Chapter Thirteen
Jack swerved as a bullet shattered the glass of the windshield. Ava shrieked, covering her ears with her hands. She was still lying on the floor in the back seat, her body trembling.
“Stay down,” he snapped.
This was an unholy fucking mess. A stolen, stripped car.
A stolen motorcycle, abandoned near Jacobson’s warehouse, and no guarantee that Jack hadn’t left DNA on the bike somewhere.
And Devin, the sharp-eyed security guard who had insisted that Jack stay and talk to them, had recognized him, moments before Jack had killed him.
And now—Ava, hurt. Devin, dead in their back seat.
Jack bit back the wall of frustration that was bearing down on him like a wave. This woman. This woman.
And when he had seen the blood running down her face, seen the way she curled over her injured ribs, something had snapped inside him that he still didn’t understand.
When he shot that man, he had none of his usual control.
None of that slow, careful calm he had built, brick by brick, over years of doing this work.
No, he had just fired. Not once. Not twice. He had emptied the magazine.
Just because Ava was hurt.
She was—
Currently trying to clamber over the barrier into the front seat.
Jack put a hand out to indicate she should stay put, and Ava high-fived it.
“Go team,” she said wearily, dropping into the passenger seat and groaning when she made contact. “Shouldn’t have done that. Why didn’t you stop me?”
“I tried,” Jack gritted out, whipping the SUV left, lights off in an attempt to lose the SUV that was rapidly gaining on them. “You wouldn’t stay put.”
“Oh.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fuck, that was a bad time. I mean, I never feel good the morning after going to the club, but I don’t usually feel so . . .”
“Broken?” Jack supplied. “Shot at?”
“Both,” Ava said. “Where are we going?”
“Away from the people with guns,” Jack said. “Now let me focus.”
Did she think this was a time for conversation? When they were driving around with a busted-up windshield and a body in the trunk and gunmen in hot pursuit?
“How did you find me?” Ava asked. “I thought I’d lose you for sure when, uh.” Her glance slid to him, a little abashed, if only for a moment.
“When you stole my car,” Jack said, cranking the wheel to the right and speeding down a dark residential street. “Yeah. I know.”
“Where did you leave it?” she asked. “Should we go back and get it?”
“I wouldn’t have left it if you hadn’t gotten yourself kidnapped in front of me.
” Jack pulled off the road into a dark parking lot for some riverside park.
They were nearing the edge of the city, far enough from the warehouse district that he could afford to stop and get his bearings.
“I had to leave it near Dynamo. And now I’ve had to leave the motorcycle. ”
It was a trail of chaos, leading straight back to him. He never left a mess like this.
Never.
And part of him thought he should have just let her stay in the back of that SUV, that he should never have chased her down and rescued her. That he should let her go down for this, let her be another body found along the river weeks from now, nobody to look for her.
But the thought of that, strangely enough, had been unbearable. She made him think of Jay. She made him think of a different world, a different life. A different version of Jack O’Sullivan, even.
“Jack?”
“Hmm?”
Ava was staring at him out of those impossible hazel eyes. “Where’d you go?” She laughed, despite the mess she’d gotten them in. “I said your name, like, three times.”
He wanted her to say it again.
He wanted her to get the fuck out of this SUV and never see her again.
“We have to get rid of this car and this body. I think we need to drive far outside of the city and burn both.” He took a breath and leaned back against the seat, bracing one hand on the armrest, the other on his gun. Fuck, he’d need to print and build a new gun, too.
Nothing connected to this most recent scene could be used on Cale Jacobson. There could never, ever be threads between one event and another. No trail to follow.
Nothing.
“Don’t tell me you ate any Dove chocolates at this scene,” Jack added.
Ava snorted. “No,” she said. “Because you had my purse.”
She said it like an accusation, as if it was Jack’s fault Ava had left her purse behind and he’d had to rescue both her purse and her ass.
He reached into the back seat and grabbed it for her, holding it out to her wordlessly.
“If you ate my chocolates,” she said with a shake of her head.
“Then you can consider it payment for saving your sorry ass,” Jack said.
“My sorry ass?” Ava scoffed. “It was worth it. I was getting intel from that guy, and I had actually already escaped from the ropes when you finally got there, thank you very much.”
And just like that, every ounce of calm he had spent years forging was gone, burned away by the flame that was Ava Cavalcante. Anger, white-hot and fierce, melted the space between them.
“What the hell were you thinking, running off to a club where people knew you? Where you could get dragged away like that?” Jack snapped. “What were you thinking, going out as if half the city wasn’t hunting for you?”
For the first time Ava truly froze. He had not seen fear on her, he realized. He had seen anger, spades of it, and a grief deeper than that. But he had not seen fear, even when he had been sitting on her hostel bed, waiting for her with a gun.
Then, slowly, a grin twisted across her face. “Oh, Jack,” she said. “Don’t start sounding like you care.”
“I care,” Jack ground out. “When you are jeopardizing my job.”
Ava snorted. “You could have let them kill me,” she said. “It wouldn’t have stopped you from killing Cale Jacobson.”
“We’ve been over this.”
He’d been clear: He needed information she had, because she knew things, knew people he didn’t. And he needed to control the collateral so that she didn’t ruin his damn job.
“You’ve rambled a lot, yeah,” Ava said. She leaned across the center console, her chest heaving, her eyes crackling. “In fact, you never shut the fuck up.”
Jack took a deep breath. And then another.
He was angry with Ava, so angry it was burning him alive. But he couldn’t afford that. Couldn’t afford anger, or anything else, not when there was chaos to manage. A body to get rid of. A body.
Usually Jack didn’t worry too much about the body. There was only one, a clean hit, something that looked like a random mugging. Untraceable bullets. A piecemeal gun, easily deconstructed, the parts abandoned in dumpsters and gas station trash cans.
And then he was in the wind, long gone until the next time he resurfaced with a job to do.
One of these days it would catch up with him. He had always known that. He had just not quite expected it to be today.
Finally, he sighed. They could drive this SUV out of the city, stop along the way for a few gas cans—he had the cash for that—and burn the SUV and the body.
By the time it was found, there would be little the cops could learn beyond, maybe, the identity of the deceased.
But that meant hiking all the way back into the city, which limited his radius.
Or they could drive back for his motorcycle, banking on his hope that Jacobson’s people had cleared that warehouse by now, and he could ride behind Ava while she drove the SUV out of town.
Or option three: Drive back downtown toward Dynamo, through the heart of the city, where a blown-out windshield and a bullet-riddled car would have any cop with their eyes open rushing to pull him over.
“Your thoughts are loud,” Ava complained. “Are you thinking of murdering me again?”
“I haven’t ever thought about murdering you,” Jack returned.
Thought about framing her for one, sure.
But that was entirely different.
“Why are we sitting in this dark parking lot by the river, Jack?” She reached across the center console and punched his arm, hard.
He flinched.
An automatic reaction, one he hadn’t planned. He thought he had gotten rid of all those automatic tells, the stories his body told without his permission.
Ava, who had been slouched against her seat back, looking absolutely destroyed from the night at the club and everything that followed, sat up a little. “Are you . . . okay?”
Jack startled.
How many years had it been since anyone had asked him that, and meant it? Since—since Jay, probably, and Jack couldn’t think about that.
“I’m good,” he said. “We have to go back to the warehouse, Ava.”
She groaned.
“Buckle your seat belt.”
“No.”
His gaze snapped to her as he started the car again. “What do you mean, no? Do you want to die in a car accident?”
“Are you going to crash the car?”
“Ava, we’re driving back to a place where there might be armed men, if we’re unlucky,” Jack said. “Cops or Jacobson’s hired assholes. So buckle your damn seat belt.”
“And if we’re lucky?” Ava leaned back against the seat again. “What then, Jack O’Sullivan?”
“If we’re lucky, Jacobson’s people have cleaned everything up so that it’s spotless and didn’t find where I concealed my motorcycle,” Jack said. “And the cops haven’t been through yet.”
“Why would the cops come at all?” Ava asked as Jack pulled the SUV slowly back out onto the road. “We were so far from anyone. You don’t really think anybody could hear gunshots way out there, do you?”
“Rule number one,” Jack said as he rolled to a stop.
It was getting dangerously close to dawn now, and that meant more people out, more people looking, more questions asked.
More cops called. “Assume there is always someone watching, and assume there is always someone listening. And assume people always know more than you want them to, and more than they should.”
“That’s a paranoid way to live,” Ava said, but her usual bite was missing from her tone.
“It’s a good way not to die,” Jack told her, and then the rest of the drive was in silence.