CHAPTER THIRTY-FOURJayden
Jayden
Two Weeks Later
“You need to eat.” Cole drops a paper plate and sandwich on my computer keyboard.
“Not hungry.”
He growls. “Then I’ll force it down your goddamned throat. You’re not helping matters.”
I curl my lip at him but don’t have the energy to do much else. I stare at the google earth images of Carissa’s house. I keep thinking that if I look at it long enough, maybe they’ll update the picture with her car in the driveway.
I don’t deserve to eat. Or sleep. And I don’t want to. Jo left us. She had a miscarriage. She miscarried my—our baby. I swallow. I made it so bad for her that she ran and hasn’t looked back. The shirt she left at our cabin has stopped smelling like her.
I fling the sandwich across the hotel room.
“Fuck you, Jay.” Cole gets in my face. “You’re going to clean that shit up, then you’re going to get your head out of your ass and get to work. We aren’t going to get her back when you can’t even function enough to eat or sleep.”
I stare into his flashing eyes. He’s taken care of me and the cabin as I tore everything to shit.
He jumped in the car, no questions asked and rode with me to Texas, where we’ve been hunting Jo relentlessly, with no luck.
Surveillance on Carissa’s farmhouse is damn near impossible as the house is a mile back from the road with multiple ways in and out and a family full of shoot-first-ask-questions-later kinds of people.
I considered interrogating and killing every last one of them.
The only thing that stopped me was knowing I’d have to look Jo in the eye and see the pain that murdering her best friend’s family would cause.
Which left us with very few options. In this day and age, it’s hard to completely disappear but it’s like Jo dropped off the face of the map.
Cole’s voice is soft, “This isn’t the Jayden that got me through all those years.”
That hits me like a bat to the stomach. I jerk my gaze up to him. He looks…lost.
Fuck. Now I’m hurting my best friend too. I scrub my hands down my face. I’m a piece of shit. I’ve never felt that about myself until now.
We sit in silence for a bit. Then I ask, “Do we have any more goddamned bread?”