Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Collapsed. Pulverized to raw meat.
He didn’t remember pulling the trigger.
Hunter locked Jack’s slick arms behind his back in an unbreakable iron hold.
“Relax, comrade.” Hunter’s breath was steady against the back of Jack’s skull. “Nothing you can do now.”
Jack jerked and thrashed, but he couldn’t break free.
Screaming. She was screaming.
“Let go!”
“Nyet.” He forcefully jerked Jack back as he tried to go to her. “Be still.”
Her screams fractured, dissolving into jagged sobs that splintered into hyperventilation. The sound gutted him, driving him to his knees, but Hunter still wouldn’t let go.
She cowered in the corner. Cole angled his body as a barrier between her and the carnage on the floor. Feet planted wide as he shouted into a radio.
Her destroyed dress hung from one shoulder, bare chest streaked with blood.
Not hers.
Don’t let it be hers.
Her screams wilted into guttural, hitching sobs as she covered her eyes.
Blood misted the floor and walls.
The ringing in his skull swelled. His vision swam.
“Daisy.” Her name cracked in his throat like dry wood splitting.
She couldn’t hear him. Wouldn’t look at him.
Ash stepped over the carnage and crouched before her. “Come with me, little rabbit.”
She looked up at him, not Jack, clear terror written in her eyes.
Ash took her hand and slowly helped her stand. He adjusted the strap of her dress and waved someone over.
“Vanessa. Take her to a guest room. Don’t leave her side.”
“Come with me, little darling. That’s it.”
Where are they taking her?
“I have to go—” Jack’s words cut off as Hunter jerked him back.
She didn’t look back.
Jack lunged. Hunter’s arms crushed tighter, absorbing the full force of his thrashing like a stone wall absorbs a storm. A grating sound ripped from his throat that had no language in it. Hunter didn’t budge. Didn’t speak. Just restrained him as he watched them take her away.
Jack threw himself forward. His voice cracked into something raw and wordless as his chest split open.
Ash straightened and turned to Cole. “See that this is cleaned up and handled.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ash adjusted his cuff and didn’t look at the body again. “The doctor wasn’t feeling well. Had to leave before dawn.”
Cole’s jaw tightened. “Understood.”
Tremors wracked Jack’s frame in rolling waves.
“Breathe, comrade,” Hunter said quietly. “What is done cannot be undone.”
Jack stared at the empty wall where she’d been huddled. His eyes zeroed in on the faint smear of blood.
She didn’t look back.
She didn’t look back.
She didn’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Drowning
“Sir?”
Nick’s voice reverberated from far away—muffled—as if speaking under water.
“Sir?”
Jack stared at the swirling text on the page. Detached words floating. Muscles too heavy to move. Eyes too still to blink. He sat in a sort of paralysis, book in hand, clothed, but he wasn’t there. Just his mind. His ceaseless mind and the echoes of her screams that never faded.
“Jack, you have a phone call.”
Slowly, he looked up at Nick, staring from the doorway of his study, and frowned. “How long have you been standing there?”
Concern flashed in his eyes. He lifted the phone to his ear. “Mr. Thorne will have to call you back.” He clicked off the phone and sighed. “Jack, maybe you should talk to someone.”
He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted to talk to her.
Two weeks dissolved like smoke. Fourteen days of sitting in the same chair, in the same study, reading the same page of a book he couldn’t absorb. The fire had long since gone cold. Grey ash settled over the hearth like the residue of something cremated. His bourbon sat untouched on the side table, the amber liquid catching what little light bled through the curtains he refused to open.
He was a master of secrets. A manipulator. A choreographing maestro who conducted nightmares for some and wet dreams for others. A sick, twisted fuck who played jazz over people’s screams. A blemish. A lie. A coward who hid behind masks and balconies.
Jack learned early in life, he could scream until his throat bled and no savior would come. For years, the chancellor’s servants moved like ghosts, deaf and blind to the suffering of a child.
So he learned to suffocate hope before it could breathe.
Learned to live without expectation the way a body learns to live without a limb.
Learned not to reach for what wasn’t there.
Until her.
She crawled under his skin and rearranged every defense he spent decades constructing. Dismantled him with the efficiency of someone who didn’t know her own power, and when the dust settled, when she finally saw the monster he warned her of, none of it mattered.
Nick lingered in the doorway, backlit by the hall. His posture carried the same patient authority it always had.
“Jack—”
“Leave me alone.”
Nick stepped into the study with quiet defiance. Not the obedient retreat of a man following orders. “Jack. Please.” His voice roughened at the edges. “You can talk to me.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Nick lowered himself into the leather chair across from Jack’s desk without waiting for permission. His hands settled on the armrests, fingers loose. “I know you better than anyone, Jack.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, resembling the tutor who once sat on the floor, teaching a brutalized boy the names of constellations so he’d have something beautiful to hold when the dark pressed in. “I’ve watched you defeat giants.” His voice carried the low, measured weight of a man choosing each word carefully. “Even as a boy, you stood up to those twice your size. What makes you think you can’t conquer this?”