of that, but I’d damn well figure it out. The four of us needed each other, he had to see that. And surely Chase had paid plenty for his crimes against us now. The problem was, Fox was one stubborn asshole and I had the feeling convincing him would be about as easy as moving an immovable wall. But I’d try. I just had to try.
***
I woke to a crash and jerked upright, pushing Chase’s arm aside where it was stretched over me. The lamp had been knocked over and had smashed to pieces.
“Turn the light on!” he barked.
“Woah, woah,” I tried to calm Chase down as he shoved me and fought me, his nails digging into my skin.
He tried to scramble his way over me to get off the bed and I forced him back, but he didn’t stop fighting me, seeming to be in some frantic trance.
“It’s me, man,” I told him, trying to see him in the darkness and his hands eased up on me, starting to shake instead.
“The light,” he begged. “Put the light on, JJ.”
I got out of bed, striding across the room and switching it on, just as the door flew open and Fox stood there in his boxers with a gun raised.
“It’s alright,” I said, knocking the gun aside and he lowered it, looking from me to the bed where Rogue still had an arm draped around Chase’s heaving chest, fast a-fucking-sleep.
“What’s going on?” Fox growled, stepping into the room and looking to me for an explanation, avoiding Chase’s pinched expression.
I didn’t exactly have an answer so my lips just sort of hung slack and Chase answered for me.
“He left me in the dark a lot,” he muttered. “For a second I thought I was still…” he trailed off, his jaw ticking and a flush of embarrassment sliding into his cheeks. Anger knotted my chest at that and I strode back to him, kneeling on the bed and getting in his line of vision.
“You’re home, Ace,” I said firmly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I felt Fox bristling at those words, but he didn’t say anything to contradict them and I was thankful for that. Chase’s frantic gaze eased and he leaned back against the headrest with a sigh of relief, placing his hand on Rogue’s back. She’d shimmied out of her t-shirt at some point so she was just in her sports bra and panties. She nestled closer to him in her sleep, her fingers tightening on his flesh as she murmured his name.
I looked to Fox, finding him fighting a war in his eyes before he turned and marched away in the direction of his room, leaving the door wide open.
Chase’s good eye was scrunched shut as he held Rogue to him in a way that said he’d be hard pressed to let her go.
I moved to the far window, twitching the curtains open and gazing down at the patio area, the sky just beginning to pale. My heart weighed a thousand tons as I stood there, hurting for Chase and knowing that he was never going to be the same after what had happened to him.
I soon found myself sliding back into bed, breathing in the scent of him and trying to find peace in the fact that the four of us were together in this house again. But somehow all I could find was turmoil. Because Rogue was angry with me, Chase was broken, Fox would never let him stay here long term, and Maverick was severed off from this family like a limb that could never be reattached. I felt the weight of all that following me back into sleep, where only nightmares waited for me.
***
The days slipped by and we fell into a routine where Fox avoided Chase as much as humanly possible, bringing food and drink to his room whilst refusing his requests for cigarettes and booze in place of his painkillers. Chase only took the meds if Rogue was there, letting her push them between his lips and swallowing them down with a glass of cold milk. Every time she did that, she kissed his cheek and something told me that was the part he did it for.
Whenever I watched him with her, it was clear to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was in love with her. I guessed I’d always known that, yet it had never been as plainly obvious to me as it was now. Something had shifted in him since