Jason felt the room like a thing against his skin — the cheap wallpaper, the single bulb swinging, the faint grease-sweet of takeout cold on the table. He sat on the edge of the chair the way someone sits on a ledge, knees ready to spring or to fall. His boots didn't touch the floor the same when he leaned forward; they tapped, restless. He kept his hands in sight. Habit. Control.

When he looked at them, it was all sharpened edges: the set of their shoulders, the way their jaw clenched around something they wouldn't say. He had watched them for a year — laughed with them, drank with them, let them think they were trusted. That made the knife in his chest worse than the one outside his door.

"You thought you could keep it from me," he said. His voice was low enough that the words might have been mistaken for breath. "You thought you were clever. Cute even." A smile that wasn't a smile tugged, then died. "You reported to your bosses like a good little rat. You told them what they wanted so they could sleep."

He let that sit. The chair creaked when he shifted; small domestic sounds, ordinary. It made the betrayal feel absurdly small and enormous at once.

"If you walk out that door and back to them," he said, and there was the ghost of a laugh then, "you walk toward my father. Do you think he doesn't keep receipts? Do you think he forgives? He eats men who disappoint him for breakfast." He tapped the table with a finger, counting nothing. "You'd make him look. You'd give him the rope."

Jason's hands curled. The knuckles went white. He had learned how to make his temper small and sharp — a thing to be used, not wasted. "And me? You think I want to bring him anything? Do you think I want to feed him what you are?" His throat worked. "I'd rather die with you than watch him take you apart to make some token of his control. That's not love. That's not loyalty. That's…"

He swallowed. The sentence broke, replaced by the sound of his breath. He let his forehead rest momentarily against his fist. When he raised his head again, there was the boy in it and the blade — both familiar, both dangerous.

"I could go to him," he said. "I could tell him. Do you understand what that would do?" His voice dropped. "It would save me nothing. It would give me nothing but a bullet and a name for my hands that I couldn't scrub off." He leaned close enough that the scent of his jacket — leather and cigarette smoke and something like old pennies — braided with the stale air. "And you? You'd be gone. I'd live with that. I can't live with that."

There was pleading in what he said, and there was a promise. Different faces of the same thing. "Stay," he told them simply. No flourish. No begging that swelled into theatrics. "Stay, and I'll make a place for you here. Not as a kept thing, not as a token — as someone who belongs. Work for me. Not for him. Not for those mouths that chew men into stories."

His hand found the scar at his throat, an old map of mistakes. He traced it like a benediction, like a threat. "I can protect you. I can give you a life where you don't have to lie to breathe. I can keep you from being washed away while he picks at the bones." The lights above hummed. Outside, a siren sighed then died.

"If you say no," Jason added, and the room shifted with the weight of the alternative, "I go to Father. I tell him. And you'll die, sure. But so will I. He won't let me live knowing you slipped through my fingers because I was too soft. You think his wrath spares his son? It crucifies him."

His laugh then was wet and quick. "So you see the choice, right? Work with me. Be with me. Live. Or refuse, and we'll both be swallowed by the thing we tried to take apart." He pushed back in the chair, the posture of someone offering a bargain he'd already decided to accept if they would only agree.

Jason's eyes softened in a flash of something older than anger — possession, fear, love tangled so tight it hurt. "I don't want to be the monster that brings you to him," he said. "I want to be the reason you stay alive. Let me be that."