Chapter 9
The fire crackled steadily, eating away at the dry pine inside the iron stove and filling the cramped cabin with a dry, resinous heat that chased the mountain frost from their bones. Jax sat on an overturned wooden crate near the hearth, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring into the flickering orange flames. Across from him, Leo had curled up on a dusty army blanket Jax had dragged out from the back corner, wrapped so tightly in the oversized canvas jacket that he looked like a discarded cocoon.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. The silence wasn’t heavy anymore; it had settled into something fragile and exhausted. Jax reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a crushed pack of cigarettes, tapped one out, and then hesitated. He looked down at the boy, who had his eyes closed, listening to the rhythmic breathing of the fire. Jax slowly pushed the cigarette back into the pack and tossed it onto the floor beside him. Some habits, he realized, were easier to drop when you weren't the only person in the room anymore.
“She told you stories about me, didn't she?” Jax asked quietly, his voice barely rising above the crackle of the wood.
Leo’s eyes flickered open. He stared up at the log rafters where cobwebs hung thick in the shadows. “She didn't tell stories much at the end. She just... coughed a lot. But when she was younger, before we moved to the trailer in Billings, she had a box under her bed. Photos, ticket stubs, and an old leather glove with your initials burned into the leather.”
Jax felt a sharp pang in his chest. The glove. He had lost that glove outside a diner in Rapid City the night the cops raided their camp and scattered the club to the four winds. Clara had kept it all those years, holding onto a piece of a life that had turned to ash before they had even figured out how to live it.
“I wasn’t a good man, Leo,” Jax said, his voice dropping an octave, heavy with a confession he had never made to anyone else, not even himself. “I broke things. I ran with men who didn't care about tomorrow because they were too busy burning down today. When I found out Clara was pregnant... I panicked. I thought my shadow was too dark for a kid. I thought walking away was the cleanest way to save you both from the wreck I was making of my life.”
Leo sat up slowly, pulling the heavy canvas jacket around his thin shoulders. He looked at Jax with those big, steady hazel eyes, lacking all the judgment an adult would have brought to the conversation.
“Mom didn't think you were a wreck,” Leo whispered. “She said you were just lost on a road that didn't have any signs.”
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Jax let out a harsh, ragged breath, running his calloused hand down over his bearded face. The raw honesty in the boy’s words cut deeper than any knife or fist ever could. It stripped away twenty years of rationalizations, leaving him bare and exposed in the flickering firelight. He wasn’t a hardened outlaw anymore; he was just a father who had been given a second chance he didn’t deserve, sitting in a rotting shack on the edge of nowhere.
“Well,” Jax murmured, clearing his throat and forcing a rough, lopsided smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. “Looks like the sign just changed. Go to sleep, kid. Tomorrow we figure out what comes next.”
