Novels by Charis Jackson

Xena“The key,” Okafor whispered beside me, gripping my wrist hard enough to leave marks. “Xena, nobody in this room said the word key.”I turned to stare at him. His face was close to mine, his glasses sliding down his nose, while Pell sat back down at the side table.At the front of the room, the chair lowered her pen. She conferred with the two men in murmurs I couldn’t hear, her hand covering the microphone in front of her. Dante sat rigid at his table with his palms pressed flat against the wood.When the chair looked up again, she spoke directly to him.“Mr. Cross, this board was prepared to rule today,” she announced, folding her hands on top of her notes. “Given this complaint, we can’t. Our decision is deferred until bar counsel completes a review. We’ll reconvene in fourteen days.”Dante’s shoulders dropped an inch, and he kept his eyes on the table.“I understand, Madam Chair,” he answered, every word clipped short. “Thank you for your time.”“For what it’s worth,” she adde

Xena.“Fix my tie,” Dante muttered, stopping me in the hallway outside the hearing room. “Please. I’ve tied it four times, and it still looks like I did it in the dark.”I reached up and loosened the knot. His collar was damp under my fingers, and I could feel his pulse jumping against my knuckles while I worked. Down the corridor, a clerk with a cart of file boxes rolled past without looking at us.“It’s straight now,” I told him, smoothing the silk flat against his shirt. “Herald would approve.”A short laugh escaped him. He caught my hand before I could lower it and pressed it flat over his heart while he breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth.“First row,” he reminded me under his breath.“First row,” I promised. “I’m not going anywhere.”Footsteps came up the corridor behind us. Okafor hurried toward us with his b

Xena“Get out of my way,” Foster growled, his face blotched red. “I’m taking it to the police myself. Right now. My mother can hate me for it after.”“Which station are you going to, and which officer?” Dante asked, standing his ground. “If you walk in off the street and hand that key to whoever’s at the front desk, there’s no record of where it came from. Any defense lawyer will get it thrown out before a jury ever sees it.”“Then let them throw it out!” Foster shouted. The man in the wheelchair turned his head toward us. “My brother’s been dead for fifty-two years, and the police never questioned a single person!”I took two steps toward them with my hands raised, unsure which of them I meant to calm. Behind me, I heard the soft hiss of the room door again, and I turned around.Cassandra stood in the doorway of 412, gripping the frame with one hand and

Xena“I have no idea how Gerald got that key,” Dante answered, rubbing the back of his neck. “I swear it to you, Cassandra. I barely knew the man. He was a name at the head of the table at Christmas, and I was a kid at the far end of it.”Cassandra kept the key raised between them. Her hand trembled, and the brass caught the light from the window each time it moved.Foster came around the foot of the bed. He stopped an arm’s length from Dante, close enough that I could smell stale coffee on his breath.“Your family,” he said, cold and very quiet. “Your family had my brother’s key in a gift box for eleven years while my mother kept a spare in her kitchen drawer and wondered.”“Foster,” I began, rising from my knees. “Dante didn’t...”“Let him answer,” Foster snapped, without taking his eyes off Dante. “He’s a lawyer. He can speak for himself.”I bit the inside of my cheek and closed my mouth when Dante’s fingers squeezed my shoulder once.The nurse at the computer cart had stopped pret

Xena“You’ve had this for how long?” Foster demanded, staring at the brown paper box in my hands with his fists clenched. “Since your wedding? Since before I even knew your name?”We were standing just inside the door of room 412. It was barely eight in the morning, and the breakfast cart was still parked in the hallway behind us, filling the air with the smell of powdered eggs and burnt coffee.“Eleven years,” I admitted, holding the box against my stomach with both hands. “I didn’t know what was inside, Foster. I opened it for the first time last night.”“Eleven years.” He laughed once, a hard, ugly sound that made the nurse at the computer cart look up. “You’ve been carrying my brother’s picture around in a box for eleven years, and you never once thought to look inside?”The nurse kept her eyes on her screen, though her fingers had stopped typing. Heat spread across the back of my neck, and the brown paper crinkled under my tightening grip. I made myself stand still and hold his s

Xena."Tell me now," I said softly, setting two mugs of tea on the kitchen table. "All of it. You said later, and it's later."Dante sat with his elbows on the table and his chin resting on his laced fingers. The wall behind him still showed the patch of new plaster he had put up the night after our fight, and the paint we had rolled on together had dried into uneven stripes.He looked at the mug for a long time without picking it up."I had just finished college," he started, his voice so low that I leaned in to catch it. "I was still living in the room over my parents' garage. Everyone at dinner talked about Herald like he was already dead. My mother said his name once, and my father put his fork down so hard that a plate cracked."I wrapped both hands around my own mug. The heat stung my palms, and I held on anyway."Nobody told me the date of the sentencing," he went on, tracing the rim of the mug with one finger. "I found it in the news

CAMILLA.We ate in silence while the weight of everything I had done sat like a stone in the center of my chest.The dining room of the mansion was the kind of space that made ordinary people feel small. Julian sat to my right, his hand occasionally brushing my knee under the table like he was trying to reassure me, or maybe reassure himself. Across from me, at the head of the table, sat the man who had fucked me until I forgot my own name less than twenty-four hours earlier.His father.The man I had dropped to my knees for. The man whose cock I had choked on until mascara ran down my cheeks. Now he was sitting there in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled just enough to show the same forearms that had pinned my wrists to the mattress, blue eyes that refused to look away for more than a few seconds at a time.I kept my gaze mostly on my plate. The food was nice, but every bite tasted like ash. My throat kept closing. Every time I swallowed I had to fight the urge to gag.Guilt sat hea

SIENNA.The office door was still half-open when Ethan’s voice slid through it like a knife finding the softest place between my ribs.“What’s our captain’s sister and the coach doing together in private…?”I froze with my hand still on the handle. Damon’s phone was face-down on the desk now, the grainy photo of us walking into the hotel lobby no longer glowing, but the image burned behind my eyes anyway. My black dress suddenly felt too thin. The ache between my legs pulsed once, like my body wanted to remind me exactly why the photo existed.Ethan stepped fully inside, eyes moving from my face to Damon’s and back again. “Do you perhaps have a crush on her?” he asked, the question light enough to pretend it was a joke.Damon’s expression didn’t change, but the air in the small office thickened. He straightened, clipboard still in one hand, and looked at Ethan the way he probably looked at players who missed an assignment.“Watch your mouth, Ethan.” His voice was low, controlled, the

CAMILLA.“Who’s that?” Maya called from behind me, still half-naked and completely unbothered by the fact that the bartender’s cum was probably still drying on the inside of her thigh.The door swung wider and Julian shoved his way inside. His hair was a mess, eyes red-rimmed, the same shirt he’d been wearing yesterday now wrinkled and half-untucked. He looked like he hadn’t slept.“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” he said, voice tight. “Where the hell have you been?”I crossed my arms, the black dress from last night still clinging to me, the faint scent of sex still trapped in the fabric. “That’s none of your business.”Maya stepped up beside me, hands on her hips. “Yeah, that’s right. It’s none of your fucking business.”Julian’s jaw flexed. He ignored her completely and locked eyes with me. “Look, Camilla… I know I hurt you. I’m sorry. What happened yesterday was a mistake.”The word landed wrong, I felt my lip curl. “Mistake, huh? What kind of mistake was that? She was eve

CAMILLA.My step faltered the second those eyes locked on mine. I couldn’t tell if it was the whiskey swimming through my blood or if the man in front of me was simply that devastating. His eyes were beautifully blue, the kind that looked like they’d seen every dirty secret a woman could have and still wanted more. Something about the shape of his mouth, the way the silver at his temples caught the low club light, tugged at a memory I couldn’t quite reach. He looked familiar in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but the alcohol and the ache between my legs made it impossible to care.“Hey,” he said. The word rolled out deep, low, the kind of voice that vibrated in my chest.I swallowed. “Can I sit?”He didn’t smile, not really. Just a small tilt of his mouth as he stood and pulled the chair out for me like it was the most natural thing in the world.I glanced back toward the bar and Maya was watching, grinning like a cat. I winked and she winked back, lifting

CAMILLA.I stood frozen in the doorway of what was supposed to be our bedroom. Julian scrambled for the sheets like a man drowning, yanking them up over his hips to hide the cock that was still glistening and hard from being inside someone else. Vivienne looked like she’d seen a ghost, eyes wide, lips parted, dark hair tangled across the pillow that still smelled faintly of my shampoo from last week.“Shit…Camilla,” Julian said, voice cracking. “I promise, this is not what you think it is.”My mouth opened but nothing came out at first. The air felt thick, like I was breathing through wet cotton. I could still hear the sound of him pulling out of her a second earlier. I could still see the way her thighs had been trembling.“So this is why you decided to leave early, huh?” The words finally came, thin and shaking. Tears burned the corners of my eyes so hard I had to blink them back. “The compulsory meeting. The flight you had to catch. You left me in that hotel room still horny so y

CAMILLA.“Oh… fuck me, Daddy…”I moaned as he thrust into my pussy pagain, the words spilling out before I could stop them.Julian’s hips snapped forward hard, driving his cock deep enough that the head of it nudged against that sweet spot I almost never got to feel. My fingers dug into the sheets, legs wrapping tighter around his waist as if I could force him to stay there, to keep moving, to finally fucking finish me for once.The hotel room smelled like sex, I didn’t even remember the name of the place. All I knew was that we had one more night before he flew out again, and I was determined to make it count.He pulled out without warning.I felt the sudden emptiness like a slap. Then the warm, sticky ropes of his cum painted across my stomach, some of it landing just above my navel, a few drops sliding down toward the neat strip of hair I kept trimmed for him. He groaned low in his throat, the sound of a man who had gotten exactly what he came for, and rolled off me onto his back