Shattered (LOST #3)(77)

Jax had a flash then. Of a man reaching out to him. A man with a green snake circling his arm. Stay quiet until I’m done. Then we’ll go out . . . we’ll go fishing . . .

He’d . . . liked to fish. But his father had never really taken him.

They never did anything.

“No,” Jax rasped as the ghosts of his past started to slip through his mind.

“Your mother . . . I tried to let her go. I didn’t think she’d tell anyone about me, and who would believe her? I mean, she was so strung out.”

Play with me, Mommy. Play!

But . . . she hadn’t. He fucking remembered that—now.

“I set that house on fire. Put your father’s body inside. She ran back in. Just ran in there . . . hell, I didn’t know why she was doing that. I left her.”

Sarah grabbed the table. “You left her to burn?”

Again, he shrugged. “She’s the one who went into the fire. Didn’t realize . . . not until I heard the screams . . . that the kid was in there, too.”

Jax’s skin felt ice cold.

“In the closet . . . that’s where they’d put you.”

“Stop talking, Dad!” Sarah yelled at him. “Just stop!”

Silence.

Jax stepped forward. Murphy tilted back his head as he gazed up at Jax.

“You really think . . .” Jax rasped, “I’ll believe your lies?”

“I think you need to get away from Sarah. I think Sarah now knows exactly what you are . . .”

“Sarah has always known what I am.” And she didn’t care.

Murphy gave a sad shake of his head. “Did he seek you out, Sarah? Start showing an interest after he learned just who you are?”

“Jax hasn’t—” she began, her voice furious.

“If the man after you has been using fire in his attacks, then you should certainly be looking at the fellow right beside you. Though perhaps he should be more grateful to me. I mean, I am the one who got him out of the fire. His mother didn’t make it, but I got him and—”

“No!” Jax roared, and he shoved Sarah out of the way as he leapt across that table. Because suddenly, he could feel flames against his skin. He could hear himself crying out.

Mommy! Mommy! And he could see smoke, coming beneath the closet door.

He tackled Murphy. They hit the ground and he put his hands around the bastard’s throat. He squeezed, his fingers tightening and cutting off Murphy’s air supply, and Murphy was just smiling, smiling—

“Stop!” Sarah’s scream. She was yanking on Jax. So were the guards. It took three guards to pull Jax off Murphy.

Then Murphy growled out, “She sees you now . . .”

Jax’s breath heaved out. His head whipped up and he saw Sarah—staring at him with horror in her eyes.

“Come on, buddy,” one of the guards said as he pulled Jax to the door. “Don’t let him fuck with you any longer.”

Jax glared at Murphy. “Bastard, I will be seeing you again.”

“Stay away from Sarah,” Murphy fired back. Two guards were pulling him toward the other exit. “She’s not for you!”

A red-haired guard had Jax in the hall. “Calm down, man,” he said. “Hell, we probably should have let you kill him. Would have saved us all some pain . . .”

He killed my parents. That bastard just confessed—

“He’s a sick sonofabitch,” the guard muttered.

Jax stared down at his hands.

And he wanted to kill.

“STOP,” SARAH WHISPERED.

The guards didn’t hear her.

“Stop!” she yelled.

Her father looked back at her. The guards stilled, but they didn’t loosen their grip on him.

“You . . . you never killed two people at once.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t mean to kill the mother. Charlene shouldn’t have run back to the fire.”

Charlene.

“You’re a liar, Dad.”

“No, sweetheart. He is. That man out there . . . he’s as dark and twisted on the inside as I am. You need to stay away from him.”

“How’d you know his last name was Fontaine?”

“Figured . . . had to be . . . I got the kid out and I left him with Mitch Fontaine. The guy was a mechanic—worked with the boy’s father—I figured leaving the kid with him would be better than nothing.”

“He hurt him, Dad. That man abused Jax.”

His eyes hardened.

Sarah swallowed to ease the lump in her throat. “And I don’t think Charlene died that night.” Jax had told her that a woman named Charlene raised him. That she’d even been there to help him get rid of the body years later.

Jax’s mother had never gone looking for him because she’d been there with him, the whole time.

“Why would you lie and tell him that?” Sarah asked.

The guards were staring at Murphy and Sarah with a kind of sick curiosity. She got that. She felt rather sick herself.

“I watched,” Murphy said simply. “I watched her. The woman she’d been died that night. She became someone new. I killed what she’d been.”

Sarah was trying to make sense of this madness. Trying to look through her father’s lies and riddles and understand the truth. “She ran away with Jax because she was scared of you. You didn’t give Jax to that man—Mitch. She took Jax and went to him, didn’t she?”