JILL
AGE: 26
LOCATION: LA PORTE, TEXAS
PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA
NAMES: JENNIFER WHITE
THE TELEVISION SCENE CHANGED, CASTING A KALEIDOSCOPE OF soundless color over otherwise darkened walls and dilapidated furniture. She rocked on her heels, ignoring the urge to check the clock, ignoring Robert splayed out on the bed, and biting back envy over his blessed oblivion in sleep. She counted a slow thirty, crossed the room again, stood behind the door, turned, and waited.
Robert’s eyes blinked open and met hers.
He dragged a pillow over his head and rolled his back to her, which was just as well. It kept her from wanting to smother him.
They’d cleaned up, she and he. They’d visited a police station and fixed his immediate problems and retreated to this cramped box of a room, and they’d been here for too many hours, interrogator and prisoner, talking, arguing, dancing around the old construct of lovers. He wanted to leave, and she wouldn’t let him, and they both knew her claims about safety and protection were more lie than truth.
She needed him to lead her to Christopher, the killer.
Just as Christopher had used Robert to get to her, she’d use Christopher to find Clare. That had been the plan, anyway, when she’d gone after Rob, but there wouldn’t be a plan—wouldn’t be anything—without Jack. She hadn’t heard from him since the preserve and hadn’t seen so much as a glimpse of him since she’d checked his location and found him off course and off plan.
She’d waited for him, had waited until waiting had become too risky.
He should have been here long before her, considering all the time it’d taken to sort Rob’s shit out, but here they were at four in the morning and still nothing.
If he didn’t make contact, didn’t show up by sunrise, then he was dead, and Clare was as good as dead, and she was alone—truly alone—isolated in a way that no one, not one other person, could possibly comprehend.
Maybe that was the real reason she held on to Robert.
She clenched her fists and pushed hard against anxiety.
She wanted to open the door and run to where she couldn’t feel anymore, and that made her angry at Jack for playing God with chemical escape.
In that, she was already alone.
All this time, everything he knew, and even he didn’t get that sixteen fucking years of living on a knife blade, of never knowing what was coming, of constant adrenaline had created its own addiction—that she didn’t medicate to get high or stay well, but to placate urges that would otherwise get her killed or put her behind bars—that she dosed to escape the nightmares and the memories and the aching quiet, like now, when anxiety rose to crippling levels as she worried about Jack and worried about Clare and worried about what she couldn’t know and couldn’t see.
She should have squirreled the damn goods away instead of flushing them. That would have been some magical foresight if she’d predicted that indeed the shit would hit the fan and it’d be her, not Jack, on the outs, waiting for the dust to settle.
Jill pulled the burner from her pocket, shoved the SIM and battery in, booted up, and returned to the call log. She should have destroyed the thing hours ago but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Jack had become Schrödinger’s fucking cat, and this was her only way to open the box and find out if he was dead or alive.
The call went straight to voice mail, just as it had every time she’d dialed.
She pulled the phone apart and shoved the pieces back into her pocket.
In the lot outside, car doors shut. Her senses jumped to alert and possibilities sequenced in rapid order: motel neighbors, law enforcement, contract killers.
She couldn’t check the eyehole, wouldn’t risk cracking the curtain. She reached for the AR-15 resting against the wall, side-stepped for a clear line on the door, and fought against anxious hope in a fourth possibility.
More than one set of footsteps killed that hope fast.
This wasn’t Jack, and wasn’t the neighbors.
She glanced toward the bed.
Robert, for all his civilian helplessness, had recognized the threat even in his sleep. He sat straight up, pillow clenched tight, eyes wide, and focused on her.
She nodded him over.
He rolled off the bed into the narrow space against the wall.
The footsteps stopped outside the window.
She readied for the kick or barrage of bullets. Instead, fingers tapped lightly against the glass, loud enough for the sound to carry inside but not so loud that the neighbors would wake, tapping a familiar pattern that paralyzed her limbs and yet forced them to move.
She rushed the door, ran the chain, and twisted the dead bolt without looking.
Jack pushed in, laden with matériel, face bruised, clothes torn and bloody. Clare followed right behind him, both of them entering the room like ghosts walking out of the darkness. The door shut. Time compressed into a capsule of questions. Anxiety, already out of control, threatened to jump the firebreak.
Her brain reached for Jack, to grab him, hug him, yell at him, knock him hard on his ass, and demand to know where he’d been—and what the holy fuck!—but her body stayed motionless, gaze locked onto Clare’s haggard frame, which was draped in an odd assortment of clothing that spoke of escape and theft long before Jack had gotten to her. Clare met her eyes, reached for her, pulled her tight, and held on in a hug.
Relief and pain and ache and fear fanned jealousy and shame and twenty years of craving into a gusting blaze. Jill loosened Clare’s grip and put some space between them. Noise from the bed broke the silence.
Robert’s face peeked up from the other side. Slowly, he stood.
Clare stalked into his personal space.
Robert backed into the wall.
Clare said, “You’re the boyfriend.”
Robert cleared his throat. “Was,” he said. “Was the boyfriend.”
Clare scanned him from face to feet and up again. “I can see the appeal.” Her eyes let him go, and he bumped into the light on the bedside table.
To Jill, she said, “The boy’s tired. He should go home.”
Jill fought the urge to bite back. In a single sentence Clare had assessed and gutted her strategy, relieved her of command, and made herself Robert’s hero. Yes, Clare was found. Yes, they didn’t need Robert anymore. And yes, he was now a special kind of baggage, but it should have been her call to cut him loose, not Clare’s.
Jill motioned Robert over the bed to the ratty chair in the corner and waited until he’d taken a seat. Worse than having her authority stripped in front of him would be drawing attention to that fact by fighting Clare to get it back.
She chose the lesser of humiliations.
To Jack, she said, “You still driving the rental?”
He nodded and then, following where the question led, dug into his pocket and tossed her the keys.
Jill turned her back to the room, knelt beside the chair, and leaned in close so only Robert would hear. “I can take it all back,” she said. “I can walk into any police station, hand over proof that you collaborated with Christopher to kidnap me, and undo everything we fixed today. I don’t want to, but I will if I have to, so you need to listen very, very carefully.”
Robert nodded.
She dangled the keys above his lap. “These go to a rental that’s parked outside,” she said. “Return the car. Drop off the keys. Then get yourself back to Austin. I don’t care how you do it—fly, drive, walk—but what you don’t do, ever, is talk to anyone about today. That’s it. Car. Home. Quiet. Manage those successfully, and you go on with your life without ever dealing with me or any of this again.”
Relief bled into Robert’s posture and out his lungs.
He reached for the keys, and she let them go.
A hint of sorrow tainted the relief.
“I know,” she said. She touched his cheek. “I’ll miss you, too.”
She walked him to the door and to the car and stood as
ide for Jack, who reached through the window with directions to the airport car rental lot scribbled on a scrap of paper—old-fashioned navigation—since Robert’s phone rested beneath fifteen feet of water. She watched him until the taillights turned out onto the street.
With their fading, the inferno broke loose.
She followed Jack into the room, moving between the beat of his steps. Years of never being good enough, of Clare favoring him while punishing her, hours of being forced to wait through anxiety-induced hell, of being left behind so Mr. Goody Two-shoes, who’d been so willing to abandon Clare, could be the one to save her, built up pressure, tore through her core, and exploded into her hands.
Didn’t matter that Clare was here, watching, didn’t matter that rivalry propelled her toward self-immolation on Clare’s critical pyre. She swung around and sucker punched her brother with an elbow hard into his face.
CHAPTER 41
JILL
AGE: 26
LOCATION: LA PORTE, TEXAS
PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA
NAMES: JENNIFER WHITE
THE DOOR SLAMMED. JACK STUMBLED. JILL DROVE HIM TO THE FLOOR, pounded a boot on his chest, leaned hard onto him, and said, “Least you could have done was answer your fucking phone.”
Jack grabbed her ankle and twisted.
She held on to balance and pressed harder into his chest. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Been just a little busy trying not to get my head blown off.”
His words were wind, background noise, a comma between movements.
She stomped his hands. He let go. She stepped off his chest toward the bed and faced Clare. Fists clenched and volume rising, she said, “Was this whole thing your doing? It wasn’t enough to destroy childhoods and wreck lives? You had to give insanity one final push?”
Clare glanced up in cold, indifferent silence, and Jill’s core melted down.
This wasn’t what she wanted, wasn’t supposed to be how it happened. No, not Jack the good son—again—saving Clare, while she, the unwanted, pushed Clare further away and made her hate her more. No. Opportunity and hope crumbled into a dark, gaping hole. Words from the past cycled through her head.
Bravo, Julia. You win the melodrama award.
Does the princess have anything to add to the outburst?
Can we move on now?
Clare slid her feet to the floor. Softly, gently, she said, “The last thing I wanted was for you to get pulled into this mess. I’m sorry it happened, Jillian.”
Uncertainty rose, suspicious and guarded.
Clare had only ever used her birth name in moments of affection, and Jill could count on one hand the times those had happened. She said, “All you’ve ever done is pull us into crap we don’t want to be a part of. Somehow this is supposed to be different?”
Clare stood, tugged her close, and kissed the side of her head.
The affection felt worse than indifference, felt like the earth caving beneath her, felt like tumbling into the hole, with nothing to grab to stop the free fall.
Jill shrugged away.
Jack dug a packet from his tool bag and, as payback for punching him, tossed the Blackphone on the bed where Clare couldn’t help but see it. Jill didn’t care. Flinging her connection to the Broker out into the open and forcing that conversation might make Clare angry, but at least it would push them back into familiar territory.
Only it didn’t.
Clare reached for the phone, ran her thumb over the glass and, as if she already knew what it represented and what Jill had done, said, “On some level, I always knew you’d find him or he’d find you. How many contracts have you taken?”
Jill hesitated. “Two,” she said. “Not counting this one.”
Clare’s expression softened into the same wistful smile that always showed when Jack had made her especially proud. “I’m sure you were spectacular,” she said. “You’re very good at what you do.”
Jill’s throat seized and sarcasm got stuck on the way out.
Clare’s fingers traced the plastic. “It’s a Faustian bargain, working for him, you know? You get a sense of purpose and identity and a way to excel in a world in which you don’t belong, and he takes your soul bit by bit.” She offered the device to Jill. “No matter how careful you are, he’ll learn you and toy with you, and when he grows tired of you, he’ll burn you.”
Jill took the phone. “You worked for him?”
“Worked with him before he became the power broker he is now, and worked bounty contracts to stay current on his operation as his influence grew. There’s history between us and we both have reasons to neither forgive nor forget.”
Jill listened past her own history and, for the first time since she was twelve, considered the genuine possibility that everything out of Clare’s mouth wasn’t a lie or manipulation. She said, “He’s who you’ve been hiding us from?”
“One of many.”
Jill waited. Jack stayed quiet.
Clare said, “Every decision, every job, came with obvious and hidden costs, and I weighed each and every one against my reasons, but the costs were cumulative, and I had a lot of time to make a lot of enemies. There’s probably not one among them who wouldn’t kill you to get to me, and the Broker, knowing who’d pay the most for that information, is at the head of that line.”
Jill hefted the phone and directed it toward Clare like an accusing finger. “I didn’t bring this down on you, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“No, my weakness brought this on you.”
Jill stopped, hand outstretched, still pointing the phone.
Ray’s words came tumbling back. She mighta suspected this’d be the last time and couldn’t bear leaving with no good-bye.
Realization connected to understanding.
She turned away, fought the urge to throw the phone, turned back, and jabbed in Clare’s direction again. “Are you fucking kidding me? After all the shit you put us through, running, hiding, fighting, you decide to just up and tell them how to find you?”
Clare’s eyes rose and met hers directly. “It was time, Jillian.”
Jill gaped, waited, and found her voice. “That is so. Much. Bullshit.”
Bullshit enough that even Jack didn’t buy it. He moved in beside her, crossed his arms, and said, “How about just this once, Clare, you skip past innuendo and go for substance? How about you start with telling us how our dad fits into any of this?”
Clare’s lips twitched, a nearly invisible micro expression that would have been invisible to anyone else but to them said Jack had surprised her. She said, “Well, if that’s not completely out of nowhere.”
It was the same maddening deflect-accuse-attack-deflect course she always followed when backed into a corner.
Jack said, “No, not completely.”
“No?”
“No.”
Clare waited and, when Jack refused to be baited into defending himself, said, “I take it you paid Ray a visit.”
The name rolled off Clare’s tongue like she’d just had lunch with him or something, like Ray wasn’t dead.
Which meant Jack hadn’t told her. Clare didn’t know.
Not a clue seeped into Jack’s tone or body language. He said, “We wouldn’t have bothered if we’d known it was you who’d invited the shooters in.”
Jill fought the urge to survey the carpet.
Clare studied his face. Dark circles and hollow cheeks belied her clarity of focus. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Where’s Ray? Right now, where is he?”
Jill took a defensive step forward. If the messenger was going to get shot, better it was someone used to it. She said, “Ray’s dead.”
Clare stopped breathing. Seconds passed. Her expression hardened. She said, “How’d it happen?”
“Sniper.”
Clare let out a long, slow exhale, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was different, in the same way a revolving door presented a different pane of glass to the sidewalk. She said,
“Ray was smarter than most gave him credit for.”
Jack said, “So he was right? This has something to do with our dad?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know who put out the hit.”
“But you were looking for him, just like Ray said.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
Jack’s fists clenched in a rare show of anger. “We’ve earned the details, Clare. Through blood, sweat, and hell, we’ve more than earned them.”
Clare chewed the tip of her thumb, walked toward the wall, crossed the room, and paced back. The visible discomfort, as unusual and out of place as kindness, set Jill on edge. She glanced at Jack.
The hand by his side motioned for her to stay quiet.
The upstairs pipes rattled.
A door down the hall opened and shut.
Clare stopped and turned. “The world was different then,” she said. “We had two superpowers waging a global ideological war, fighting through surrogates and proxies and dancing around nuclear annihilation. We were young, young and patriotic opponents in that war, Maria Catalina and Dmitry, CIA and KGB, manipulating each other for information. But we were on his territory, his game was better, his sources were more reliable, and my point man was a backstabbing, double-dealing traitor.”
Jack said, “The Broker.”
Clare nodded, lips pressed tight, and she returned to pacing.
Her words picked up tempo with each stride. “My country abandoned me, left me trapped. Your father got me to neutral territory, and then he abandoned me, too. Favor or manipulation, I still don’t know. When I fled, I became an enemy of the state, and when he left, it forced me to run. If I’d stayed, his people would have taken you from me to ensure my obedience, if not loyalty, and they’d have raised you and indoctrinated you as human weapons in their long-game strategy.”
Clare turned to Jill, reached for her hand, held it tightly, and studied her fingers. “You were minutes old the first time your little fist grabbed my thumb, grabbed my soul. Minutes old, and evil was already hunting for you. I had no way to predict how long you’d be mine, but I knew I’d never allow my weakness, my heart, to be the reason you were stolen or killed, knew I’d do whatever needed doing to hide you and make you strong, strong enough to survive without me.”
Liars' Paradox Page 24