Chapter 10
Jax stepped out from the shadow of the doorframe, his heavy boots making no sound on the rubberized flooring of the cell block. He walked right up to the reinforced glass panel of Cell 4, planting his broad shoulders squarely in front of the observation window.
Sarah stood up from the concrete cot so fast she nearly lost her footing, grabbing the vertical steel bars of her cell door with both hands. Her knuckles turned stark white against the dark iron as she stared out into the dim hallway, her breath catching in her throat.
“Jax?” she breathed, her voice raspy and thin, as if she hadn't spoken an audible word in days. She pressed her face against the bars, her eyes scanning the broad chest, the scarred hands, and the worn leather vest. “What in God's name are you doing here? They told me you were three states away. They said you skipped bail back in Bakersfield and never looked back.”
“I was,” Jax said, his voice dropping into a low, controlled rumble that barely carried across the corridor. He pulled the manila envelope out of his vest pocket and pressed it flat against the wire-reinforced glass window, right where she could see the cracked red wax seal and the typewritten headers. “And I should've stayed gone. But your boy tracked me down at a diner three counties over. He brought the ledger, Sarah.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a long, agonizing second, letting out a ragged sigh that sounded like years of accumulated terror finally leaving her lungs. When she opened them again, tears tracked clean paths through the dust and grime on her cheeks—not the hysterical sobbing Jax had anticipated, but the quiet, restrained release of a woman who had already prepared herself for the worst.
“They set me up, Jax,” she whispered fiercely, gripping the iron bars so hard her forearms trembled. “The night shift supervisor—he handed me the inventory manifest before he clocked out early. He told me to sign off on the chemical storage pallets in Sector B. Ten minutes after I locked up the office and took Leo to the truck, the whole west wing went up in flames. They had my signature on the digital log, but they changed the date on the hard drive. I didn't burn that warehouse down.”
“I know you didn't,” Jax said, tapping the manila envelope against the glass. “Because the man who signed the corporate transfer agreement for the insurance payout left his real signature inside this box right here. We found it in the Red Creek storage locker this afternoon.”
From down the hallway, the sharp, metallic clatter of a heavy ring of keys hitting the floor echoed off the concrete walls, followed by the heavy, rhythmic thud of rubber-soled boots approaching around the corner.
“Shift change,” Sarah hissed, her eyes widening in sudden panic as she jerked her head toward the end of the cell block. “The duty sergeant makes his rounds right at one o'clock. If he finds you down here with Leo, they’ll charge you with aiding an escape and throw away the key before we ever see a judge.”
Jax didn't panic. His hazel eyes narrowed as he glanced down the corridor toward the approaching footsteps, calculating the distance and the time they had left. He pulled the folded ledger and the confession papers out, sliding them carefully underneath the gap at the bottom of the heavy steel cell door until they rested flat on the concrete floor inside her cell.
“Hide those under the mattress right now,” Jax instructed, his voice an absolute command that brooked no argument. “Tomorrow morning, when the public defender shows up for your arraignment, you don't say a word to the prosecutor. You hand that packet straight to the judge and tell him the signature belongs to the regional director of industrial development, not you.”
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“And what about you?” Sarah asked, her voice cracking as she knelt down to scoop the papers off the floor, clutching them against her chest like a shield. “Where are you going to be, Jax?”
“I'll be sitting right in the back of the courtroom,” Jax said, turning his head as the flash of a heavy brass key turning in a distant security door reflected off the white-tiled wall down the hall. “Waiting to see if the state of Nevada still respects its own signatures.”
