CHAPTER 12 - DAMAGED CONTROL

*Jace's POV*

His father was waiting in the kitchen when Mason dropped him home, and one look at his face told Jace the bruised knuckles weren't going to be the biggest problem of the night.

"Sit down."

Jace sat.

Senator Ryland set his phone on the counter, screen up, already open to a headline that made Jace's stomach fold in on itself. **RYLAND'S SON IN CLUB BRAWL AMID FATHER'S RE-ELECTION PUSH.** Beneath it, a blurry photo someone had taken on their phone .... Jace mid-swing, face twisted into something he barely recognized as his own.

"Care to explain?"

"Some guy was running his mouth. I told him to stop. He didn't."

"Running his mouth about what?"

Jace's jaw tightened. He hadn't planned on saying it out loud, not here, not to his father, not with the word *love* anywhere near a sentence he was about to speak in this kitchen.

"Nothing important."

"It's important enough that you broke a nineteen-year-old's jaw in front of forty witnesses with camera phones three months before election day." His father's voice stayed level, which was somehow worse than shouting. "So try again."

"He was talking trash about someone from school."

"Someone."

"Ezra Monroe."

His father went very still. His eyes flicked toward the window, then back, and his jaw worked once like he was chewing on a number he didn't like the size of

"The Monroe boy."

"Yeah."

"You got into a bar fight," his father said slowly, "defending Thomas Monroe's son."

"It wasn't a bar. And I wasn't defending...." Jace stopped himself, because he had absolutely no good way to finish that sentence that wouldn't make things worse.

His father studied him for a long moment, and Jace had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling of being read like a page.

"This story runs for exactly one more news cycle," his father said finally, "and then it disappears, or it follows you into every headline for the rest of this campaign. Do you understand that?"

"I understand you care more about the headline than what actually happened."

"I care about not handing your mother's opponent a gift-wrapped scandal three months out." His father's voice sharpened for the first time. "You want to know what the headline could have read? *Ryland's Son Assaults Teen Over Rival Senator's Child.* Do you have any idea what that does to us? To the campaign your mother has worked four years for?"

"So what, I should've just stood there?"

"You should have walked away."

"I couldn't."

The words came out before Jace could stop them, quieter than he meant, and something in his own voice surprised him enough that he looked away first.

His father was quiet for a long moment.

"You couldn't," he repeated, like he was turning the phrase over, looking for something underneath it.

"No."

"Why not?"

Jace didn't have an answer that wouldn't blow up everything sitting quietly in his chest for the last month, so he said nothing at all, and his silence apparently told his father more than any explanation could have.

His father exhaled slowly, rubbing a hand down his face, looking older than he had ten minutes ago.

"You will apologize publicly," he said. "A brief statement. Regret, maturity, lesson learned, all the usual language. Robert will draft it in the morning."

"Fine."

"And you will not go anywhere near a club, a party, or anything remotely photographable for the rest of the summer."

"Fine."

His father studied him again, something unreadable in his expression now, quieter than the anger had been.

"This isn't like you," he said. "Fighting over someone. Especially not..." He didn't finish it, but the pause did the work anyway .... *especially not the Monroe boy* .... and Jace felt his face go hot.

"It's not a big deal."

"You broke a bone in a stranger's face over him, Jace. It's clearly some kind of deal."

Jace had nothing to say to that, mostly because it was true, and he hated that it was true, and he hated more that his father had noticed it faster than Jace had let himself admit it.

The statement ran two days later .... carefully worded, forgettable, exactly as boring as it was designed to be. The story faded from local news by the weekend, chased off the front page by an actual policy debate between his mother and Thomas Monroe that turned considerably uglier than any bar fight.

Jace watched the debate from the couch that Thursday night, his father's campaign staff clustered in the next room murmuring about polling numbers. Senator Monroe stood at his podium delivering some line about accountability and leadership, sharp enough to draw blood, and Jace found himself staring past the man entirely, thinking about the house across the street. The dark window. The door that had clicked shut and never opened again.

His mother caught him looking distracted and misread it entirely.

"Don't worry about the polls," she said, squeezing his shoulder on her way past. "We'll be fine."

Jace almost laughed. The polls were the last thing on his mind.

He went upstairs after the debate ended, sat by his window out of habit, and looked at the dark house across the street the way he had every night for weeks. Somewhere in that house, Ezra's mother was probably watching the same debate, listening to the same sharp exchange between their fathers, carrying the same tired weight Jace had seen in her eyes on the porch.

He thought about the fight. About the word *pathetic* and how fast his hand had moved before his brain had caught up to it.

He thought about what his father had said, quiet and almost gentle, the closest thing to concern Jace had heard from him in years.

*This isn't like you.*

He wasn't sure it wasn't, anymore. He wasn't sure of much these days, except that somewhere between three years of jokes and one silent hallway, something in him had rearranged itself into a shape he didn't recognize ... one that apparently threw punches over Ezra Monroe's name and meant it.

Summer crawled forward, slow and quiet and empty.