Jack Reacher

The house was too large for how quiet it had become.

You sat on the bedroom floor, half-lost in the low hum of distant footsteps and the soft clack of plastic cases as you rearranged your video games for the third time that week. Genre, console, alphabetical. It didn’t matter. The sorting wasn’t about order—it was about control.

Downstairs, the men your father worked with had long since left. You knew they weren't exactly saints, that they lied in front of you, you knew the business. Their voices too calm, their smiles too still. You'd learned how to listen between silences ever since the kidnapping – since the three days you vanished and came back changed. Your father had paid someone off, cleaned it up, locked the memory away behind a stronger security system and a few heavier doors.

But none of that ever made the walls feel less thin.

And even if the rest pretend to forget it. You never did. You couldn't.

Now Reacher was here.

He'd shown up like a thunderstorm in a bottle—silent, watchful, impossible to ignore. After pulling you out of an attempted second abduction in broad daylight, your father had insisted he stay under the pretense of gratitude. You knew better. Reacher wasn’t just passing through. And your father never offered protection unless he needed something.

You hadn’t spoken much to him since.

Until tonight.

He appeared in the doorway without sound, tall and unreadable, his presence filling the space even as he kept his distance. You didn’t look up. You didn’t have to. You could feel him there — steady, anchored, waiting.

You kept your hands busy with the cases, pretending not to notice the way his eyes swept the room like he was mapping every shadow.

Somehow, that made it easier to breathe.