Chapter Sixteen
Jack gazed down at Annabelle’s sleeping face. A nasty bruise had blossomed across her right cheek bone and there was a bluish darkness beneath her long, thick lashes. Her skin was pale, her lips cracked. And she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on.
His fingers shook as he brushed a lock of her long hair from her forehead. The man who’d hit her hadn’t held anything back. He’d been angry at Jack’s foolish comment, that much Jack knew. And then Annabelle had prevented him from killing Jack, which hadn’t quelled the thug’s wrath any. He’d taken it out on Annabelle, striking with everything he had.
“How are you feeling?” a voice asked from behind Jack.
He turned to face Cassie, who was poking her head through the low door of the cabin. He shrugged, and then winced a little as he did so.
“I’m fine,” he told her. “Thanks for patching me up.”
“It’s my job.” Cassie shrugged, ducking into the cabin. “Or, it used to be.” She felt strange, now, making eye contact with the man who sat on the make-shift bed beside Annabelle. There was a lot about Jack Thane, and to be frank, his older friend from Texas, that made Cassie distinctly nervous.
During his rough treatment by the Colonel’s men, Jack had been sliced in several places, where someone’s rings or brass knuckles had dug into the flesh of his abdomen and sides and ripped gashes across his skin. By fortunate chance, other than a small cut on his left cheek, his face had been left intact, but more than a little bruised. Cassie had blithely asked for the necessary material to create stitches, which she honestly felt he needed on a few of the deeper cuts across his stomach. But she’d only meant it as a joke since they were on a boat and nowhere near an emergency room.
However, Samuel Price had produced the materials without so much as batting an eye, and Jack seemed to think nothing of it.
That was strange enough. To add to it, however, was the fact that when she’d been tending Thane’s wounds, she’d noticed two very palpable things about him. One, he had a body like granite. It was large and sculpted and rigid and it looked, for lack of a better descriptor, incredibly functional. She doubted he ever ate carbs.
Two, there were scars. A lot of them. Some of them weren’t at all small.
Plus, there was this relatively old tattoo on his left shoulder. She could tell it was old because another scar actually ran through the tattoo. The color was also no longer exceptionally vivid. It took several years for a tattoo’s color to fade. This tattoo was enigmatic. A number and a strange symbol. It wasn’t like any she’d ever seen before. She couldn’t help but wonder what it meant. She also couldn’t help but wonder whether Annabelle had ever seen the tattoo. And whether she knew what it meant.
Cassie was vitally aware, now, that there was not only a lot about Jack Thane she didn’t know, but that whatever it was, it was… violent. And she wasn’t sure she was interested in ever learning what it was.
She moved forward to place the palm of her hand against Annabelle’s forehead. She pulled one of Annabelle’s eyelids up, and then the other. Then she moved her hand away and went to the sink to get a glass of water.
“How is she?”
Cassie seemed to consider her words before she spoke. She took a deep breath. “Only a concussion can knock someone out like that, and if I had an MRI machine, I’d insist on a scan. However…” She returned to his side and placed the water on the low table next to him. “Her pupils look all right. She wakes up whenever we shake her, and she knows who the current president is – along with all sorts of trivial things that Clara and Dylan came up with to ask her. So, she’s got her head still screwed on, even if someone did try to knock it off her shoulders.”
Cassie sat down next to him and continued. “All in all, she wasn’t out long. We know there’s no amnesia, and apparently no confusion. Other than the brief bout she experienced when she woke up to see all of us standing over her. I think she was pretty sure she was dead at that point.”
Jack nodded, a small smile playing about his lips.
Cassie continued. “She’s got an incredibly hard head, I have to say. I think she just sort of… turned out her own lights.” She sighed and stood again. “I’m pretty sure she’ll be okay. If I wasn’t, I would tell you to get her to a hospital. But, we should keep waking her up every twenty minutes or so, just in case.”
Jack nodded again, this time in compliance.
“Try to get her to drink something,” she finished and then tried to leave.
Jack’s voice held her back. “We need to talk, Cassie.”
Cassie swallowed and hesitated before turning around, in the doorway, to face Jack once more. “Why?” she asked, forcing a smile. “You breaking up with me?”
This brought a smile to Jack’s face as well. In that instant, Cassie could see what it was about him that had Annabelle so enthralled. Whatever else he may be up to and whatever else he may have done, Jack Thane had a killer smile.
“I want to thank you, Cassie,” he started, his Sheffield accent massaging her nerves, “first, for being such a good friend to Annabelle.”
This caused Cassie’s brow to furrow. “Jack, I’m not Annabelle’s friend for your benefit,” she told him, matter-of-factly. “I’m her friend because she’s a good person, well worthy of friendship.”
Jack nodded. “I’ll second that. However, I am still grateful for it. Is that so wrong?” He asked softly.
Cassie honestly couldn’t think of anything wrong with it, so she shook her head.
“Second, I know you noticed the scars.”
She blinked. And then she blushed. And then the color drained from her face – all in quick succession. There was no point in denying it. An utter retard would have noticed the scars. So, she shuffled on her feet and then nodded.
“I know you’re wondering where they came from and I think it’s time you knew.”
“That’s all right,” she stumbled. “You really don’t have to tell me.”
Again, he smiled. Again, she melted a little, but she was distinctly nervous now.
“Annabelle will never tell you,” he said. “She’ll never betray my trust. But you’ve already seen too much.”
Cassie held her breath. Her heart hammered against her rib cage.
“Sit down,” he told her. She found herself moving to a chair beside a small built-in desk and sitting down.
“Sam and I are paid assassins. Sam has been doing it for longer than I can remember and he’s the one who trained me.”
Cassie didn’t move. She still didn’t breathe.
“However, it’s imperative that you understand two things.” He paused for effect. “Number one, you’ll never have to fear for your own safety, Cassie, or for the safety of your friends and family. Not from us – not from anyone. Do you understand me?”
She did not respond.
He leveled his powerful blue gaze on her and repeated himself. “Cassie, do you understand?”
Cassie blinked and drew in a breath, only then realizing that she’d been holding it for too long. She felt dizzy. But she found herself nodding. She had been right when she’d told Annabelle that there was something dangerous in Jack Thane’s eyes. She just hadn’t know how right she was.
He was a hired gun.
And now she knew.
“And number two is that you must never tell any one.” The gaze hardened, his tone dropped an octave. “If you do, number one is forfeit.”
Killer smile, indeed.
This time, she nodded right away. Emphatically.
Two minutes later, when they were once more alone, Jack peered down at Annabelle. Then he ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He closed his eyes.
His conscious mind combed through the events of the last several hours. Images and emotions criss-crossed his perception, like flashing scenes cast by a broken movie projector. Clara closed the door of the manor behind her.
Reese pressed a green button on his cell phone. A massive portrait of Hamlet’s Ophelia floated in a blackness. The Colonel took out a whale-bone pipe and tamped down the tobacco. Annabelle leapt over a couch.
But running through every image, like a warping fold in the video tape, was his overwhelming fear for his daughter. It was a fear to end all fears, like a culmination of things you prepare for, try to prevent, hope never happen. You teach your child to look both ways before they cross the road. To hold someone’s hand. You teach her not to talk to strangers. To use the buddy system. To buckle her seat belt, get home before dark, not walk at night, alone.
Every day, a father faces fear. Every day, a new one presents itself as an old one takes a back seat – still there, but not as pressing as the new one. Every day, a father does his best to protect the ones he loves. He has no choice. It’s a requisite to his sanity.
And in the end, in a single moment, in an unforeseen happenstance or an act of incredible evil, all a father does becomes obsolete.
He had asked himself so many pointless, painful questions, as he’d stood there, chained to the wall in the Colonel’s hidey-hole. He’d asked, Did she get out? Did she know enough? Had he taught her well enough? Had she caught the look he’d given her? Did she understand?
Questions to kill what was left of a man’s reason. Questions more torturous than anything the Colonel’s men could have done to him.
Only time would have given him the answers he so desperately needed. And each passing second had been agony.
Jack’s gaze rested on Annabelle again.
The rest of his fear had been for her.
The minutes that he’d spent fearing that something horrible had happened to Clara and would happen to Annabelle next had been the longest, most hellish minutes of his existence.
He closed his eyes again, once more resting his face in his hands. The only thing he’d come to know for certain in the time since that fear was that he never wanted to feel that fear again. Never.
Ever.
He’d made a decision. He was taking Clara back home to England and Annabelle was coming as well. He could protect them there in a way he never could here.
“Jack, I need some Excedrin.”
Jack’s eyes flew open and settled on Annabelle, who had just placed her right hand to the bridge of her nose. She pinched it there, her brow furrowed, her eyes shut tight against what must have been some pretty bad pain. “I’m getting a migraine.”
“Try a little food first,” he told her as he helped her to sit up. She winced when the movement sent more agony playing about behind her closed lids.
“No doing,” she said, coming to a comfortable position. Her head was hammering. She was a little queasy. And she felt frustrated. Just beneath her consciousness, something important slipped from her grasp, fading away with her waking awareness. “I want what all good torture victims want. Morphine. And if I can’t have that, then any pain killer will do.”
“Drink a little, then,” Jack suggested, holding out the glass of water for her.
“I always drink when I swallow pills,” she replied, giving him a pointed look and ignoring the water.
He blew out a small laugh, replacing the glass. “You’ve a very hard head.”
“Lucky for me.” Annabelle blinked against the cabin’s overhead light and then went back to rubbing the bridge of her nose and her temples, alternating between the two. She couldn’t decide which helped more. But she was positive that neither helped enough. She was also positive that Jack wasn’t going to give her any pain killers at that moment. Protocol for concussions. Still, it felt better to complain about it.
“Where are the others?” She asked as she rubbed.
Jack gestured toward the doorway and the deck beyond. “Either on deck or in the other rooms. I’ve warned them to try to stay below as much as possible.”
“Where’s Reese?”
“Bound and gagged in the ship’s hold.” A bit of an exaggeration, since the boat had no real “hold”. Reese was actually bound and gagged in a trunk in the captain’s cabin.
Annabelle digested the information. She’d woken up at one point to see Sam tying Reese up in the corner of the room, so she knew they’d brought him along. “Where are we going?” she asked then.
Jack didn’t reply. There were two answers to that question, and he just realized that he only knew one of them. Where they were going eventually – as soon as humanly possible, given the circumstances – was Britain. But where they were going right now, on the other hand, he had no idea. He’d been so concerned over Annabelle’s well-being that he’d forgotten to ask.
And their immediate destination was most likely the one that Annabelle was actually interested in. Besides, telling her about her upcoming UK trip and the eight hour flight it would require was something better left to another time and place. Like, when she was drunk, maybe. And handcuffed to a sturdy chair.
He stood up slowly, giving Annabelle a very gentle kiss on the forehead as he did so. “I’ll be back, luv. Sit tight.”
Annabelle watched him go. Her brow was furrowed. Something ate at her consciousness. There was some knowledge skirting the boundaries of her awareness, teasing her senses, slipping just out of reach like a phantom itch. Elusive.
She sighed.
She knew, on the one hand, that the events that had transpired over the last few days were more than your average human being were really meant to handle. She knew that trying to wrap her head around the realization that Max was murdered and that she’d watched Jack get tortured and that she’d suffered a concussion and that Clara and Dylan were presumed dead and then suddenly weren’t dead was just more than could be expected of a normal person.
But she also knew that she wasn’t normal. She never had been. If she’d been normal, Jack’s profession would have bothered her a lot more than it did. She would have run, screaming, from Jack Thane and everything that he represented. If she were normal, she would eat meat and drive a gas-guzzling SUV. She would go to church on Sundays, or something like that, and she wouldn’t listen to Tenacious D or ride motorcycles or write-in Scooby Doo at the polls during election time.
She wouldn’t be able to accept everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours, concussion included, and still be capable of utterly rational and coherent thought.
Luckily, she wasn’t normal. She was a “D”-loving, Scooby-Doo happy, tree-hugging, vegetarian motorcycle enthusiast who was in love with a professional killer.
Annabelle blinked. In love?
Okay, she thought. Better not go there. Not just now. Other things to deal with just now.
Like figuring out what Craig Brandt had to do with MediSign before the bad guys figured it out first. She needed to get to Columbia University before Godrick Osborne’s goons did. She needed to solve this mess and bring Max’s – and Teresa’s – killers to justice. She needed to do this. For so many reasons. And for Dylan.
And she wanted drugs. And she needed a gun. She was goddamned tired of being beat up.
Sam looked up from the helm as Jack ducked into the captain’s quarters. The older man nodded in greeting. “How’s she doin’?”
“Well enough,” he said. “Hard head and all.” Jack made his way across the cabin. He looked out through the windshield, watching the multitude of barges and yachts make their way from Upper New York Bay, into the endlessly traveled waterways of the Hudson.
“She saved my life,” he said then, before he even knew he was going to say it. He hadn’t realized it had been on his mind. But his sudden words made clear the fact that he’d been subconsciously mulling it over. Annabelle had saved his life. She’d taken down the man who would have otherwise shot Jack point-blank. And now that he was openly considering it, he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Stunned, maybe. Overwhelmed, certainly. If he hadn’t already known he couldn’t live without Annabelle Drake, this would have been the waving flag.
Sam looked
over at him. Then he turned back to the windows and shook his head, whistling low. “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Jack Thane. One lucky son of a bitch.”
To that, Jack said nothing. It was true. And there was nothing more to say on the matter.
He spared a glance at the large chest in the corner of the cabin. Holes had been shot into its lid to provide for breathing. He wasn’t at all sure what to do with the chest’s occupant. In this Business, you either befriended a fellow assassin or you killed him. Jack hadn’t yet decided which route to go with Reese.
“You tell Annabelle’s friend about us?” Sam asked then.
Jack looked over at Sam. He was talking about Cassie. “Yes,” he replied.
Sam nodded to himself. “Figured you would. Probably best. Think she’ll keep quiet?”
Again, Jack said, “Yes.” Then he changed the subject before Sam could ask about Dylan, which he knew he would do if given the chance. “Where’d you get the skiff?”
“Borrowed it.” Sam made small corrections with the steering column, his eyes skirting the horizon as the yacht rode above the gentle waves to some unknown destination. “Like I said, Jack, you’re lucky. If the Colonel’s hole hadn’t been on water, you’d be dust.”
Jack could second that. If Sam’s arrival had been timed any later, Jack would be dead and Annabelle would have been carted off to Osborne, only to be killed later. As a point of fact, Sam’s timing had been next to godly.
“Chalk it up to karma,” Jack muttered under his breath.
In the corner, the man inside the chest laughed heartily. And Sam shot Jack an incredulous look. If there was such a thing as karma, Jack Thane, the assassin, couldn’t have collected a whole lot of the good kind.
“What’s our heading?” Jack asked, trying his best to ignore both of them. In his tired state, his Sheffield accent was particularly strong.
“Columbia University. ‘S’where you needed to go, right?”
“Yes.” He should have known that Sam would be one step ahead of the game. “Dock just after Lincoln Tunnel and we’ll take a bus onto campus.”
Hell Bent Page 19