Chapter 7: Shadows in the Garage
Jax reached out, his thick, calloused fingers closing around my wrist, not with anger, but with a sudden, desperate urgency. Without a word to the other men watching us from the bay doors, he pulled me past the gate and into the dim interior of the old auto body shop. The air inside smelled of stale motor oil, burning rubber, and decades of dust. Sunbeams cut through the high windows, illuminating floating specks of gray dust that danced lazily in the quiet space. He led me past a row of dismantled engines and greasy toolboxes into a small, cluttered office partitioned off in the back corner.
He closed the heavy wooden door behind us, muffling the low murmur of the bikers outside. The room was sparse, furnished only with a battered metal desk, a couple of mismatched chairs, and a calendar from three years ago hanging crookedly on the wall. Jax let go of my wrist and ran a hand through his long, dark hair, letting out a long, ragged breath that sounded like a tire slowly losing its air. He dropped down into the metal desk chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring down at the concrete floor between his boots.
"Where did you get that?" Jax asked, his voice rough and stripped of all its usual defiance. He pointed a trembling finger at the paper still clutched in my hand.
"County records office downtown," I said, staying on my feet near the door, keeping my distance while holding my ground. "Martha helped me look through the old municipal birth registries from Miller Creek. It wasn't hard to find once I knew what year to look for. Your real name is written right there next to my mother's."
Jax raised his head, his hazel eyes—the exact shade of my own—meeting mine across the small desk. There was a deep, haunted pain in his gaze that made my chest tighten. He wasn't just a tough biker who walked out on a whim; he was a man trapped inside the prison of his own past mistakes, too ashamed to reach back across the years.
"Your mother deserved better than what I gave her," Jax said softly, the words scraping out of his throat like sandpaper on wood. "I was twenty-one, broke, and knee-deep in trouble I couldn't climb out of. I thought leaving was the only way to keep you both safe from the life I was dragging behind me like a chain."
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"Leaving didn't keep us safe," I answered, my voice dropping an octave, the raw truth of growing up without a father finally finding its voice. "It just left us alone. My mom worked two jobs until her hands were raw just to keep the lights on, and she never stopped looking at that old photograph you two took before I was born."
Jax flinched as if I had struck him physically. He leaned back in the chair, staring at me with a new kind of realization dawning in his eyes. He saw the faded photograph in my jacket pocket, the worn edges of my jacket, and the tired determination in my face. The armor was completely gone, leaving only a tired, regretful man facing the consequence of his long silence.
