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I hadn't even realized how close I was. I had been too focused on him.

But then his arms were around me, his teeth were against my shoulder, and my name broke apart in his mouth. Something inside me gave way. I cried out into his hair and shook against him while he held me.

Beneath my breastbone, something shifted.

It wasn't the familiar ache, and it wasn't Silas's thread. It was quieter than either of those things, but I felt it turn once inside me and settle into place.

We stayed tangled together afterward, damp with sweat and struggling to catch our breath. Jax kept his arms around me, and I didn't tell him to put his hands back on the headboard.

"I got caught," he said eventually into my hair, sounding dazed.

"Well, next time I catch you, we do as I say."

I felt his laugh through his chest. "That's my line."

"I stole it. Along with the tiger stripes."

"Keep them," he said. "Keep all of them. I don't want them back."

Afterward, he refused to let me get up. He lay on his back while I curled against his uninjured side, and his fingers moved slowly along my spine.

He told me about Mateo, but not about the illness this time. He told me everything else.

Mateo laughed like a donkey. Once, the night before a hospital scan, he'd dyed his hair blue with food coloring just to annoy the doctors. Another time, he'd called Jax at four in the morning and told him he sounded happy, which was apparently deeply suspicious and needed to stop immediately.

"I want you to meet him," Jax said. "When this is over. When I've..."

He left the sentence unfinished.

"He'll love you. Then he'll steal you, and I'll have to fight him."

"You'd lose."

"I'd let him win. That's different."

We were quiet for a while after that.

Then Jax shifted beneath me and reached awkwardly behind his neck. He fumbled with something one-handed and swore softly in Spanish when the movement pulled at his ribs.

"Here," he said. "Help me."

It was a chain.

I had seen the thin gold chain at his throat dozens of times without really noticing it. A small oval pendant hung from it, worn almost smooth from years of handling. A tiny sun had been engraved into the metal, with a face at its center softened by countless fingers.

"Mamá's," he said. "She gave it to me the day I left for the island. She said it would bring me home." He held it between us, and the metal caught the lamplight. "I want you to have it."

"Jax, I can't."

"You can."

He lifted it around my neck himself, moving slowly with his injured fingers. The pendant settled into the hollow of my throat, still warm from his skin.

For a moment, he only looked at it.

Then he raised his eyes to mine, his face bruised and swollen, without even the hint of a grin.

"So you've got something of mine," he said quietly, "that isn't bruises."