Page 90 of Chained

"That's rich, considering you're the one who taught me where to cut, where to shoot. Where to fucking bleed them dry."

"Watch it." His tone drops, a warning I've heard a thousand times growing up. I don't listen to it now any more than I did then.

"No, you watch it. You could have saved me, Adrian. You could have stopped all this. You could have walked me out the front gates the first week I got here, when I was all bone and bruises and still crying for a mother who sold me for fifty quid. You didn't. You trained me instead. You turned me into exactly what they wanted."

"I kept you alive." His hands ball into fists at his sides. "Do you understand that? Every single day, for fourteen years, I kept you alive in a place built to eat children whole. You think that was easy? You think there was a version of this where I just walked you out the gates and Archie didn't put a bullet through our brains?"

"Then maybe that would've been better."

The punch comes before I even see it. Adrian's fist connects with my jaw, hard enough that I stumble back into the bag, the chain rattling above us. Copper floods my mouth, and for the first time tonight, I feel something. Real. Sharp.

"Don't you ever say that to me again." His voice shakes. "Don't you dare stand there and tell me you'd rather be dead than alive, not after everything⁠—"

I come back at him before he finishes, my own fist catching him across the cheek. He staggers, but doesn't fall, and then we're just swinging, both of us, no technique left in either of us. Just fourteen years of everything neither of us ever said spilling out through our hands. A blow catches my ribs and I grunt, driving my shoulder into his chest and shoving him back into the wall, his head cracking against the brick.

"You did what was best for you," I spit, pinning him there, my forearm against his throat. "Not me. You."

"I did what kept you breathing." He shoves me off, hard enough that I stumble. "There's a difference, you ungrateful little⁠—"

"Is there?" I laugh again, that same wrong sound. "Because from where I'm standing, breathing isn't the same as living, Adrian. I've been dead since I was eight years old. You just kept the body moving."

He lunges, and this time, I let him take me down, both of us hitting the mats hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. His hands find my collar, fisting the fabric, and his face is inches from mine, blood dripping from his split lip onto my jaw.

"You think I don't know that?" His voice breaks completely now, no anger left in it, just grief. "You think I don't lie awake every single night wondering if I made the wrong call? If there was a version of this where I got you out and you actually got to be a kid somewhere, anywhere else?"

"Then why didn't you try?"

"Because I was scared!" The words tear out of him, raw and ugly. "I was twenty-eight years old and terrified of a man who'd already buried people for less, and I made the only choice I could live with—keeping you close enough that I could protect you from the worst of it, even if I couldn't protect you from all of it. Before you came, Jax, I'd only ever had me. There was no family waiting for me to come home to them. There was no life worth living. But then you came, and finally I had a purpose beyond the killing. I had a life that I needed to save, a heart I wanted to love. You're my son, Jax. You might not be my blood, but you're mine, and I did everything I could to fucking keep you safe."

What he's saying makes sense. I always knew there was more to us than just two people living in the same cage. He is my dad, in every sense of the word, but still, I blame him. I fucking blame him and every other cunt in these walls for not tossing me out into the cold where I'd have been safer than growing up in these walls. Fourteen years of hate, resentment, and fucking fear bubbles to the surface, and I can't swallow it down, no matter how hard I try. I'm too fucking tired.

"You didn't protect me from anything," I finally say, quieter now, the fight gone out of my voice. "Look at me, Adrian. Look at what I am."

"You're my Ace of hearts. That's what you are, that's who you are, Jax."

"I'm a monster." The words come easy now, easier than anything else I've said tonight. "That's what I am. That's what they made me, what you helped them make, and the worst part…" I pause, sucking in a breath. "The worst fucking part is that they didn't have to force it. I let them. Every single time. Because somewhere along the way, I started needing it. The blood. The release. I crave it, Adrian. I'm exactly what they all wanted, what they all spent years training me to be, and there's no version of tonight where you walking me out those gates four years ago would have changed that, because it was already in me. It was always already in me."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Just stares down at me, his grip loosening on my collar, his whole face crumpling into something I've never seen on him before. Something that looks almost like defeat.

"You're not a monster, Jax."

"Don't." My voice cracks for the first time. "It's too late for the bullshit, Adrian. Look at me." I extend out my arms, showing him the blood stained into my skin. "How can you deny it? Look what I've done."

Killing doesn't affect me. Not until late at night and I'm all alone with no company but their screams, and now, her voice. Her eyes, the way her blood flowed so easily onto my skin without the satisfying pleasure in my chest. It's sunk in somewhere deep, and I don't know how I'll ever get the sound of her voice out of my head. And the kid…fuck, the kid. I've fucked him up for life. Killing doesn't affect me. But killing her did.

"It's not bullshit." He pulls back, sitting up and dragging a hand across his bleeding mouth. "I'm telling you the truth, the same way I always have. You did something monstrous tonight. That doesn't make you one. There's a difference, and if you can't see it right now, then I'll keep saying it until you do."

I don't answer. I just lie there on the mat for a second, staring up at the ceiling, listening to both of us breathe. This is what he's always done, always been the man when I'm at my lowest who'll lie on the floor and wait for me to see reason. He was the one who spent six months sleeping in my room when I was first brought here, convincing me the monsters weren't under my bed until I finally learned he was right. They were in my head.

Fuck this. I push myself up, slow, every part of me aching in ways that have nothing to do with the punches. I spit, blood and saliva hitting the mat beside Adrian's knee, and I don't look at him as I do it.

"I don't care. Not anymore."

I'm already moving, grabbing my jacket off the bench, not bothering to put it on. My knuckles throb with every heartbeat, the split skin pulling tighter as I flex my hand into a fist and back open again, just to feel something that isn't the way her body relaxed in my arms as she took her last breath.

"Jax—"

"Don't follow me."