45
Lila
Jude came through the door carrying two plain store bags, looking so ordinary that for one disorienting second my brain tried to reject everything I already knew.
He kicked the door shut behind him and took in the room with that same pleasant, open face I had seen since we were kids.
Only now I could see what had always been underneath it.
He wasn’t surprised to find me there. He was checking what had changed while he was gone.
He set the bags beside the door with maddening calm. “I can see we’re already having problems.”
Mason went rigid beside me. “Jude?” Confusion came first, then something sharper as he looked from Jude to me.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked, but my voice had thinned. Something was settling into place around us, and every piece made the room feel smaller.
Mason turned fully toward him. “She’s asking about Jade.” Jude said nothing, and Mason took one step forward, disbelief stripping the color from his face. “You told her we had Jade?” His voice sharpened. “Why would you say that?”
Jude tilted his head as if the answer should have been obvious. “Because it worked.”
Mason stared at him while Jude’s eyes slid briefly to me. “She came,” he said. “That was the point.”
My stomach dropped. Mason shook his head once, hard. “No. No, that wasn’t the plan.”
Plan. One word, and suddenly every reassurance Mason had tried to give me before Jude walked in looked different.
Jude’s expression barely shifted. “Plans evolve.”
Mason moved another step closer, putting more of himself between Jude and me without seeming to notice. “You told me she was coming because she finally saw her past mistake for what he was. You told me she needed us. You said if we were patient, she would come on her own.”
Jude let out a soft breath. “And now she’s here.”
“Because you used her daughter.” Mason’s voice cracked on daughter.
Whatever fantasy had brought him this far was finally colliding with something he could not dress up.
“You lied to me. You told me this was about helping her, about getting her away from bad choices, about showing her who actually loved her.” He looked at me, horror replacing the hope he had worn when he opened the door.
“This wasn’t the plan. This is too far. I’m not doing this. We need to let her go.”
Jude studied him in silence long enough that I felt the calculation in it. Then his gaze moved to me, colder now. “You really should stop saying that, like she belongs anywhere but with us.”
A chill crawled over my skin. “I do not belong to anyone.” I stepped back, putting space between myself and both men. “And you are out of your mind if you think you can kidnap me and keep me here.”
A small smile touched Jude’s mouth. “There it is,” he said softly. “That temper. That fire. You always did save the best of yourself for the worst possible men, then hand the scraps to the ones who would’ve worshiped you.”
The familiarity of it made me sick. Years of looks, invitations, helpfulness, all of it rewritten in his head as devotion I had somehow failed to reward.
Mason was still staring at him. “No. No, Jude, Babe, answer me. Why would you use Jade?”
Jude sighed like Mason had become tiresome. “Because you were taking too long. Then an opportunity presented itself.”
Mason flinched, and Jude spread his hands.
“Come on, Mase. Be honest with yourself. She was never going to come to me first. Not after all those years of turning me into the wrong kind of man in her head.” His gaze drifted toward me.
“Too rigid. Too obvious. Too much like a man already waiting at her feet.” Then he looked back at Mason.
“You, though. You had the right face for it. Safe enough to get close. You looked like the kind of man she could almost convince herself was the smart choice.”
Mason’s face broke open, but Jude kept going. “She’d already let you close once. You had the right job, the right polish, the kind of face her father could approve of without losing sleep.”
“You used me.” Mason’s voice came out hollow.
Jude actually looked offended. “Don’t be dramatic. We used each other.”
“No.” Mason’s breathing had gone shallow. “No, that’s not what this was.”
Jude laughed softly. “Isn’t it?”
Nausea climbed my throat as I looked between them. “You’re both out of your minds.”
Neither man looked at me. Mason was fixed on Jude with the stunned concentration of somebody watching a life he believed in come apart in front of him.
Jude shook his head. “You were the one whining online about her. You were the one posting about the woman who wrecked you and walked away like it was nothing. I just happened to recognize the shape of the story.” He took one unhurried step toward Mason.
“And once we met, you were lonely enough to believe anything that let you feel chosen again.”
Mason looked like he might be sick, but Jude only softened his voice, turning cruelty into something almost intimate. “I gave you somebody to be angry with. Somebody to want. Somebody to build toward. You were going to give me access.”
My hands curled into fists. “Access to what?”
Jude turned toward me fully. The pleasant mask didn’t disappear so much as become irrelevant, because now I could see the certainty underneath it. He had spent years treating every refusal as something temporary, something he was entitled to correct.
“To you,” he said. The simplicity of the answer frightened me more than shouting would have.
“You think all those little run-ins were accidents?” he asked. “The ER visits?” A faint smile touched his mouth. “Seeing Mase gave me reasons to be there. Reasons to bump into you without raising alarms. What he couldn’t provide, I got on my own. Digitally. Same way I found him.”
Mason closed his eyes for a second, which told me that part was not new to him.
Jude watched him do it before turning that same awful fondness back on me.
“Your searches. Your log-ins. The places you clicked from, the places you spent time.” He tipped his head slightly.
“You’d be amazed what people leave behind when they think they’re just living. ”
My laptop. My phone. Grocery runs and late-night searches and every ordinary thing I had never thought to guard against someone who believed watching me was love. “You tracked me.”
“I watched over you.” He said it with the calm certainty of a man expecting gratitude.
“You stalked me.” The correction came out flat because anything louder felt too much like giving him the reaction he wanted.
His smile held. “Different words for the same thing, depending on whether the woman is grateful.” He paused, then added softly, “Yet.” My stomach turned.
Jude nodded toward Mason. “He was going to give me the in. The softer face. The one you might actually step toward when you wouldn’t step toward me. And in return, I gave him what he wanted too.” His eyes returned to Mason. “Or thought he wanted.”
Mason’s voice barely carried. “You said we were building something together.”
Jude looked at him with lazy contempt. “And you believed that because you needed to.”
“Jude,” Mason breathed. His face had gone slack with hurt, as if saying the name might somehow bring back the man he thought he knew.
“You should have seen yourself,” Jude said. “All that talk about us. About a future. About the three of us. Like she was just going to fold herself into whatever shape made you feel healed.”
Mason backed up, his eyes fixed on Jude as if distance might somehow change what he was hearing. “You said—”
Jude cut him off without a flicker of remorse. “I said what kept you useful.”
Something changed in Mason then. He was not innocent. He had listened, believed, followed, helped. But whatever Jude had promised him had been real to him, and I watched that belief die.
Mason stepped fully in front of me. “This wasn’t the plan,” he said, voice shaking but louder now.
“You said we were going to help her see reason. You said she would come here because she wanted to, because she finally understood. This?” He gestured toward me and the room.
“This is kidnapping. This is using a child. This is insane. I’m not doing this.
We need to let her go. Now.” For one heartbeat, I let myself believe his choice might matter.
Jude’s face went still. “Mason,” he said quietly, “move.”
“No.” Mason swallowed but stayed where he was. The word held between them, steadier than the rest of him. “I mean it. You crossed a line. You crossed every line. This ends now.”
Jude studied him, then looked past his shoulder at me. Whatever remained of his pleasant expression emptied out. His hand moved toward his waist, fast enough that I saw Mason react before I understood why, and a gun appeared in Jude’s hand.
Mason’s mouth opened. “Jude, no, wait—” The gunshot tore through the room before he could move.
I screamed as Mason jerked backward and hit the floor. The sound kept ringing in my skull while my brain struggled to understand the body sprawled on the hardwood. One of his hands twitched once, then stopped, and I couldn’t move.
Mason had lied to me. Helped lure me here. Helped build something sick around a version of me that existed only in his head. And when he finally understood where it had led, he had stepped between me and Jude. Now he was dead.
Jude lowered the gun with horrifying calm. “He was useful.” He glanced at Mason’s body before looking back at me. “But he was weak.”
My breath caught as blood spread beneath a man I had once trusted enough to sleep beside. Jude looked at it without flinching. “Now it’s just you and me.” He gave a small, practical shrug. “And don’t worry about your kid. I don’t even have the brat. It was just a lucky break on the scanner.”
For a second I didn’t understand him. Then I did, and relief hit so hard it almost hurt. Jade wasn’t here.
Relief and rage hit so violently together that I grabbed the first heavy thing within reach, a ceramic lamp from the side table, and threw it at his face with everything I had.
It connected with a crack. Jude staggered, swearing, one hand flying to his face as the lamp shattered and blood opened along his brow.
I ran for the kitchen and the back door beyond it, shoes slipping on hardwood as I fought for speed. I had no plan beyond outside, distance, somebody hearing me. I almost reached the kitchen before Jude hit me from behind.
The impact drove me forward before I could get my hands out. My body struck the floor hard enough to blank my vision, and pain burst through my side, deep and sharp, stealing every scrap of air from my lungs. A scream finally came when I could breathe again.
I twisted under him, clawing for whatever I could reach. My nails caught skin. I kicked, bucked, dragged myself an inch toward the cabinets before his hand closed in the back of my hoodie and ripped me toward him.
“Fuck! Stop fighting.” I bucked again before the command was fully out of his mouth.
He caught my hair and slammed my face into the floor. My lip split against my teeth, blood filling my mouth, and before I could orient myself he dragged one arm behind my back. Something shifted in my shoulder with a wet pop, and pain erased the room.
My scream came from somewhere outside thought, raw enough to tear my throat. Jude drove my cheek into the floor while my vision doubled and swam. Blood and dust coated my tongue. Above me, his breathing had turned ragged. I had broken his calm. Somehow that frightened me almost as much as the gun.
Metal clicked close to my ear. He trapped one wrist and snapped a handcuff around it.
“That’s enough,” he said, breathless now. “You’ve made your point.”
A laugh scraped out of me and tasted like blood. “My point?”
Jude leaned close enough that I could smell the copper of his blood mixing with mine.
“That you need to be taught slower than I hoped.” His fist tightened in my hair, drawing my head back until nausea rolled through me.
“I gave you years to choose right. I waited while you kept throwing yourself at men who didn’t deserve you, men who used you, men who left you.
I waited while you played at being a mother and a nurse and whatever else made you feel noble enough to ignore what was right in front of you. ”
Every breath hurt. “You are not right,” I spat. “You are insane.”
He smiled as if my refusal amused him. “You know what your problem always was, Lila?” he asked softly.
“You mistake intensity for love. Chaos for devotion. Damage for passion.” Bloody fingers brushed the side of my face with grotesque tenderness.
“Mason thought you needed tenderness. I knew better. You need structure. Certainty. Somebody who’ll stop letting you ruin your life with your own impulses. ”
I turned my head and snapped my teeth at his hand. He swore and shoved my face harder against the floor. “Still fighting,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Jesus. Still.”
A low rumble rolled somewhere beyond the house, faint at first beneath the ringing in my ears.
Jude froze over me. I stopped fighting long enough to listen through the pain, and the sound grew until there was no mistaking it. Motorcycles. More than one, engines rolling into the street with enough force to vibrate through the floor beneath my cheek.
Jude’s weight shifted, uncertainty finally cracking through his control. “What the hell—”
Pain still burned through my shoulder. Blood filled my mouth. Mason lay dead in the next room, and Jude still had a gun. None of that changed the sound growing outside.
Jackson was here. I smiled against the floor.
“You’re so fucked.”