Until You (Fall Away, #1.5)(8)

My palms were sweaty, and I had no idea what had happened. He’d hung up after telling me where to find him.

I’d left him alone—and hurt—once before. Never again.

“Slow down, man,” Madoc chimed in behind me. “This will go a lot faster if we just ask someone where he is.” I hadn’t even noticed that he’d followed me in.

My shoes squeaked on the linoleum as I jetted down the corridors, flinging back curtain after curtain until I finally found my brother.

He sat on a bed, long legs dangling off the side and his hand on his forehead. I reached for his ponytail and yanked his head back to look at his face.

“Ow, shit!” he grunted.

I could’ve been gentler, I guess.

He squinted up at the fluorescent lighting as I took in the stitches on his eyebrow.

“Mr. Trent!” a woman’s voice barked behind me, but I wasn’t sure if it was to me or Jax since we both shared our father’s name.

“What the hell happened to him?” I wasn’t asking Jax. Others were to blame.

My brother was just a kid, and while he was only a little over a year younger than me, he was still younger.

And he’d had a life of shit.

His mother was Native American and barely legal when she’d gotten pregnant with him. While he sported our father’s azure blue eyes, the rest of his looks came from her.

His hair was probably black, but it looked a shade lighter and fell halfway down his back. Certain pieces were braided and then everything was brought back to a ponytail mid-skull. His skin was a couple of shades darker than mine, and everything was overshadowed by his bright smile.

A woman behind me cleared her throat. “We don’t know what happened to him,” she snapped. “He won’t tell us.”

I hadn’t turned away from Jax to see who I was speaking to. It could’ve been a doctor or a social worker. Or the police. It didn’t matter. They all looked at me the same way. Like I deserved a spanking or something.

“I’ve been calling you for hours,” Jax whispered, and I sucked in a breath when I noticed that his lip was puffy, too. His eyes were pleading. “I thought you’d be here before the doctors called them.”

And then I knew it was a social worker, and I felt like a dick. He’d needed me today, and I’d screwed it up again.

I stood between him and the woman, or maybe he was hiding from her view. I didn’t know.

But I did know that Jax didn’t want to go with her. My throat tightened, and the lump inside swelled so damn much that I wanted to hurt someone.

Tate.

She was always my victim of choice, but she was also in every good memory I had.

My brain flashed with the one place that was untouched by hatred and despair.

Our tree. Tate’s and mine.

I briefly wondered if Jax had anywhere he felt safe, warm, an innocent.

I doubted it. Had he ever experienced a place like that? Would he ever?

I didn’t have the first goddamn clue what life had been like for my brother. Sure, I’d gotten a taste of it during my summer with our father when I was fourteen, but Jax had had a whole lifetime of that shit. Not to mention the foster homes over the years. He was looking up to me like I was the f*cking world, and I didn’t have the answers. I had no power. No way to protect him.

“Did Mr. Donovan do this to you?” the social worker asked Jax about his foster dad, Vince.

He looked at me before he answered, knowing that I would know when he was lying. “No,” he told her.

And every muscle in my arms and legs burned.

He was lying.

Jax wasn’t lying to protect Vince. He knew that I could tell when he wasn’t being honest. It was the way he’d hesitate and eyeball me before the lie. I always knew.

No, he wasn’t deceiving me. He was deceiving her.

Jax and I settled our own scores.

“Okay,” clipboard lady—who I’d finally turned around to make eye contact with—snipped, “let me make this easy for you. We’re going to assume that he did this to you and move you to a group home tonight until we find another placement.”

No. I closed my eyes.

“You f*cking people,” I choked out, my stomach hollowing while I tried to keep my emotions in check for Jax.

All of his life, my brother had been sleeping in strange beds and living with people that didn’t really want him. Our father had carted him around from shithole to shithole, and left him at sketchy places all of the time growing up.

Enough was enough. Jax and I belonged together. We were stronger together. It was only a matter of time before what little innocence he had left decayed and his heart grew too hard for anything good to grow.

He was going to become like me, and I wanted to f*cking scream at these people that I could love him more than anyone else. Kids didn’t just need food and a place to sleep. They needed to feel safe and wanted. They needed to feel trust.

Vince hadn’t taken that away from my brother tonight, because Jax had never counted on him in the first place. But Vince had made sure Jax would go back into a group home, and again, he’d put me in the position to remind my brother that I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t protect him.

And goddamn, I hated that feeling.

Grabbing a wad of cash out of my pocket, I yanked my brother in for a hug and stuffed the money into his hand. Without even looking at him, I spun around and walked out of the room as fast as I could.