28. Ari
CHAPTER 28
ARI
J ace’s phone rang. It was beginning.
At first, we’d been worried that if he left, he might move Kelsey to a meeting room downstairs, but he couldn’t, could he? Not when his dad—who was definitely not on his way to the airport—might notice her presence and ask why the hell she was estimating costs and getting ready to consult with a structural engineer.
Jace listened for a moment, then glanced at Kelsey and left the room. No matter, we knew what was being said. Right now, the daytime concierge at the reasonably upscale apartment building where he maintained a fuck-pad on the fourth floor was informing him that in just seven short months, he’d be a baby daddy.
Kina had tracked down one of the few sex workers who hadn’t blacklisted Jace, a girl named Dione. Jace had left Dione bruised and bloody, so she’d been only too happy to screw with him as long as we promised she’d have backup. The thousand bucks we were paying her was merely the frosting on the cake.
Originally, we’d planned to have a girl make a scene in the Neptune’s lobby, but the Neptune had security, so Kelsey would only have had a few minutes to talk with Selene before Kina and Dione got thrown out, and that’s if we were lucky. Then Peggy had given us the goods. The new plan was perfect. While Jace hurried over to the Arts District, Dione was busy telling his “neighbours” how he’d fucked her without a condom even though he’d promised not to—that part was actually true—and now he was going to be a father.
Were we sure Jace would go? Ninety-nine percent. According to Dusk, image was everything to a narcissist.
He came back into his office.
“I just need to step out.”
“But we’re right in the middle of discussing the dining room configuration, and I have a meeting in the office at two.”
There was no meeting in the office. From the start of her time in Vegas, Kelsey had been making up meetings so she had an excuse to leave.
“Reschedule it.”
She tried a, “But wait…” as he hustled away, then gave us a thumbs-up in front of the brooch.
So far, so good.
Kelsey peered out the door, and I held my breath as she padded through the apartment, heading for the kitchen. The rhythmical thunk, thunk, thunk as Selene chopped vegetables was audible through the mic.
“Hey.”
Selene looked up, knife in hand, a pile of onion rings on the wooden board in front of her. Tears ran down her cheeks, and I wasn’t sure whether they were food-related or Jace-related. She looked utterly miserable, but she quickly slammed on a smile.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you want more coffee?”
“That’d be great.”
“I’ll just check if Jace wants something to drink. ”
“He left.”
Selene set down the knife and moved to the coffee machine. The kitchen was spotless.
“He did?”
“He took a call in the middle of our meeting and burned on out of here.”
The cup and saucer in Selene’s hands shook as her hands trembled. “Oh. Oh no.”
“You okay?”
“I just hope there isn’t a problem with the hotel. Jace gets stressed when there are problems.”
“And then you get more bruises?”
Hoo boy. Kelsey was going for it right off the bat. Selene lost her grip on the saucer entirely, and both it and the cup smashed on the tile. She gasped and fell to her knees, trying to scrape up shards of china with her bare hands.
“Leave that; it doesn’t matter.”
“You think? Jace will be back in a minute, and he’ll…he’ll…” Selene began sobbing, and mascara smudged everywhere when she rubbed her eyes. “I gotta clean this up.”
Kelsey took her gently by the arm and led her to a stool. “You sit down and I’ll clean it up.” But first, Kelsey handed her a tissue—she’d come prepared. “How long has Jace been hurting you?”
“I can’t talk about this. He’ll kill me.”
“He won’t know.”
“He’ll find out. He always does.”
Kelsey was carrying a bug detector in her purse, an advanced model that picked up multiple cell and wireless bands. If there was a device transmitting in the apartment, we’d know about it, but so far, all the device had alerted us to was the camera and motion detector by the apartment’s entrance. It covered the elevator and stairs. There could be a static camera recording, but there was no way to detect one of those covertly, so that was a chance we’d have to take. Besides, Jace seemed the lazy type—it was unlikely he’d choose a method of spying that required manual intervention. Not in the kitchen. I could see him putting a camera in the bedroom, though.
“Okay, you sit and drink coffee while I talk.”
Kelsey stepped over the broken china and made Selene a milky drink, plus a black coffee for herself, then found a dustpan and brush under the kitchen sink and began cleaning up. There didn’t appear to be a laundry room, and the kitchen was small in proportion to the apartment, probably because the Fullers made use of the wider hotel facilities. Selene watched Kelsey suspiciously.
“I dated a man a little like Jace once,” Kelsey started, and Dusk and I exchanged glances. Kelsey hadn’t elaborated on how she was going to handle this conversation, just assured us that she would. “His name was Dan, and I met him when I was nineteen. Damn, he was handsome. And so charming, at first anyway. Fun, generous. Soon, I was spending all my time with him. He made me want to spend all my time with him.”
Selene was nodding along. She knew the playbook. Had lived it.
“The first time he hit me, he was drunk. And so, so sorry. He promised it wouldn’t happen again, and for a while things were good. And then they weren’t. What Jace is doing to you isn’t okay, Selene.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“There are people who can help you. Do you have family close by?”
“Not close by, not anywhere. Nobody can help me.”
“Jace isn’t here. You could leave right now and go to a shelter. Just walk out the door.”
“He’s watching. He’s always watching.” She waved toward the elevator. “There’s a camera. Last time I tried leaving, he caught up with me in San Bernardino and made me come back.”
So she had tried to leave before? That gave us hope.
“I could leave with you. Say we’re going out for coffee.”
“Security will follow me, and then they’ll call Jace.”
“So they’re complicit in keeping you a prisoner?”
Selene shrugged. “They think I’m a danger to myself.”
“And are you?”
She held up the knife, and I noticed it had a rounded end and a bumpy edge. A kid’s safety knife. Haven had used one of those when Nana first taught her to cook.
“I mean, not anymore. And he took all my pills too.”
Oh, hell.
“You didn’t…you didn’t actually try, did you?”
The tears flowed faster. “He broke the bathroom door off its hinges and forced my fingers down my throat until I threw everything up.” Selene hiccupped. “You should leave. I’m not saying that to be mean, and I realise he must be paying you a lot of money to work on the golf thing, but he’s a psycho.”
“I already know that.” Kelsey took a sip of coffee. “He drugged me on Friday.”
“What?” Selene’s hands began trembling, but this time, she put down the cup before she dropped it. Notably, she didn’t question the drugging assertion. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
“He said it was a business meeting, but he insisted we visit the Funhouse. We ate dinner, and then I just… Everything went fuzzy. I can’t remember much.”
Selene had turned whiter, and she’d been pale to begin with. “He didn’t… Tell me he didn’t…”
“Some friends happened to be in the restaurant, and they got me out of there.”
“Sorry, I’m so sorry. Ohmigosh, I thought it was just me stuck in this nightmare. You need to get out of here. Please, you have to go.”
Kelsey took both of Selene’s hands in hers. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t understand why you even came back. Why did you come back?”
“Because I’m worried about my job, and I couldn’t sleep from worrying about you.”
Selene’s trickle of tears turned into racking sobs, and Kelsey wrapped her up in a hug. Heck, I wanted to hug both of them. Selene was barely more than a kid, only twenty-two, and Jace was eight years older. They’d been married for three years now. Three years of hell.
“I’m so s-s-scared.”
“If I can find a way to get you out of here, will you come?”
“Jace will find me. He’ll find me, and he’ll kill me.”
“I have friends who will help. It’ll take some planning, but we’ll get you far away from here.”
My phone pinged, and when Kelsey glanced at her smartwatch, I knew she’d received the same message from Erin. Erin was on the back of Sin’s motorcycle, waiting outside Jace’s apartment building in the Arts District. They’d followed him there from the Neptune.
Erin
Jace just left.
“Will you come?” Kelsey asked again. “I can see you don’t want to stay here.”
Finally, Selene nodded. “I’ll come.”
That evening, I sat on the back deck with Dusk, the overhead fan whirring above us. It was still oppressively hot. One of the neighbours was having a party, and the sound of rock music and laughter drifted on the air, along with smoke from the grill and the aroma of burned burgers.
I’d spoken to Haven earlier, told her how much I missed her, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to be relieved or disappointed when she told me she was having a great time without me. Nana was staying at the house while I was away, and Zach had fallen so easily into the role of stepdad that I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming some days.
But today had been a reminder that not every woman was so lucky.
“Do you really think we can get Selene out of there?” I asked Dusk.
“Sure. Jace is an easy kind of monster to deal with. Hotheaded, doesn’t think things through, distracted by shiny objects. And we’re the Choir.”
“Well, some of us.”
“Hey, you’ve worked two jobs with us now. We’ll call you Choir-adjacent.”
“I’m not sure whether to be thrilled or terrified by that.”
“How much do you know about us?”
“Only snippets I’ve heard here and there. And I know I’m scared of Jerry.”
Dusk laughed. “You shouldn’t be. Unless you cross her, she won’t hurt you.”
“She said she caught a guy named T-Rex. Is he still alive?”
“Oh, sure, he’s in a holding cell.”
“What are you planning to do with him?”
“Who knows? We might just blindfold him and dump him at the side of the road with a warning. ”
“Really? I wasn’t sure Jerry would let him keep on breathing.”
“He isn’t much of a threat.”
“Unlike the first four guys?”
“Let me give you a history lesson. In September 1918, a young British soldier was fighting his way forward at the Canal de Saint-Quentin. He led a charge on the village of Marcoing and took out a machine gun post, then came under fire as he repaired the bridge ahead. The Brits fought back. The enemy began scattering. A German corporal came into range, and the soldier had a split-second decision to make—shoot him or let him go? The corporal was retreating anyway. Would you have taken the shot?”
“I…I’m not sure.” I’d never aimed my gun at a live target, and I hadn’t even been to the range for months. “Probably not. Maybe the corporal got a reminder of his own mortality and in return, he’d let a British soldier live next time?”
“What if I told you the corporal was named Adolf Hitler?”
A shiver ran through me. “This is all hypothetical, right?”
“It’s a true story. Fast-forward a few years, and Hitler was responsible for the deaths of seventy million people.” Dusk fixed her gaze on me. “The Choir will always take that shot. Always .”
“What if you accidentally shoot an innocent person?”
“I mean, we’re trained not to do that, but we also take risks that others don’t. That they’re not allowed to take. And I can’t say we’ve never had collateral damage. But I can guarantee we’ve saved a heck of a lot more innocent lives than we’ve ended.”
I understood. Even though I found it unpalatable, I understood.
“So it’s you against the world? ”
She answered a question with a question. “Do you know what a point man is?”
“The soldier who leads the way through hostile territory?”
“Exactly. We’re a point team. Point Team Golf, officially.” Another laugh. “ Golf. The irony.”
“Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf. So there are six other teams?”
“Maybe? Some information is so compartmentalised, even we don’t see the full picture. But we’re the only all-female team. And at least we’re not Team Hotel.”
“Should you be telling me any of this?”
“We have our core members. And then we have folks like you who we work with on occasion. And as you said, you’re scared of Jerry.”
There it was: the threat. A very light threat, but a threat all the same. I swallowed hard. And I understood. I’d been invited to play their game, but if I spoke out of turn, I wouldn’t like the consequences.
“Do you enjoy your job?” I asked finally.
“Most of the time. Do you enjoy yours?”
“Most of the time.”
Did I like the thought of being Choir-adjacent? Earlier in the year, I’d seen them rescue a bunch of trafficked women, and now they were working to help a victim of domestic abuse. I couldn’t hate the idea. Regular channels hadn’t helped, had they? The police had seen Lucy McCall lying on the floor in the parking garage, made vaguely sympathetic noises, and gotten absolutely nowhere.
“If you’re looking for a place to dump T-Rex, try leaving him outside the Steel Horse Saloon.”
Dusk leaned over and clinked her glass of OJ against mine.
“Welcome to the dark side. We have wine and cookies.”