The dregs of his day had littered down to a scatter of ephemera on a worn table and a congregation of aching bones. He was feeling more like a shell for a bargain lot of blood and muscle than a man – and so he did what rang of second nature. He drank the whiskey that Quinn had put in front of him.

"What?" his voice slivered between accusatory and bitterly defensive. "Something to say?"

"Not a word." There was a graciousness in the other man's voice that bent toward derisive on his ear and Chibs stiffened a gloved palm on the bottle neck.

"Aye, correct." He nodded as he slung back harder into the widely seated chair. "Maybe this time you can keep from mouthing off about it in front of Mother Teller."

"Wasn't me, brother." Quinn cocked him a tight glance of surety. "Honestly."

Chibs winced into the truth he saw in the other man's eye, jaw biting on a twitch before he lifted the bottle for another hefty swallow. And that liquid burn was all he'd craved since she'd lit his lungs up hot and scraped heat against his hips with digging nails. Because, unbidden, it had remembered the taste of her wanting for him. And that had kept him strung tight like a wire, pinioned and about to snap.

"Ya know those cruisers have front facing cameras?" the other man questioned softly as he headed toward the darkened kitchen.

"And Patterson'll have a wonderful show then." Was his only guttering response before turning his head away, voiding the conversation from further existence.

Quinn's departure from the room only managed to crowd the 3am quietness of the cabin farther in on him and while it normally would have made him jittery, the need to brood was impassable and impossible to ignore. He stared a long while at the shell casing that rested on the table, empty and harmless and still – as though it was innocent of what it had done to them all.

Not one of them was innocent of this.

And he blamed himself at the right top of the long list of faultings.

He hadn't checked Bobby for a weapon. He hadn't searched for the murderous stowaway. He'd been afraid to touch his brother, just for the plain possibility that he'd disappear. And mirages couldn't possibly carry the weapons of their own vanishing-trick-demise. He'd right disappeared though, in a way. What of him wasn't buried in the ground thirty feet from the casing that had released a dividing destruction on them all.

And Jackson's reaction…

His dressing-down demand and reprimand had been a punishment for not finding that gun, that bullet. A punishment for wanting to reach out for her in his hurting and being weak enough to voice it. And it was a place to settle some blame. So maybe he had reached hard for her, and maybe he'd touched that vision - for fear that if he didn't, she would disappear too.

"And what if she does?" He hissed before taking another stringent swallow. "Feckin' idiot."

It shouldn't have mattered – it shouldn't have. Especially considering that he still didn't necessarily trust her intentions all that far for throwing. She was a bloody cop.

And he was the guiding hand of his own friend's murder.

Actually… many a friend. And many a murder.

Maybe that was why she was curling closer in on him – because that many murders put you into a place where some cops would do near on anything to spin your ass to the wind. Maybe she was just playing him cold-hearted. Something in his head said that was a brand of punishment he may have been deserving of… That the place he was suddenly starting to feel a certain surfeit of safety was the place that would run him into or under the ground? Exhausted delirium had him coughing a bitter laugh into the bottle on that thought, lungs aching hotter for another round.

And what? What if she was using him?

Would it really be so rough to a burden to bear? Her wrapping around him as she took him down? If she was knocking him in the back of the knees while taking him tight then good girl on her. Maybe she would end him and maybe she'd end this unredeemable mess. Maybe she'd knife his back on a kiss so no brother of his had to – because that was what he feared even farther than her betrayal.

He had no sons. But at least, for awhile, he'd had his boys. And Juice's betrayal still tasted like ash clogging in his throat when he thought on it for too long. So better to focus on the other, yeah? Better to be a support for a man who didn't have a father and needed a stronger voice. At least, it's what he'd been telling himself when it came to Jax. It was the lie he'd been living inside of to keep them both above dirt. It was the way he'd patterned patience with the boy's quick decline into a maddening vengeance.

Until he'd been so brashly accused of a failure of loyalty over the blood spill of one of his best friends. That's what he'd heard in the prince's tone anyhow.

Don't keep her too close? He'd bury himself close in her whenever he damn well pleased.

And she? So bloody bold on him. Demanding too. The both of them telling him what to and what not to do. He was suddenly very weary of ultimatums. But on her it had been a kind of sweetened vulnerable, an asking and pleading for a truth that could fit between law and lawless... It had weakened him. If it had been a play, it had been a sure-fire one, one he couldn't see past. She'd been burning up her self control like a brush fire bringing down poplars, wild and crackling uncontrollable. He hadn't been able to ignore the fact that the stumbling embarrassment of her pride left a singe on him.

Some men just couldn't walk away from a fire - they either doused it or they dwelled in each flare up.

So he'd leaned into the heat of it and poured the gasoline. She'd acted so goddamn sure that she wanted him to prove that he could match her. He'd made a decision, hand catching on hers, that he was going to make her put up or shut the hell up. To her credit, she hadn't backed down – and that had led his hands over her. That had him breathing the rush of her into his lungs as she'd pulled him into her, Teller's warning be damned.

And what did it matter anymore that he'd done so?

What did it matter if she'd end him?

He was burning down round his own fucking boots anyhow.