Chapter Twenty – Jack
Chapter Twenty
Jack
The next thing I remembered, I was painted in his blood.
Thea was curled into a ball, facing away from me, saying, “Oh-my-God, oh-my-God, oh-my-God,” in a chant.
Light-pink intestines were mazed upon the floor and his ribs jutted up at unnatural angles. Gauzy deflated lungs were torn on either side, and I—I looked down. I was holding his heart. I’d torn it open to drink the sweet blood inside like it was a melon.
“Oh, God,” I said, just like Thea.
She dared a glance at me. “Jack? Is that you?” Her voice was so quiet in her terror even I could barely hear.
“I’m not sure.” As the darkness faded and more of me came back—I could feel all the places my shirt stuck to me with drying gore.
She twisted toward me. Her blonde hair was greasy and she’d never gotten to wash all her make-up from the club off. “Jack—what happened?”
“I had to save you.” I opened up my hand and the wet remnants of his heart fell to the cement with a squelch.
I reached for her with my bloody hand and she pulled back, hugging the wall.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen though.
” No wonder Rosalie hadn’t been worried about me surviving, or Tamo.
“Are you okay?” I asked, leaving my hand out but not coming closer.
Thea put her free hand to her mouth. “I don’t know. I think so. Are…you?”
I stared at the heart where I’d dropped it. “No.” I didn’t know if I’d ever be okay again.
“How did you do all this? I saw him shoot you—and what was with all the eating?” her voice rising as she panicked.
I opened my mouth to tell her—and then realized the less she knew, the better. The gulf that there’d always been between us had just widened to an impossible extent—the very difference between life and death.
She took my silence for disapproval. “I didn’t love him, Jack.
Rosalie made me dance for him. I wanted to stop, but every time he came into the club she made me and—at night it somehow made sense, but in the mornings?
I didn’t know what to do. It was like I was his girlfriend, but I didn’t want to be, I swear, she made me.
I know that sounds crazy—but you don’t know how she can be. ”
“I believe you.”
She unspooled herself toward me as far as she could come with the chain. “I never wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me. What we had—I wanted to have it for forever. Just you and me.” She reached toward me with a fluttering hand.
I stepped past her, ignoring it, reaching for the chain against the wall. With a strong tug it came free and she crawled forward through the gore, finding a set of keys in her dead captor’s pocket.
“Glad I didn’t swallow those,” I said, watching her undo a padlock.
“Me too,” she said grimly, scooting back to stand more than an arm’s length away. She was still wearing what she’d been taken from the club in, minus her heels, and she looked shaken and scared, like the girl I’d pulled from the wreckage once again.
“Why do you always need saving?” I whispered, and she heard.
“Jack—I,” she licked her lips and took a step forward.
“Stop right there,” I said, and she did, swallowing the words. “Because I’m going to imagine for the rest of my life that you were going to tell me ‘I love you’. If you weren’t—I don’t want to know better. And if you were, hearing it now would break me.”
She bit her lips and nodded, as tears welled in her eyes.
“You need to go, Thea. Vegas isn’t safe for you.” Who knew how many of the girls in Rosalie’s employee were being used like this, to further Rosalie’s private aims? I couldn’t let her go back there.
“To where?”
“On that trip around the world.” I leaned over and grabbed the dead man’s wallet. It was stuffed with hundreds. “Is there another way out of here?” If there wasn’t I would make one.
“I think so—I think his car is parked in the front.” She held up the keys.
“Good. Take it—jump the curb until you hit the road—do not go back that way, okay?” I pointed to where I’d come in, at the back of the warehouse.
Everything would be over if Tamo saw her.
“Grab someone’s coat, pants, whatever you need, and get to a hotel till dawn.
Clean yourself up there—but do not go to sleep, and do not go home till daylight.
After that, grab your passport and luggage, and go.
Don’t talk to anyone. Get to the airport and start flying—and don’t stop until you’re in a different country. ”
She looked so confused and everything in me wanted to hold her. “But what about you?” she asked.
“I’m going to go back to the club and tell Rosalie you died.”
She took a step nearer me. “She’ll know you’re lying—she always does.”
“Not until it’s too late.”
Thea looked stricken. “Come with me, Jack. I—I need you. I always have, I was just so stubborn—"
I wanted to kiss her, but my mouth tasted like another man’s blood. “I can’t.”
“But—"
“Go. Remember—hide until dawn.”
She teetered in place like she was still wearing high heels. “Jack—I’m so sorry—"
“Me too.” I could write a book about all the ways I was sorry now—and her hand reached back out. If I let her touch me—if all of this was for nothing—“Go!” I shouted at her, and she leapt back as though I’d burned her. Her eyes widened—and then she ran for the door.