Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Noah
I’d never been inside The Hargrove. It was the kind of place that hosted five-hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraisers and Galas, and man, I was grateful for the new suit.
From the second Jackson and I walked in, I was in awe. The lobby had gorgeous marble floors and chandeliers that sparkled overhead. The rooms were just as nice. Gator had managed to get us rooms there in the hotel, and the room itself was elegant in a way I thought only existed in the movies.
The plan was for us to be there for as short a time as possible, so we arrived with just enough time to check in and get dressed for the Gala.
I’d spent a ridiculous amount of time in the bathroom trying to tame my hair, and when I walked out into the room, Jackson was ready to go.
He was wearing a dark suit that looked like it had been custom-made for him.
I’d known he owned the suit. The day we’d gone to get mine, he’d told me they’d all gotten suits at that shop, but the knowing and the seeing were different things, because my Daddy was sexy AF.
I froze in the doorway and took him in, and he just stood there and let me look. He always looked good, but there was just something about a man in a well-made suit.
“You look great,” I said.
He let his eyes move over my body before saying, “So do you.”
My cheeks heated, which was ridiculous. This man had seen every single part of me, so him telling me I looked good shouldn’t have made me blush. But it wasn’t what he said; it was the heat in his eyes as he said it.
I drew in a breath and said, “We should probably get downstairs.”
“Are you nervous?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Kat sent something for you.” He walked over to the bed and reached into his bag, pulling out a black box and opening it to reveal a beautiful watch.
He took it out and came back over to me.
“This watch has a tracker in it. As long as you have it on, Kat will be able to find you. Hold out your wrist.”
I did as he said, and he carefully placed the watch around my wrist. “Listen to me. This is just a precaution. The guys are getting into position right now. No one will hurt you. You just get up there and deliver your message. You don’t have to worry about a thing, we got you.”
I leaned my forehead against his chest and took in a few deep breaths. Then I stood up straight and nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”
The Freedom Forward Gala had taken over the ballroom on the second floor, and the hallway leading to it was full of people in formal wear, standing around talking while they waited for it to start.
Thankfully, none of them knew who we were, so we were able to avoid polite small talk and go on into the ballroom.
We walked past Hawk near the main entrance. He just gave us a nod and went back to observing the crowd. Wolfe was sitting at a table talking with a couple wearing clothes that looked like they cost more than I made in a year, and Gator and the twins were there somewhere, but I didn’t know where.
On our way down from our room to the ballroom, Jackson handed me a tiny little earpiece and told me to leave it in for the entirety of the Gala.
With the manpower, the watch, and the earpiece, they’d gone to a lot of trouble, especially since we didn’t even know if there was a threat.
I was grateful, though. The low hum of the ballroom noise and the occasional check-in from one of the guys was reassuring.
The ballroom was full of round tables with white cloths, with centerpieces that I recognized as ranunculus and eucalyptus. New beginnings and protection. Someone had known what they were doing. There was a low stage at the far end with a podium and a screen showing a loop of the foundation’s work.
I looked around the room until I spotted Dr. Maranda Reyes near the bar.
“I want to go say hi to Maranda first,” I said, and Jackson just nodded and went with me.
She was decked out in an elegant burgundy dress, heels, and some very nice expensive-looking jewelry. She looked sophisticated. Like this crowd of rich people was where she belonged, and nothing like the laid-back woman I’d had counseling sessions with over the last six months.
It was like she was a totally different person, or at least it was until she saw me coming, and her face lit up in a genuine smile.
“Noah.” She took both my hands. “It’s so good to see you.” She looked at me the same way she looked at me in sessions. Like she was reading things I hadn’t said. “You look well.”
“I feel well,” I said. “And I mean it. I’m not just saying it.”
“I’m so proud of you. Do you know that? Not because you’re here tonight, though I’m glad you are. But because of the work you’ve done to get here. That was you, Noah. All of it.”
I held onto her hands for a moment. “You helped.”
“I guided you, but you did the hard part.”
She squeezed my hands and let go, and I turned to look at Jackson.
“This is Jackson.” When I’d called her last week, I’d told her all about him, and my hopes and worries where he was concerned.
She looked at him and then at me and then back at him. “It’s very nice to meet you, Jackson.”
“Ma’am,” Jackson said.
A voice crackled over the speaker system, and a man announced that we were about to begin. Maranda gave me a quick hug and told me again how glad she was I was there, before she left to go find her seat.
We found our table. I sat, and Jackson sat beside me, and for a while I simply watched the room.
“Corvane is here,” Wolfe said in a calm, steady voice. No panic, just letting us know he was here.
“Where?” Jackson asked.
“Third table from the front, second row over.”
I searched frantically until I found him.
The chatter continued in my ear as other members of the team located him, but I ignored it all. Instead, I took in this man who lived in my nightmares.
I recognized him from the photograph in Wolfe’s conference room.
Anton Corvane was in his late fifties, silver-haired, the kind of broad through the shoulders that I was sure came from a gym because I doubted the man had ever worked a day in his life.
He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than my car, and he wore it with the ease of a man who’d never once in his life felt out of place anywhere.
Beside him was a woman I didn’t recognize from any briefing.
She was younger than him by twenty years, at least. Dark-haired, composed, in a deep blue gown. She held a glass of champagne in her hand and was smiling at whatever the man to her left was saying. It was a perfectly good smile.
But I knew what genuine looked like, and that wasn’t it.
I knew it the way I knew the sound of footsteps on a staircase, and the click of locks on a basement door. The body remembered things the mind tried to forget, and my body was telling me something about the woman in the deep blue gown that no briefing file would have caught.
“Who’s the woman?” I asked.
“His wife, Imogen,” Gator replied.
“Jackson,” I said quietly.
A pause. Then, lower, “I see her, too.”
I shifted my attention to Corvane then. Noticing the confident way he sat there, like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Like he owned the air around him. The woman beside him laughed at something and touched his arm, and he didn’t even bother to look at her, like she wasn’t even worth so much as a glance.
“Don’t,” Jackson said quietly, and I realized he was reading my face.
“I’m not going to do anything.”
“Noah.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just watching.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he looked back at the room, and his hand found mine under the table, and stayed.
The program started a few minutes later.
The foundation’s director spoke first, then a woman I didn’t know, who’d been trafficking legislation’s most effective advocate for the past decade.
There was a video that I didn’t watch. Instead, I watched Corvane.
I wanted to know if he would be moved at all by what victims had gone through before being purchased by monsters like him.
Corvane watched the video with polite attention and an expression that gave away nothing. Like he wasn’t the least bit affected.
I was called to the stage next. Jackson gave my hand a squeeze and said, “You got this.”
He was right. I did have this. I walked up with the speech in my pocket, but I didn’t take it out. I had practiced enough. The words were mine.
“My name is Noah Gentry,” I said, into the microphone, into the room. “Eight months ago, I was drugged at a club and taken. I was held for several weeks, sold at auction, and recovered by a private security firm before I could be transported out of the country.”
The room was very quiet.
“I’m not going to tell you that story tonight. Not because I can’t, but because the story I want to tell you isn’t about what happened to me. It’s about what happened after.”
I found Jackson at the table. He gave me an encouraging nod, and I smiled at him before turning my attention back to the crowd.
“The people in your statistics, in your case files, in your fundraising materials… the ones who survived… we live in the after. And the after is long, and the after is hard.” I paused.
“What I needed in the after was someone to tell me the truth. That it was going to take time. That taking time wasn’t the same as failing. ”
I looked out at the room. At the faces that were with me, listening to every word I said, and I went on to share the difficult process of rebuilding a life.
The regular therapy sessions, the resources to start over, and how even the smallest things that had once seemed simple suddenly seemed like climbing a mountain.
“I’m here tonight because I wanted to be in a room full of people who are trying to make the after shorter and better and less lonely for people like me.
” I took a breath. “That’s what your support does.
It doesn’t undo what happened. Nothing does.
But it makes the after survivable. And if you do the work, eventually, surviving becomes something more. Something like thriving. Thank you.”
The applause started, and I stepped back from the podium, and for a moment I just stood there at the edge of the stage and let it wash over me, not the applause, though that was kind, but the fact of being here.
Of having said it. Of being the person who was strong enough to walk into this room and tell his story.
I was stepping down from the stage when I saw her.
Corvane’s wife was moving toward the side of the ballroom. She glanced back once at Corvane, who was looking at the podium where the next speaker was standing and not watching her, and then she slipped through a door near the far wall.
I looked at Jackson. He was already on his feet coming toward me, and his gaze was on the door she’d gone through and then on me, and I could see him reading my face and knowing.
“Noah—” he said in my ear.
“Two minutes,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Noah—”
But I was already moving.
The corridor outside was quiet after the ballroom, the sounds muffled behind the door. She was standing near the window at the end of the hall with her champagne glass, and she turned when she heard me. For a moment, we just looked at each other.
“I’m sorry to follow you,” I said. “I just wanted to say, I saw you in there, and well—” I stopped. “I’m not going to pretend I know your situation. I don’t. But I know what it looks like to be somewhere you didn’t choose.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Her champagne glass was very still in her hands. Then she sighed. “I know who you are.”
At first, I thought she meant because she’d just heard my speech, but then it clicked for me what she really meant.
“He told you?”
She shook her head and let out a wry chuckle. “He doesn’t tell me anything. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hear things. He won’t stop, you know. You can’t win. He always gets what he wants. There’s no fighting it.”
She sounded so sad and so lost, but she was wrong. I would win because I had Three Bears Tactical helping me, but more importantly, I had Jackson Crowe at my back.
“If you ever need help,” I said, “or if you ever want to talk to someone who can actually do something—” I reached into my jacket pocket and took out the card I’d put there before we left the hotel room.
Three Bears Tactical Services with Wolfe’s direct line.
“These are good people. They helped me. They’ll help you, no questions asked, no judgment. ”
I held the card out.
She looked at it. Then she looked at me. She took it quickly and slipped it into the small clutch she was carrying, and her fingers closed over the clasp.
“Thank you, but they can’t help me,” she said. Her voice was very quiet.
“I know you don’t believe me, but they can,” I said. “Just… keep it somewhere safe.”
She nodded once. I nodded back. And then I turned and went back through the door into the ballroom.
Jackson was three feet from the door.
He looked at me. I looked at him. His expression was completely professional—composed, neutral, the face I imagine he wore when he was in operational mode.
“Hi,” I said.
“We’re going to talk about this,” he said, very quietly.
“I know. But did you hear what she said?” I asked.
“We all did.”
He put his hand on my back and steered me back toward the table. His touch was steady, but I was aware that the steadiness took some work; that underneath it, he was furious and frightened and relieved all at once. I also knew I was going to hear about all of it when we got to the room.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, quietly, as we walked, “I knew what I was doing.”
“I know you did,” he said. “That’s not the point.”
“Jackson—”
“Later,” he said.