JAXSON
I shouldn’t have walked away from her like that. She was trying to talk me down, to chase whatever was dark in my head away with jokes and dumb questions, and I left. Walking felt easier than saying the truth, because the truth would break things in a way I couldn’t fix.
I’d handled everything in my life—fights, street heat, decisions that should’ve crushed a man and didn’t. But the one thing I couldn’t manage was telling the woman I loved that my father was the reason why hers died. I couldn’t even hold my own temper toward her without feeling like a traitor. So I ran again.
I’d left the house that morning without telling anyone. The warehouse I picked was out of town, cold concrete, one busted window, the kind of place you choose when you want to forget you used to care about a
