Chapter 25 The Fall
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Fall
Fear lurched inside of him. Reflected in her eyes as she gasped in pain. The shift was tangible and real. Trust vanished. Only ugliness remained.
Jack scrambled off the bed, and turned his back to her, needing a moment to collect himself. Her breath shifted like a blade in his ribs.
“I’m sorry,” he snapped. “I can’t.”
Her silence gutted him.
His mind drew upon the wreckage left in the wake of every catastrophe he’d ever survived, throwing him back to a time and place he never wanted to visit again.
Hands pawing. Skin tearing. Breath cinching.
Tears welling. Teeth biting. Copper filling his mouth as he held it all in, pretended it wasn’t happening, tried to breathe through it, tried to die.
Weight. Crushing weight. Sweat. The stench of rot.
Gold veneers and laughing cherubs. Blood-red bedding to hide the stains.
“Fuck!” he snapped, storming to the bar.
Crystal clinked as he uncorked a decanter with a shaky hand. He half expected to stand on tippy toes and stretch to reach the glasses. In that moment, he was not Jack Thorne. He was trapped in little Jackie’s mind, stripped of options and trapped under the crushing weight of a giant.
The rattle of liquid filling an unsteady glass broke the silence. He swallowed three fingers of Mad Hatter in two gulps, but the anesthetic was slow to take effect. So he poured more.
Her sniffle stopped time and his heart split open in ways he couldn’t handle. Not now.
“You should go.”
Her breath hitched. He couldn’t bear to face her, didn’t want to see how she looked at him. “Jack…”
His eyes pressed shut. His fucking name on her lips was a spell. “If you want, I can arrange a car. You’ll be compensated for your time—”
“Fuck you.” Bedding rustled and she was on the move in a flash of red satin. The bathroom door slammed and he flinched.
He set down his empty glass with a hard click and turned. The room was destroyed. He should have never brought her back here.
Moving to the fireplace, he lifted the empty leather file box and began picking up the scraps of paper. He’d burn them with the others. As long as he had a plan, he could stay calm. He just had to keep moving and—
“Fuck!” He flipped the table, sending the silver tray of food soaring across the floor.
Flinging the useless box at the wall, he seethed. His hands balled into fists, splitting his broken knuckles open again.
“I can’t do this.” He buttoned his shirt, tucking in the tails in such a rush, a dash of blood marked the crisp white.
He moved to the dressing room and ripped a jacket off a hanger. Clothing used to be his armor, but now it felt more like a tourniquet.
He faced the mirror and stilled when a little boy looked back at him. Dark bruises showed under his big eyes as he stared up at Jack wearing far too much exhaustion for a child. His clothes were moth-eaten and his arms too skinny. He shivered as if trapped in an endless winter.
Jack’s throat tightened until his vision blurred, forcing him to abruptly look away.
He dialed the code into the safe and retrieved his gun, checking the magazine out of habit. Then he stilled.
His mind went to Daisy. What was she doing in there? Was she angry? Crying?
He reached to rub a hand over his face and stilled again. Her scent was all over him.
He shoved the gun back in the safe and slammed it shut.
Moving slow and keeping his steps light, he approached the bathroom door. Pressing his head to the cool wood, he closed his eyes and listened to her soft sniffles.
He was a monster for making her cry.
His palm pressed to the door. “Daisy?”
Another sniffle. “Go away.”
He twisted the knob and pushed his way inside. She sat on the lip of the tub, wrapped like a goddess in the bedsheet. “I’m sorry.”
“I heard you the first time.” She wiped her eyes, but more tears fell, each one a small, brutal death he suffered in full.
He took a step, then another, until he was crouching in front of her. She pushed when he wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Don’t,” she begged, when he rested his head on her lap.
He didn’t know the words to make her stop hurting. His entire existence had been an endless void of pain. Her soft sniffles eviscerated him. His fault. Not hers. But he was a selfish bastard and he needed to hold her, no matter how much she wanted him to stop touching her.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he confessed, pulling her fingers to his lips. He kissed her delicate knuckles, her hands.
A soft whimper slipped from her throat, the sound confused and pained. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have—”
“No. None of this your fault. I’m broken.” He squeezed her hands. “The inside is so much worse than the outside.”
He shifted, settling in to fully rest his head on her lap as he stared to the gaping door.
“I’ve spent my entire life hiding the damaged parts of me, but you…” He still didn’t understand this hold she had over him. “There’s something about you. I thought…maybe… You saw me.”
“I do see you, Jack.” Her fingers threaded through his hair, bringing him back to the way she held him in bed.
He closed his eyes, savoring the unparalleled sensation of having gentle hands on him.
“I’ve seen your scars,” she reminded, stroking her fingers down his scalp to his neck. “I can only imagine what they did to you.”
His eyes opened. “They?”
She hesitated. “R.A.” When he sat up to look at her, she quickly explained, “I saw the burn.”
Jack was back at the estate, body stretched painfully over a chair as the chancellor told him to be still.
He’d known whatever was coming would be bad, but nothing prepared him for the shock.
That deep, bite of searing pain that turned his vision white.
The jolt of pain that made him buck and scream as heat burned through his flesh burns.
Breath snatched from his lungs as his jaw locked.
His stomach dropped as his body became a thick, throbbing nerve that swelled in agony. Alive and pulsing. A heartbeat.
A thousand needles punctured his skin as the smell of charred flesh filled his nose like a noxious fume. A cold sweat washed over him, drenching him in humiliating dizziness that left him shaking for hours.
“Look at that,” the chancellor had moaned, proud of his handy work, indifferent to Jack’s tears.
Tight. Swollen. Raised. Wrong. It was a patch of shame he’d never shed, one that lay claim to his body in a way that would follow him home. The chancellor was always with him after that. An echo that never died.
Jack’s finger twisted his ring, his words small and constricted by the little body of a boy he sometimes found himself trapped within. “He was a bad man.”
Her cool fingers trailed slowly over his cheek. She let the statement settle before she asked, “How did he die?”
“Screaming.”
The moment was as seared into his memory as the burn on his hip.
It had taken months for Jack to heal. If not for Myrtle, he would have died. He waited for the papers to announce the passing of Chancellor Rupert Aurin, but no announcement ever came. Then one day, Jack saw him on a television in the window of a pawn shop.
The world stopped. The chancellor was alive. He stood at a podium and wore a black patch over one eye.
Whatever Jack had been doing, wherever he’d been going, it all just fell away.
He rushed back to Myrtle’s flat and ripped back the rug.
“Jack, what are you doing?” She was still in bed, since her work didn’t start for a few hours.
Incapable of explaining, he pulled up the floorboards and began extricating all of his belongings. Stacks of money spilled from the pillowcases, and he stuffed them back inside.
“Jack, stop.” Myrtle’s hands caught his. “Tell me what happened?”
When he tried to speak, only sobs escaped. How was it possible the chancellor was still alive? Jack killed him. He was supposed to be dead. Bad men needed to die, but the chancellor seemed immortal in all his evil.
“Shh, it’s okay, love.” She caught his hand, one of the few places he didn’t mind being touched. When he tried to tug away, she restrained his hand in two of her own. “Listen to me, Jack. Whatever’s happened, we can figure it out together.”
He fell into a fit of tears and she could only helplessly watch him break into a million pieces. That night, she didn’t go to work. She stayed up with him, listening to half sentences as he tried to put into words everything he’d been through.
She never judged him or made him feel ashamed for the things he’d done. And that made it easier to face the worst of it in his mind, even if he lacked the courage to say those things out loud.
After that night, Myrtle connected him with a man who went by the name of Wolf. Apparently, Wolf had solved a problem for Myrtle before. She hadn’t gone into detail, but Jack knew it had something to do with the scar on her stomach and the reason she would never have children of her own.
Wolf was a gangster of sorts, a problem solver—the kind that made problems disappear.
He had access to everyone and everything, from the lowliest bad actors to the most powerful men.
He took money from athletes, politicians, and even clergy.
He didn’t take sides. Wolf was on the side of whoever paid him the most.
“I’m an expensive enemy to have,” he’d once told Jack in that strange, old-money accent that was as manmade as his fortune.
Wolf didn’t care what Jack’s problem was or who it involved.
He only needed to know the desired outcome.
At first, Jack had thought to pay him. Like any other problem, Wolf could make the chancellor go away.
But then, after learning how powerful Wolf actually was, and how accepted he was by the classes, Jack changed his mind.
“Can you teach me how to do what you do?”