with the edges.
The question cracks something. She breaks—sobs that catch on themselves, breathless and frantic. Reid shushes; his thumb catches tears as fast as they fall. Between hiccups she gets it out, tiny and terrified: “I—I don’t want you to see me differently.”
“We wouldn’t,” I tell her, immediate, true in the marrow. Across her body I meet my brother’s eyes and see the same vow. Somewhere underneath, a smaller thought needles—why would we? Did she do something she thinks we can’t look at?—and I slam a door on it. “We’ve done bad things,” I add, honest as a blade. “You still like us.”
“It’s… hard to say.” Her voice frays.
“Try,” Reid murmurs, bending to brush a kiss into her hair, the softest insistence in the world.
She’s still shaking; the words come out tattered. “There’s someone… in the city… who’s not happy with me. Hasn’t been. For a while.”
“Why?” I ask, but she chokes on it, head shaking hard like she can shake the memory off. “Who?” I try, and that makes it worse—shudders that tighten every muscle like she’s looking at a face we can’t see.
Reid and I trade a look over the ridge of her shoulder, a silent agreement to tread like we’re walking her out over black ice.
“Did that person hurt you before?” I ask, softer than I’ve ever asked anything.
She nods. Once. Twice. No air behind it.
I feel Reid tense against me, every line going steel; when I glance up, his eyes aren’t brown anymore, they’re that flat, dangerous black I know too well. The same color lives in my chest. It doesn’t scare me. It should scare someone else.
“Is it the person who calls or texts sometimes?” I ask, and she nods again, frantic now.
The rambling starts, words tumbling on top of each other until they stop meaning anything: “I tried to fix it—I tried to be nice and to listen and to talk and to make it right—but he only got angrier and angrier and more violent and I didn’t know what to do and maybe I did the wrong thing and—”
“Hey,” I cut in, shushing, palm cupping her cheek, thumb anchoring the hinge of her jaw. “You’ll spiral if you keep going. We’ve got what we need for now.” I say it aloud for her and for us, so the room knows: someone in the city; a he; he’s still texting. That’s enough to move.
She startles like she remembered an appointment with fear. “It’s not my boyfriend,” she blurts. “I don’t have a boyfriend— I would never do that to you—”
“We know,” Reid says at the same time I do. “We know.”
Ex, I think, and the word tastes like rust.
“Does he know where you are?” I ask.
“No.” A fast shake.
“Can he find you?”
“No,” she says again, a little stronger.
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” The gentlest version of the question, even though the animal part of me wants to tear the world up by its roots.
“I’m sorry,” she cries, over and over, as if the apology is the only raft that floats. “I didn’t want to seem like a bad person for… for causing this—” The phrasing makes my head snap; beside me Reid flinches like someone swung at him. Causing this? What the hell did someone make her carry?
I don’t touch it. Not now. I tuck it away, slow and careful.
“I didn’t want to bring my past here,” she says, smaller, wrecked. “I just wanted to start over. I didn’t want anyone to look you up—what if he figured out where I am?”
“Would he be desperate enough to come to Northhaven?” Reid asks, that low, even tone he uses when he’s measuring the sea.
Silence stretches. She chews her lip the way she does when she’s choosing true over easy. “No,” she says at last. “I don’t think so.”
She swallows, tries to breathe like she’s been practicing. “I know it’s done and it’s in the past,” she whispers, “but I can’t help feeling… scared.”
“We know,” I say, and wrap my hand around her shin, just below the knee, the way that grounds her; Reid tightens the circle of his arms and presses his mouth to her hair again. We hold her while the tremors taper, we hold her when they flare back, we hold her until the only movement left is the soft rise and fall that says her body remembers how to be a body.
Across her, my brother’s eyes meet mine. The thought is the same in both of us, clean and cold and easy to live on: if he’s still calling and texting, it isn’t past, and it isn’t done. Not until we make it so.
It takes a long time for the tremors to burn out—thirty slow minutes of aftershocks rolling through her muscles, tears restarting in little surges, breath snagging and then catching again. We ride each one with her. Reid keeps his forearms locked around her torso, rocking the smallest bit like he’s lulling a storm; I cradle her calves and shins across my lap and stroke slow lines from knee to ankle, counting her through the breaths until the numbers start to land: in for four, hold for two, out for six. When she hiccups, I kiss the heel of her hand and press her palm flat to my chest so she can feel something steady that isn’t the ocean in her ribs.
Eventually the shakes thin to a faint flutter. The tears stop falling and just cling to her lashes. Her voice is wrecked and small when she apologizes again; I tell her there’s nothing to be sorry for, and Reid’s mouth finds her hairline like he’s signing his name there. She didn’t give us the whole story tonight—we can feel the shape of the parts still locked away—but she opened the door enough to show us what’s stalking it. There’s a man out there who thinks he gets to keep calling. He’s going to learn he doesn’t.
“Let’s try to sleep,” I say, softer than the lamp glow, and reach past her to dim the light. The room drops to a quiet gold; the AC hums like a lullaby.
Reid doesn’t loosen his hold. I can see it in his face—the thought of letting her out of his arms even to move beds twists something in him tight. “We’ll make it work,” I tell him, and pat the strip of mattress left on my side. “Three of us, one bed. Just for tonight.”
He nods once, grateful in that wordless way he is. We choreograph it carefully: I slide back against the headboard and lift the duvet; he shifts with her cradled to his chest and lowers both of them into the middle. I roll in behind her and fit my chest to her spine, my arm curving over the top to meet his where it bands her ribs. We become a bracket—his heat at her front, mine at her back, our hands finding each other across her sternum like a clasp.
“Color?” I murmur into her hair, not because we’re going anywhere, just because the question steadies us all.
“Yellow,” she whispers, then after a breath that goes down clean, “Green.”
“Good,” Reid says against her temple. “Sleep.”
We don’t leave space for the dark to creep back in. I tuck my thigh under hers so she can’t slide into the cold spot; Reid angles his chin into her crown and hums something tuneless that I’ve only ever heard when he’s holding broken things together. Her breathing lengthens, then evens; the trembling fades to the smallest shiver and then disappears.
I lie there in the dim, feeling the weight of them—his forearm heavy over mine, her heartbeat easing under our thumbs—and let the purpose settle like ballast. We are in her life so she never has to carry this alone again. Whatever’s still unsaid can take its time; whatever bastard in the city thinks he still has a claim can try the door and find us instead.
Her exhale brushes my wrist. Reid’s grip tightens once in a wordless promise and then loosens as sleep pulls at him. I breathe in the familiar, ridiculous mix of vanilla, citrus cleaner, and her skin, and let my eyes close with my arm locked across both of them, the three of us sandwiched into a single, stubborn answer.
We fall asleep like that—stitched together, holding on, giving the night nothing to work with.