by Meli Raine
“JANE!” Silas shouts as he starts to jog toward me. I don’t want to talk to him. Don’t want to touch him. Don’t want to deal with the screwed up circuitry that connects us at the same time it shorts out, leaving me with a tangled mess of wires and no current. It feels like failure. I’ve failed in every way possible.
I can’t even love right.
He breaks into a full sprint, coming at me like a tank on full speed, inevitable and awe-inspiring. I don’t want to feel this way about him.
I can’t help but feel this way about him.
“Leave me alone,” I tell him. Duff gets out of the SUV and stands next to the door. He’s not tense. Just waiting. He watches us for cues.
I’m tired of being watched. It’s exhausting to know your very existence is a performance.
“Don’t listen to her,” Silas tells me. “What she said about your mother –”
“It’s not just what she said,” I try to explain, but the very act of making words with my mouth is glacially impossible, like moving a continent with a spoon and a bucket. “It’s how she made me feel. I’m tired of being made to feel like I am worthless.”
“I don’t think that.” I hear the words as I climb into the back seat, Silas following.
My hand stings from slapping Jenna. My ears clog slightly as Silas closes the car door. I look at him. The air is grainy and intense, my breath coming in stilted, shallow gasps that make me light headed.
“What you think doesn’t matter. How I feel when I’m with you does.”
Forcing myself to remember to breathe, I turn away from him. I’m surrounded by more people than ever.
And yet I’m so lonely.
Our phones start buzzing like mad. Mine rings. I look at the number.
Lindsay.
I look quickly at my most popular social media accounts. I can always call Lindsay back.
Notifications are blowing up. One hundred, two hundred...
And counting.
“Someone already got video of you slapping Jenna. Posted it on a free video site. Shit,” Silas says, looking at his phone, scrolling. “This is bad.”
“Define ‘bad’? On a scale of one to ten, ten being my mom died in prison and my car got bombed.”
“Six?”
“I can handle six. Bring it on, six.”
I answer the phone on the last ring, Lindsay breathing hard in my ear.
“You slapped her!” she crows, giddy. “Thank you!”
“Thank you?”
“I’ve wanted to do that for years. Closest I got was shoving Mandy into the water at the shops downtown. You actually slapped Jenna!”
“You saw the video?”
“Drew’s guys caught it. They’re trying to stop it, but too many people grabbed it. There’s only so much suppression the tech team can do,” Lindsay explains.
“I don’t care.”
“Good. She deserved it.”
“You don’t know what she did.”
“Oh, she did plenty five years ago.”
“She made a crack about my mom. And begged for Drew’s team to protect her.”
“WHAT?” Lindsay screeches. “That bitch wants my husband – who was drugged and violated by those assholes five years ago – to protect her?”
“Yes. Mandy wanted protection, too.”
“Screw them! I hope you dug your nails in when you slapped her.”
“It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t plan it.”
“I’ve imagined it for years.”
“Really? I mean, Jenna was the follower.”
“Jenna is dumb as a box of rocks.”
“That is an insult to rocks,” Silas mutters under his breath. Lindsay is speaking so loudly, he can hear her, and I don’t even have her on speakerphone.
“Look, I called because Drew showed me the clip. It’s short. But there’s also a screenshot of you as you slap her that is going up everywhere. Twitter is crazy already.”
“When is Twitter not crazy?”
“Just know that you’re in the news cycle. Again.”
“Oh, no. How will I ever manage?”
“If you need to talk, we’re still at the Lilac. Drew likes the room service.”
“Drew has opinions about food? I thought he was raised in Sparta and dines on hard tack and MREs.”
Silas laughs.
“Only when I’m not around,” Lindsay says with a laugh. It’s bitter. Devoid of emotion in that creepy way people who’ve been abused develop as a coping mechanism. Nothing about this conversation is funny.
And yet we laugh.
“The slap heard ’round the world is going to cause you problems today, Jane,” she says.
“Not if I ignore my phone and the internet.”
“True. Reality creeps in when we least want it, but nothing about being online is reality, right?”
“Call me,” she says, her voice caring. “I mean it.”
“I will.”
Silas has set his phone aside. He stares at me. “We’ve got it covered. Scrubbing as much as we can. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.”
“I know. I take ownership. I slapped her. Some paparazzi got it on video. We chose to meet in a big, wide-open space.”
“And you walked away with Jenna intact. That’s better than what happened to Tara and Mandy,” he points out.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
“But it’s true, Silas.” I sigh as I say his name. “I wish it weren’t true. They’re garbage human beings but that doesn’t mean they deserved to die. And so violently.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“Me? I’m fine. No one’s tried to kill me for how many days? I’m on a roll. Someone needs to make one of those signs for me. You know, the kind at construction sites? This Worksite Has Been Murder-Attempt Free for X Days.”
He just stares.
“We need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Jane.” I know he’s trying hard not to touch me. I can tell.
I can tell because I’m fighting the same impulse.
My silence makes him try again.
“Can we just... talk? Man to woman? Person to person? I’m not going to attempt to persuade you. This isn’t about who is right or wrong. I miss you. I miss talking to you. I miss – I don’t know.”
“How can you miss me when you’ve been around me most of the time?”
“I just do. There’s a huge difference between being inside someone’s inner world and being shunned from it. It’s not even about being able to touch you.” There. He said it. My heart speeds up. My body feels like it’s on fire. He’s being open and trying to get me to open up, too.
I close my eyes and see his hand, outstretched to me, offering a sturdy, stable way to cross the chasm.
I can’t.
I just can’t.
I want to, though. God, how I want to.
“Yes,” is all I can say. “I feel it, too. The distance.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Then why does it feel so fatalistic? So impossible?”
“Because feelings are feelings. We can’t control how we feel. We can only control how we react.”
“That is so clichéd.”
“Clichés are true.”
“They’re also unhelpful. They take very complex, nuanced situations and turn them into simple platitudes.”
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” he says. The non sequitur throws me off.
“Huh?”
“Live simply so that others may simply live.”
“Are you trolling me to my face?”
“Let go or be dragged.”
“Shut up, Silas.” I can’t help it. I smile.
“I made you laugh.”
“You made me smile.”
“You’re beautiful when you smile.”
“And you’re a pain in the ass when you’re persistent.”
“I am always persistent. I just do
it quietly.”
“Then you’re always a pain in the ass.”
“That’s a start. It makes you pay attention to me.”
“Any attention is good attention?”
“It is when it comes to you.”
“I feel... weak.” There. I said it. I confessed to the secret that isn’t a secret.
“You?” His eyebrows go up. “Weak?”
“When it comes to you, yes.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and his suit jacket tightens around his shoulders, bunching slightly. The move exposes his gun belt. “You’re weak with me?”
“Around you. Not that you make me weak. I feel like I’m giving in if I forgive you. Like I’m ceding a piece of myself to you that I’ll never get back.”
“That’s intense.”
“Try carrying it around inside you all the time.”
“No, thanks. I’ve got more than enough rolling around inside me.” His hand makes a big circle around his torso. “This body is full.”
I go quiet.
“It’s not weak to talk about finding a way back to each other, Jane. And I do want that. Very much.”
Why am I holding back?
“Do you want that?” he pursues. The fact that he’s not touching me is driving me mad.
“I don’t know what I want.”
“Well, I do. I do know what I want. And when you decide what you want, just tell me. Directly. No more secrets. No more lies. No more omissions. I don’t want to play this game of subterfuge with you anymore. You get to choose your life. You get to choose who you want in it. But let me be crystal clear: I want you. I want you very, very badly. I also understand that I hurt you. That feelings aren’t binary. We don’t turn them on and off with a switch. It takes time to get from one place to another inside.”
He crosses the last few inches of space between us, his hand covering mine.
“Take all the time you need.”
Some obstacle inside me drops away. Some roadblock on the path between us magically moves. His hand on mine is the first time in the last thirty-six hours when I don’t feel like I’m splintered into a thousand pieces. This feels good. This feels nice.
This feels whole.
“Thanks.” I leave my hand. We sit like this together.
I am not alone.
You don’t realize how busy your mind is until you see it from the outside. The only way to observe your own mind is to stop spinning. To let yourself fall. In the peace of being at rest, you can compare. Rest vs. motion. Rush vs. contemplation. Worry vs. abundance.
And maybe – just maybe – in the stillness I can find a way back.
Back to him.
Back to a future.
Back to me.
“Gentian,” Duff says from the front. “Paulson wants that meeting.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“With Jane?”
“No.”
I pull my hand away. I know it’s not Silas’s fault that Mark doesn’t want me at the meeting, but rejection is rejection.
“Whatever it is, I’ll tell you if I can,” he says, as if trying to make up for it.
“I know you will.”
“Do you?” He moves his head, shifting his weight to rotate enough to face me, one hundred percent of all that is Silas facing me. Through sheer will I take him on, meeting his gaze. I see sincerity. Virtue. Honor. Brilliance. Calculation. Danger.
Truth.
Loyalty.
Love?
Silas
My work phone rings.
My personal phone rings, too.
Adrenaline surges through me. This is bad.
Earlier today, I left Jane at the Lilac Inn. Headed to Drew’s office to fill out paperwork and make sure the tech team’s on top of that stupid video of Jane slapping Jenna. I’m headed for Mark’s meeting in Santa Monica right now, driving with my head deep in details I need to track. Drew’s at Mark’s place already, and I want to know why the hell Jane couldn’t come.
I was going to wait until I got there, but this is even better, because that’s Drew’s number on the line.
I grab my work phone first. “Gentian.”
“Jenna is dead.” Drew’s voice is all business.
I’m not surprised. “Damn it. Already? We were just there what – six hours ago?”
“Five,” he responds, all flat and business-like.
I look at the clock. “How?”
“Overdose. No history of addiction. Zero. But that doesn’t matter. By the time the internet gets hold of the story, she’ll be a two-bit heroine-whore who has been shooting up since she was in utero.”
“Heroin OD? Or pills?”
“Heroin. Cops found her in a crack house.”
“Crack house?”
“Any sense she was using?”
“She was rail thin, but no. No sores. No picking. No twitching.” Then again, my sister didn’t have those symptoms, so...
“One of the officers got sick from fentanyl powder.”
“Sounds like the way my sister died.”
Drew stays silent.
“You don’t think they’re connected?”
“They’re testing the fentanyl. I didn’t tell you this before, but some new information about Tricia’s death came through.”
“What the hell, Drew?” I yell into my phone.
“Calm your tits, Gentian. It just came through an hour or so ago. The fentanyl in Tricia’s system was a special kind.”
“I know that. You have new info?”
“Designer fentanyl. Connected to Claudia Landau and turns out this is a type specifically associated with the Russian mafia.”
“The Russians killed my sister? You sound like a bad social media meme, Drew.”
“Most days I feel like one. But no, not a joke. Not a bad meme. Not fake news.”
“Tricia had nothing to do with the Russian mafia. Or Mexican druglords’ daughters.”
“If she was mixing fentanyl with her heroin, she absolutely did.”
“And now Jenna ‘overdoses.’” I emphasize the word, making it clear I’m suspicious. “You said you’re testing the fentanyl?”
“Yep.”
“Think they’re connected?”
“Yep. But we need proof.”
“When will lab tests come in?”
“Few days.”
“Anyone else know about the possible connection?”
“We’ve kept it as quiet as possible.”
I sigh. “I’ll break it to Jane. Don’t have Duff or Romeo or any of the other guys do it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it. Why did they want those three women dead? And who’s next?”
“You know damn well who’s next, Gentian.”
“No. She won’t be.”
“I know that. You know that. But this is just a circle jerk. We can’t stop what we don’t know. And if they get to her before we can get to them...” Drew goes quiet.
“Any sign of danger to Lindsay?”
“No. Not more than the usual.”
“Harry and Monica?”
“No.”
“So this really is all about Jane,” I say, reeling.
“I’d rephrase it: this is about all the people who have been killed before Jane. Jane’s their final target. Why? If it’s all connected, then this goes back to my parents’ car accident. Mark’s mom and dad. Tara, Mandy, and now Jenna. The courier who was driving the blood samples. All the attempts on Lindsay’s life last year. Anya.”
“You’re putting Anya’s death in the same category?”
“I am now. Hell, Mark’s adding Carrie’s father’s death in there, too. He might have only been connected to El Brujo, but who the fuck knows? That picture of Monica with him has meaning.”
“What does it mean? Sure, we know it’s all connected, but knowing something and proving it are two differ
ent things. And whoever is pulling the strings here is setting Jane up.”
“Get over here, Gentian. We’re at Mark’s place. We need to talk in private.”
“I should get back to Jane.”
“Duff’s got her. She’s on a news blackout. No one will tell her what’s going on unless –”
“Unless Lindsay calls her again.”
“Again? What do you mean, again?”
“Lindsay’s the one who told Jane about the viral video of her slapping Jenna.” The implication of that starts to hit me. “Shit. We need damage control. That slap is going to be considered some kind of violent assault and people will connect it to Jenna’s death.”
“Jane didn’t slap her to death.”
“No, but our informant had no problem trying to link Jane to my sister’s death. To the fentanyl. Now Jenna dies from a similar overdose profile?” I point out.
“Jesus,” he whispers. “You’re right.”
“I should go get her.”
“Paulson says it needs to be just us,” Drew insists.
“Paulson’s wrong.”
“Paulson is never wrong.”
“Neither are you, and you were wrong about Jane.”
He sucks air in sharply. I’ve pissed him off. Good. A pissed-off Drew gets shit done. His rumbling, aggravated sigh means I’ve won. “Fine. She can come, but Mark isn’t going to be happy.”
“Since when does Mark’s happiness matter?”
“Good point. Just take a few different cars and make sure Jane wears a disguise.”
“You serious?”
“I’m serious. Mark lives with his brother and his girlfriend, and some other family. Three apartments in a triple-decker near the Santa Monica pier. He’s super protective of his brother. Mark has no problem with Jane knowing information. It’s her presence that bugs him.”
“Then let’s meet on the beach.”
“Hang on. Let me text him.”
I wait, pulling the car over on the shoulder of the road. The trip between the Lilac Inn and Santa Monica is winding and filled with quiet roads. I don’t need to focus on driving as much, which is good.
Because all I can think about is Jenna’s death.
And how Jane is going to be set up as the fall guy.
Chapter 11
Jane
Lavender tea, a new book from my favorite romantic comedy author, and a tray of chocolate-dipped shortbread cookies.