✯ North Star ✯

20 - Your Word Against His

I spent most of the day reading and listening to music, trying to quiet the thing in my head that wouldn't settle. The house felt too big, too still, too off in a way I couldn't name — a wrongness sitting low in my stomach that I couldn't trace back to any single cause, just a kind of static hum under everything.

So when my dad burst through the front door with a wound down his arm, the book fell straight out of my hands, my whole body lurching upright before my mind had caught up.

"Dad? What happened?" I moved toward him, stomach dropping straight through the floor.

"Stella, you need to go back to your room," he said quickly, pushing me back, his hand firm against my shoulder.

"No — Dad, what's wrong? Where's John B?" I tried to hold my hands still, though they'd already started shaking.

"Stella." He looked at me, something in his eyes I didn't have a name for yet. "John B stabbed me."

"What — no. No, he wouldn't." It came out as a whisper, barely anything, the words refusing to fully form in my throat.

"Sweetheart, I know it's hard to believe. But you need to go to your room now." He pushed me inside and shut the door before I could say anything else, and I stood there in the sudden quiet with my heart slamming and nothing to do with the panic climbing up my chest.

---

It was dark by the time the door creaked open, and every nerve in my body went taut at the sound of it.

John B stepped inside, holding a gun.

"John B, why do you have a gun?" I whispered, my whole body going cold and still.

"Did you tell your dad about the gold?" His voice was low and sharp, nothing like the way he usually sounded, and something in the wrongness of it made my stomach twist.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Answer the question. About the gold."

"No. No, I would never do that."

"Then how'd he know?" He grabbed my arm, his grip tighter than I'd ever felt from him. "Answer me."

I gasped, the shock of it jolting straight through me.

"John B, you're scaring me," I whispered.

"Is life back in the Cut scary to you?" He was close enough that I could feel how hard he was working to hold himself together, his whole body trembling faintly with something that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite fear.

Even now, I knew — in whatever part of him was still him — I was the last person he wanted to hurt. Fear had just made him forget that, and something in me softened toward him even through the terror.

"Stella!" Dad's voice, down the hall.

John B froze. "Shh."

He took my hand and led me outside as quietly as he could, my pulse hammering with every step.