Chapter Nine
Jack still didn’t know what to make of this woman. He’d been studying her—her mannerisms, her habits, the way her eyes flicked away from him when he had looked at her too long. Her past.
Credit card debt, medical debt. House foreclosed on. And one, only one, run-in with the law: the glitter bomb, which had resulted in an immediate restraining order.
Now she was scarfing down his remaining strawberries—he made a mental note to order more groceries, especially since so far Ava seemed to have a chaotic tendency to skip meals and just eat whatever she could find in his fridge.
She also had a habit of glaring at him, leaving dishes in the sink even though there was ample time to wash them, and stripping her clothes off at inappropriate moments. And, of course, lying to him.
About the dress shopping, and her plans, and the club itself. Her eyes betrayed her, darting toward the door when she said they wouldn’t go anywhere until tomorrow.
“Get some rest,” Jack said. “I’ll call in a grocery order in the morning.”
“Oh.” She patted the corner of her mouth, missing the whipped cream on her nose entirely. “You mean you don’t use the app? Are you seventy-two?”
“Thirty-one, actually. I call and ask them to enter my items for me,” Jack told her. “And then I use a prepaid Visa, because those are untraceable. They don’t allow those on the app, but they will take them on the in-store kiosk.”
“Is this Hit Man 101?” Ava asked him. “And don’t worry about getting any food for me. I’m good.”
He cocked his head, surveying her carefully.
Ava was curvy—full at the hips, and breasts, too, though he was trying, trying not to openly stare at the way they stretched and filled her small cutoff tee, which advertised a 5K she’d presumably run when she lived back in Iowa.
Still, there was a gaunt look to her face, like she’d recently lost a lot of weight, all at once, as if something had uprooted the person she had been and left a more skeletal shadow in her place.
Like so many people, she spilled details about herself, her past, all of it like water—a 5K you ran, the sticker on your water bottle, the chocolate wrapper in your purse, all details someone could use to identify, triangulate.
Locate. Details available to anyone. A record of living, worn and shed like a second skin.
“You don’t want breakfast tomorrow?” Jack asked her. Lying to him or not, she needed to eat.
“I usually just have coffee,” Ava told him cheerfully. “Eating? In the morning? Couldn’t be me.”
“Hmm,” he said. He was ordering her breakfast regardless, but now didn’t seem like the time to pick a power struggle.
Maybe she liked waffles. Or cinnamon rolls.
She seemed like she would, and he suspected she would accept a breakfast if it was placed in front of her, even if she wouldn’t bother fixing one for herself.
“All right. You can take the primary suite tonight. There’s a whirlpool tub. ”
Jack was still fairly certain this woman would attempt to sneak right out of the house as soon as she thought he was sleeping and chase down whatever lead she’d been certain she’d find at the club.
Not that it would be that hard to figure out which club she’d sneaked off to—now that he knew one of Cale Jacobson’s employees gave away secrets at a club, he could find the rest himself.
And Ava had been right—he didn’t need her now, but he did need to keep her away from the authorities, who were so desperate to catch her. It would be far, far too easy for her to negotiate a plea deal in exchange for turning in someone who had been hired to complete a hit on a powerful businessman.
“Are you saying I need a bath?” Ava interrupted Jack’s thoughts. “I had a shower today. And hot tub time. Which counts as a second bath, honestly. I bet the heat and chlorine kill all the germs.”
Jack bit back another sigh. Ava was the only person he had ever met who took the offer of the nicest bedroom in the house as an insult. Or a suggestion to bathe. Though now that he knew she was feral enough to view a soak in the hot tub as equivalent to a proper bath, he might need to suggest that.
“I thought it might help you relax,” he told her wearily. “You’ve had a long day.”
Of course, it was also a strategic move. It put him between her and the main entrance, which meant he would hear if anyone entered the house, long before they reached her room, and he would also hear her, whenever she inevitably sneaked out tonight.
“Well, aren’t you a gentleman when you’re not murdering people?” Ava deposited her second set of dirty dishes into the sink and left them there.
It wasn’t even that Jack minded doing the dishes—he didn’t particularly; like cross-stitch, he found washing the dishes to be precise and meditative. It was just that setting dishes down “for later” was so desperately inefficient.
Ava’s eyes found him, glinting as she watched his internal struggle.
She was goading him with a dirty bowl and spoon and the tiniest speck of whipped cream still on her nose, and worse: It was working.
“You’re chill about contract murder but not dirty dishes,” she said, snorting with laughter.
He washed the dish. Because what was there to say to that? Yes. Yes, he was.
“So I’ll go dress shopping tomorrow morning,” Ava said as he finished his task.
He followed it with his routine: drying hands, neatly replacing the towel so that it was dead center on the rack and not a centimeter off, and applying hand lotion thoroughly.
Ava watched him with interest. “And you’ll stay here when I do that?” she asked. “And . . . plot? I’m not really sure what contract killers do. Y’all don’t really have a lot of ‘come along with me’ videos on social media. Or maybe I’m just not on that side of TikTok.”
“Can confirm that we do not make lifestyle content,” Jack said. “Good night, Ava.”
“Does ‘good night, Ava’ mean it’s past my bedtime and you’re sending me off to bed?” Ava walked past him.
Jack’s hand shot out before his mind caught up with him, snagging her arm, trailing the soft expanse of skin beneath his thumb.
Then he wiped the whipped cream from her nose and drew in a breath to steady himself.
“Do you need a bedtime?” he asked. “Why do you keep asking if I’m ordering you around, Sunshine?
If that’s what you want, you’ll have to ask nicely. ”
“Fuck you,” she whispered.
Jack let her go, and she disappeared down the hall, one last glance over her shoulder at him as she went.
It was only after he heard her lock click into place that he realized the gun at his waistband was gone.
Jack had more weapons, of course. Three handguns, all untraceable, pieces he’d assembled himself. Plus a truly impractical number of knives, a small syringe, and a long-range rifle, though that last one stayed at his little off-grid property out in Montana.
Still, that wasn’t the point, and it did nothing to stave off the anger that was rolling through him like a wave. Ava Isabella Cavalcante had stolen his gun, and he had been too distracted by her proximity to notice, let alone stop her.
She had, however, left her phone out on the counter. Maybe a trap laid for him, maybe just carelessness because she was exhausted, untrained, and skipped meals.
That last part was baffling to Jack, for whom hunger cues were regular, and meals—healthy, filling, nourishing ones—were a thing of routine.
As long as he and Ava were a working team, he was going to make sure she damn well ate.
Even if he did end up framing her at the end of this, like she’d so angrily insinuated he would.
Because what good would Ava be for him if she was wasting away and so hungry she was jittery? It was impossible to retrieve useful information from someone who was too hungry to think.
Jack took her phone to his room, where he connected it to his laptop, opened it quickly—her password was her name, for fuck’s sake.
He didn’t even have to mess with the phone’s encryption, which would have taken him significantly longer.
He just hazarded a few guesses, not enough to get him locked out more permanently, and .
. . yeah, she needed to work on her password security.
Once he had cloned the schedule from her calendar app (Cale’s schedule was largely something he had already documented, but there were a few additional appointments, one to a high-end salon and one to a very exclusive massage parlor, that could prove useful), he pulled up her history on Maps.
Sure enough, her past was cataloged there for anyone to see. Just like the 5K T-shirt and the chocolate wrappers, her app history was a trail to follow, and Jack was a determined man.
There was a corner grocery store, Taco Bell (listed under “visited often,” so at least she had meals occasionally), a hardware store, and Cale’s favorite juice place where they’d first met.
That, and a club called Dynamo, just slightly northwest of Old Town, where most of the clubs in the area had sprung up along the Willamette.
He searched her contacts next. Only one number was saved, so at least she had (presumably) purchased a new phone for her little endeavor.
He copied the number into his phone and then shared Ava’s contact with his own phone, just in case, and adjusted her location settings so that her location was shared directly with him.
Finally, he called the one number Ava had saved in her phone.
It rang a few times, and then a bright, cheery woman’s voice said, Hey, this is Ari.
Sorry I missed you! Call me back, or send me a text, since this is the twenty-first century and let’s be honest, nobody wants to talk on the phone.
Love you! Unless you’re a telemarketer, in which case, please take me off your list. Okay, that’s it for real. Text me.
The dial tone beeped, and Jack hung up, then deleted the call from the log. Whoever Ari was, she mattered to Ava. Enough that she was the only number saved in Ava’s phone.