Chapter 307 - 0307: You’re Losing Your Cool

Chapter 307: Chapter 0307: You’re Losing Your Cool

Jaxx’s Point Of View

The air in the warehouse tasted like rust and old oil, a thick, stagnant soup that clung to the back of my throat and wouldn’t let go. It was three in the morning, the hour when the rest of the world was dreaming of normalcy, of clean sheets and quiet rooms, of lives untouched by blood.

But here, under the flickering, buzzing hum of a single overhead bulb, reality was a lot sharper. And a lot bloodier. My boots crunched on the grit of the concrete floor. The sound was deafening in the heavy silence, each step an announcement of what was coming.

As I moved toward the center of the room, my men parted like waves, their faces masks of disciplined shadow. They knew the mood I was in. They’d learned to read the signs over the years... the set of my jaw, the deliberate slowness of my movements, the way silence stretched tighter around me than any shout ever could.

They knew that for the last seven days, I hadn’t been a man; I’d been a ticking time bomb with a very short fuse, and someone was about to pay the price for lighting it.

I stopped in front of the chair. Elias was already trembling, the metal frame of the seat rattling against the floor in a pathetic rhythm. He was a mid-level runner who thought he could play in the big leagues, who thought he could steal from me and walk away breathing. Looking at him now... soft hands, soft belly, the kind of man who’d never bled for anything in his life, I almost pitied him. Almost.

"Where’s the manifest?" I asked, my voice flat, emotionless, the kind of calm that preceded violence.

Elias swallowed, a hard click in his throat. Sweat had plastered his thinning hair to his forehead, and I could smell the fear rolling off him in waves, sour and sharp, the oldest scent in the world.

"I... I told you, Boss. The feds, they hit the drop. It’s gone. I don’t know where the paperwork - "

I didn’t let him finish. I reached into the leather roll on the table and pulled out a small, heavy hunting knife, its blade catching the weak light. I didn’t go for a vital organ. I went for the thigh. I drove the blade in deep, feeling the resistance of muscle and tissue, and before he could even scream, I twisted it forty-five degrees. The sound he made was inhuman... a wet, gurgling shriek that echoed off the high rafters and seemed to hang in the air like smoke.

"Wrong answer," I whispered, leaning in so close I could see the burst capillaries in his eyes, the way his pupils had dilated to black pools of terror. "Let’s try again. The manifest, Elias. Who has it?"

"I don’t... Please! I swear on my life!" His words came out in gasps, broken by sobs.

Stab.

This time it was the other leg. I felt the blade hit bone, and I gave it a slow, agonizing turn, watching his face contort. Blood began to pool on the concrete, dark and steaming in the cold air. Elias was sobbing now, his head lolling back, his body twitching in a rhythmic, pathetic dance of agony.

Part of me... the part that still remembered being human, felt nothing. That part had died seven days ago, the moment Elena looked at me like I was a monster. I searched myself for guilt, for hesitation, for anything resembling the man I used to be before that night. I found only the steady, patient machinery of purpose.

"Don’t lie," I whispered, almost gently. "It’s insulting to both of us."

I pressed the tip of the blade into the soft meat of his shoulder, just below the collarbone. I didn’t stab this time. I moved with the precision of a jeweler, making a slow, deliberate three-inch track. The skin parted like silk under a razor. Red blossomed, hot and vibrant, staining his white undershirt in an expanding bloom.

"Agh! God! Stop!" Elias gasped, his body jerking against the zip-ties hard enough to cut into his wrists. "Please!"

I pulled the blade back and looked at it, a single bead of his life clinging to the edge, catching the light like a ruby. There was something almost meditative about it, the way blood caught light the same way it did in every other century, every other war.

"You’re making this very difficult for yourself," I said, my voice steady, almost conversational, as if we were discussing the weather. I withdrew the knife, the sound of the steel sliding out of his flesh making even my seasoned guards shift their weight. "You want to keep your fingers? Or should we move to the hands next? Every lie is a piece of you I take home."

"Wait! Wait!" he choked out, his chest heaving. Blood was everywhere now, staining his clothes, splattering my boots, pooling beneath the chair in a spreading lake. "It was Marcus! Marcus took the manifest! He rerouted the shipment to the docks in the South. He... he told me he’d kill my family if I didn’t help him."

I stared at him, processing the words. Marcus. One of my oldest lieutenants. A man I’d trusted with the keys to the kingdom, who’d sat at my table, drunk my whiskey, swore his loyalty with his hand over his heart like it meant something. I felt a cold, familiar void open up in my chest. No anger. No surprise. Just a calculation, a mental shifting of pieces on a chessboard. Betrayal, I’d learned long ago, rarely announced itself. It simply waited, patient as rot, until the moment it could do the most damage.

"Marcus," I repeated, testing the name on my tongue, letting its weight settle. I wiped the blade on Elias’s clean shoulder, watching the white fabric turn a muddy, saturated crimson. The intimacy of the gesture wasn’t lost on him; his eyes widened with fresh terror.

I stood up, the leather of my jacket creaking as I turned to my captain.

"Orders, boss?" the man asked, his voice low, careful not to betray any emotion.

"Burn everything," I said. "And make it look like an accident. An electrical fire, a gas leak... I don’t care. Just make sure there’s nothing left but ash. And don’t tip Marcus off. I want him relaxed. I want him sitting in his office thinking he’s the smartest man in the room, congratulating himself on his cleverness. Let him stew in his success for a bit. We leave the shipment alone for now. We don’t make a move until he’s forgotten how to be afraid."

I looked back at the sobbing mess in the chair. Elias had given me what I needed, but that didn’t buy him mercy. It never did. Mercy was a currency I’d stopped carrying years ago.

"And send an invitation to the Berzert club for a drink tomorrow," I continued, my mind already three steps ahead. "Address it to Marcus. Tell him I want to celebrate our ’successful’ quarter."

I walked out into the biting night air, the smell of gasoline already beginning to rise behind me as my men prepared to erase the evening’s work. I tossed the bloody cloth into a rusted bin and drove. I drove until the city lights blurred into a smear of neon misery, until the warehouse sat miles behind me and the screaming had faded from my ears, replaced by something quieter and far more dangerous: thought.

At the firing range, the silence was a vacuum, broken only by the distant hum of the city. I stepped up to the line, the weight of the handgun a familiar, grounding pressure in my palm. I didn’t aim at the bullseye. I aimed at the memory, at the ghost that had been haunting me for seven sleepless nights.

Bang.

Elena’s face when Sebastian called himself my father, the way her expression had crumbled like something structural giving way.

Bang. Bang.

The way her voice broke when she called me a liar, each word a blade between my ribs, sharper than anything I’d used on Elias tonight. Bang.

Knowing I was the reason she was back on that floor, broken by the same family twice. Knowing I’d promised to protect her and failed, the one promise that had ever mattered.

I emptied the clip, the hot brass casings clinking against the ground like falling coins. I reloaded with mechanical precision and kept going, my movements automatic, born of years of practice. My arms grew stiff, my ears rang, but I couldn’t stop. Every shot was a desperate attempt to kill the look in her eyes, to erase the memory of her disappointment, her betrayal, her pain.

I fired until the barrel was too hot to touch, until my hands shook and I had no bullets left, but the pressure in my chest didn’t budge. It never did. Some wounds, I was beginning to understand, didn’t close with violence. They only widened.

I drove to the penthouse, the silence of the elevator mocking me with each ascending floor, each soft chime a small, taunting reminder that I was going home to an empty bed and a guilty conscience. The moment the doors slid open, I walked straight to the bar, grabbed a bottle of bourbon, and drank half of it in long, burning gulps that seared my throat.

The pain felt good, a distraction from the ache in my chest. But satisfaction eluded me, and I was reaching for another bottle when a hand clamped onto my wrist.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Jaxx?" Roman’s voice cut through the dark room like a jagged edge.

"Let go, Roman," I growled, my breathing heavy and ragged, each breath a struggle against the weight crushing my lungs. "I’m not in the mood for a lecture."

"You’re losing your cool, and you’re going to get us all killed." Roman’s grip tightened, refusing to release me. "You’re burning warehouses and shooting until your hands bleed, and you’re drinking like a man who wants to forget he exists. This isn’t you. You’re the one who keeps his head while everyone else is losing theirs. You’re the guy who counts the bullets before he fires. Right now, you’re just spraying lead and hoping for the best."

I ripped my arm away, the bourbon sloshing in the bottle, amber liquid catching the dim light. Words stuck in my throat, refusing to form. Every time I closed my eyes, Elena’s face materialized in that office - the exact moment recognition dawned, the precise second the warmth in her eyes turned to ash.

I could still see the look of utter, soul-crushing betrayal when she realized I was the brother of the man who had turned her life into a nightmare. That expression haunted me more than any ghost ever could, more than any face of any man I’d ever put in the ground.

"You have no idea what it’s like!" The words exploded from me, raw and desperate, tearing out of someplace I usually kept locked. "Seeing her look at me like I’m the monster... like I’m him."

Roman released a long, weary sigh as he settled onto the barstool beside me, the leather creaking under his weight. For a moment he just studied me, the way he used to study a man across a negotiating table, searching for the crack that would let him in.

"It’s been a week, Jaxx. A week of you acting like a rabid dog, and I’m running out of ways to clean up your mess."

"I don’t want to talk about her," I hissed, taking another swig, welcoming the burn.

"Well, too bad. Because we’re talking about it." Roman’s voice dropped an octave, taking on that tone he used when negotiating with enemies... measured, patient, relentless. "Why didn’t you tell her the truth from the start? You knew who she was. You knew Graham was your half-brother. You should have told her before she found out from that senile old bastard Sebastian."

"And say what, Roman?" I laughed, a bitter, dry sound that scraped my throat. "’Hey, Elena, I know my family ruined your life, destroyed everything you held dear, but want to grab dinner?’ She would have run. Gone in a heartbeat. She would have hated me from day one, and I never would have had the chance to..." I stopped myself, the unspoken words hanging between us like smoke, too fragile and too damning to say aloud.

"She hates you now," Roman countered, his eyes boring into mine with uncomfortable truth. "And that’s worse. Because now she thinks the last few months were a setup. A calculated game. With all she has endured - the marriage, the Sinclairs, the constant lies... Elena is like a wounded animal right now, Jaxx. Cornered and desperate. Do you know what happens to wounded animals when they feel cornered?"

I looked at him, the ice in my glass rattling as my hand shook with barely contained emotion. My jaw clenched so tight I thought my teeth might crack.

"They strike," Roman said firmly, leaning forward, his voice quieter now but no less certain. "She’s not going to just sit there and cry forever. That’s not who she is, and you know it. She’s going to bite. And she’s going to aim for the throat."