Axel’s adrenaline crash hit all at once; his arms felt heavy, his legs unsteady. But he felt lighter inside as his gaze swept over Ashe, checking for anything that needed immediate attention.

  Ashe’s skin was already a patchwork, some places the light pink of newly healed flesh, others their usual warm caramel. He wasn’t like the other Jumpers they usually saw.

  He’d clearly been injured more than once, granulation tissue of varying pinkness lined his chest, ribs and arms. And yet he seemed…fine. Minimal scarring. Only a few superficial cuts and bruises. It was strange. The only real problem was his shoulder. It gave a dull pop when he tried to lift his arm. Someone had set it wrong—probably Ashe himself.

  He wrapped gauze around Ashe’s shoulder. When Axel pulled it snug, Ashe flinched, but said nothing; his jaw just tightened, teeth grinding against teeth.

  It felt like the pain hit Axel instead. His stomach twisted, and he had to look away from his son’s pinched face. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Ashe was supposed to be kept out of all this—a blind kid, a world apart from the cruelty outside their door. Lilly sat behind him, watching. The silence between them grew thick, pressure building with every passing second. Axel knew they had to talk—that they couldn’t avoid what this meant, or what was going to come next.

  He heard his wife’s pants whisper against each other as she stood. When she spoke, her voice was cold, measured, almost emotionless.

  “I think we need to talk. Meet me downstairs.”

  Axel glanced at Ashe, who visibly shivered. This clearly hadn’t been part of his plan. Something had gone wrong. The two of them stayed there in the bathroom, silence settling between them, thicker than usual.

  Axel cleared his throat, trying to lighten the mood, to get any reaction out of his son. “Well… we’d better not disappoint.”

  Ashe only looked at him for a heartbeat, then dropped his head. With a low groan, he pushed himself to his feet and shuffled toward the stairs.

  Axel stayed where he was, staring at his reflection in the mirror. His hair stuck out in wild tufts, dark circles pooled under his eyes, and a raw redness clung to his skin like a second, irritated layer.

  Axel planted his hands on his thighs and forced himself upright, steadying against the sink. He stared at his reflection and drew a long breath. What came next was the part of being a father he hated most.

  He took the stairs slowly, milking every step for a few more seconds of peace. A small, selfish part of him hoped the conversation would already be over by the time he reached the kitchen—that they’d somehow handled it without him.

  No such luck. They were still there, sitting at the table, waiting.

  He swallowed a sigh and dropped into the chair beside Lilly. He didn’t trust himself to start, so he just nodded toward her. She took it as the cue it was.

  She was at her scariest like this, her emotions tucked away behind a calm, careful mask. On the surface she looked composed, but Axel knew it would only take a single wrong word for that calm to explode.

  “Well, do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Ashe started to shake his head, but Lilly’s fingers clenched around the edge of the table. Her nails scraped hard across the surface. Ashe’s ears twitched at the sound, and the shake turned abruptly into a nod. He knew better than to test her temper—just as well as Axel did.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Okay, then tell me what happened. Why are you carrying a duffel bag with our kitchen knife in it—and why is it covered in blood?”

  Ashe’s voice, when it came, was calmer and more monotone than Axel expected. In that moment Axel realised how much his son had grown up. He wasn’t the frightened blind kid who’d gotten stuck in the playground his first week of school. The thought eased something tight in Axel’s chest.

  “First… I accidentally entered a portal.”

  The words hit him like a sledgehammer. He’d known it, even before Ashe said it, but hearing it aloud made it real.

  Lilly sucked in a sharp breath that came out almost like a hiss.

  “Accidentally?” Her fingers tightened around the edge of the table, knuckles turning white. “How do you enter a portal accidentally, Ashe?”

  Ashe’s shoulders hunched; his head dropped. “I was out walking. I was bored. It opened on top of me. I didn’t see it coming—clearly.”

  Axel almost chuckled at the dark joke, but swallowed it back. Wrong time. “What rank was it?”

  “The first one was F-rank,” Ashe said, turning his head slightly toward Axel’s voice.

  “The first one?” Lilly shot to her feet, leaning closer to him. “There was more than one?”

  Axel stood as well and set a hand between her shoulder blades. He didn’t need her to sit, just to calm down a little. Losing it wouldn’t help. “Start from the beginning,” he said.

  Ashe nodded slowly. Silence settled over the table like a heavy blanket while he scratched at his hair, lining the words up in his head.

  When he finally spoke, the story came in careful pieces—slow at first, then faster as the whole picture formed. Sneaking out. Stealing a kitchen knife. Convincing them to let him join judo so he could get to the guild. The first portal he hadn’t chosen. The second one he had. With every detail, he only incriminated himself more.

  If Axel hadn’t been so scared, he might almost have been proud. It was exactly the kind of reckless, stubborn plan a normal teenager would pull. Before the portals, the punishment would’ve been a lecture, grounding, maybe losing his phone.

  But everything was different now.

  Lilly turned to Axel; they shared a look. Some of the hardness had bled out of her eyes. She slid back into her chair and folded her arms.

  “If I told you to stop, would you?”

  The question dropped into the room like a stone down a well. For a moment there was no sound at all, all of them waiting for the echo.

  After a few seconds, Ashe shook his head. “No.”

  Axel had suspected as much, but Lilly trembled under his hand. Axel knew Ashe just wanted to be part of the world; pulling him out of school when the portals appeared had pushed him onto this path as much as anything.

  To his surprise, Lilly didn’t explode. When she spoke again, her voice had gone clinical—more doctor than mother.

  “Okay. Then if you’re going to keep doing this, I want your phone on you at all times. If anything happens or you need help, you call us. We’ll do our best to get to you—always. You tell us when you get a call, and when you’re home again. No more secrets. No more sneaking out.”

  Axel blinked. He’d braced for a long fight, thought he’d have to drag her to this point, but she’d gone there on her own. Fine by him.

  Ashe’s brows knit, just as surprised as Axel. Then he nodded quickly. “Thank you.”

  He half-stumbled, half-launched himself around the table, arms wrapping around both of them, tears slipping down his cheeks. His breath was warm against Axel’s face as he whispered, “I just wanted to help.”

  The words stung; they were the exact reason Axel had become a doctor.

  For a little while, sitting there in that messy, too-small kitchen, they felt like a real family. A strange one, but a family that cared about each other, fiercely.

  Ashe quietly left the room, heading upstairs. His exhaustion clear, but it seemed a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  -

  Ashe steadied himself on the railing, toes brushing lightly over the carpet as he felt his way up to his room. He couldn’t have expected that conversation to go much better—and still, he’d hoped he could’ve kept it secret a little longer.

  Was it ego? That stupid, selfish part of him that wanted to be like Clark Kent? Or just the way the whole thing had wrung him out, left him emotionally empty?

  He flopped onto his bed and lay there, no music, just his thoughts for company. His fingers found the guild ID in his pocket, the one they’d given him after the Introduction jump. He rubbed the card between his fingertips, then froze.

  His name wasn’t there.

  He could’ve sworn it had been engraved with raised letters on the front. Ashe Taylor Wilson.

  He was too tired for this. He let the card slip from his hand and hit the floor, then shut his eyes, hoping sleep would drag him under before he could convince himself to get up, brush his teeth, and change out of his clothes.