Chapter Twenty-Six
The next morning Ava woke up ravenously hungry. For more wontons or for more of Jack’s cock, whichever she could get first.
He was already awake, poring over details in his notebook.
“Is this murder manual back in rotation?” Ava asked him. “And do you need to have a murder matcha to go with it?”
That was what he’d been drinking that first morning. He’d ordered before her at the café, asked for a matcha, unsweetened.
She should have known then that he was a violent criminal, honestly. Who didn’t add sweetness to a drink?
“It’s not a murder matcha,” Jack said wearily. “I’m glad you’re up. Let’s get to work.”
“Work? Before cinnamon buns?” Ava gave him her best pleading face, without any hope that it would work, and then came over and sat on his lap, naked, grinding her ass a little against him as she sat.
She was rewarded by feeling his cock stiffen beneath her.
Jack swatted the edge of her thigh lightly. “Knock that off and let me focus,” he said. “Don’t you need to get dressed?”
“If I don’t do either?” Ava asked.
“Then I’ll tie you up and leave you here while I go and get things done,” Jack said. “And you hate being ignored above pretty much everything else, so. Knock it off.”
Ava made a whiny noise, because otherwise she was going to open her stupid mouth and tell Jack her feelings for him. It was kind of dumb that she’d only figured it out yesterday, and unfortunately she’d woken up still falling for him today. Very inconvenient.
“I’ve been poring over the floor plan,” Jack said. “I can see a few ways in—there’s an entrance for waitstaff that might not be too difficult—but I’m not finding a way out.”
“Unless we take the helicopter that’ll be on the roof,” Ava said.
Ms. Rae had talked about her boss having his helicopter parked on the roof anywhere he went, even if he hadn’t used it to travel there. He always had an escape route, she’d said.
And that meant Jack and Ava did, too.
“Do you know how to fly a helicopter?” Jack asked her, shifting her on his lap. “And put some clothes on.”
“So that you won’t drop everything and fuck me again while we’re in the middle of working?” Ava asked. “And anyway, I was assuming you knew how to fly a helicopter. Are you telling me you don’t?”
“I do, actually,” Jack said. “It just seemed like quite the assumption to make.”
“Are you former military?”
“No.”
“Former CIA?”
“Definitely not.”
“Well, you’re a badass,” Ava said. “And you know how to drive a motorcycle. So I guess I just kind of assumed.”
Jack patted her thigh again absentmindedly (which was rude, because gentle little pats didn’t sting as deliciously—all they did was tease Ava into wanting more). “Those two are not the same,” he said.
“Vroom,” Ava said sagely. “Now get on with it. You get distracted so easily. You have a way to get us in, and I have a way to get us out. If we’re right that they moved the gala up, Cale will probably be at the mansion already? So we need to get ready.”
She had spent so many months working to get this close, but now that it was just a night away—Ava shivered.
Tomorrow, everything would change, one way or another.
Cale would be dead, and Ava likely in jail at best, or dead at worst. Or she would have failed, Cale would still be breathing, and this would all have been for nothing.
But, either way, it was all going to be over soon.
“Ava,” Jack said slowly. “But, Ava, there’s a very real chance we don’t walk away from this. I want you to know . . . I’m willing to walk away. If you are.”
Ava nearly jumped off his lap. His words had scrambled her brain hopelessly. He couldn’t mean that. He couldn’t.
“You’re right, I do need clothes for this conversation,” she muttered. She crossed the room and pulled on one of his shirts, and then his hoodie, which went down past her ass, the sleeves so long her hands were buried in them. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Jack said.
He couldn’t look at her, either. “I—I have my own reasons for choosing this work. For needing to do this job. But I’ve never had a job go like this, and I’m not one hundred percent sure I can get us both out safely.
So I’m willing to walk away, if you are. ”
Ava hesitated.
Was she? Could she be?
She hadn’t thought that was possible, even a few weeks ago. She couldn’t imagine a version of herself without the fury, the grief, the thing holding her together and pushing her forward. It had kept her alive after Ari.
“Come here,” Jack said softly, and that was how Ava realized she had started pacing.
Jack was still sitting on the opposite bed, but he had set his phone and notes down and his arms were open to her.
She accepted the invitation, settled next to him, tucked against his side.
“You could tell me,” he said softly. “If you wanted.”
He said it so simply. An invitation to share her why, the thing that was driving her so inexorably onward despite every obstacle, every danger.
And oh god, she did want to tell him everything she had started sharing earlier.
After months of talking to nobody about this, of letting nobody in, it was Jack O’Sullivan who had worn away the walls around her heart and made her want to talk about it.
“Her name was Ariel, but she went by Ari,” Ava said softly. “And she was my whole world.”
Jack sat up, looking down at her, his full attention fixed on her, just like before. “Ari,” he repeated. “Ari, who made you laugh.”
It meant something, talking about Ari without talking about all the grief and loss. Talking about the good, the laughter, the games of cards that all felt like a lifetime ago now. It was freeing not to have to tell the awful details.
Ari’s symptoms, building slowly and then all at once. Ari’s doctors, not listening until it was too late. The diagnosis. The one single hope they had, an experimental drug that might have saved her. Denied by her insurance, Cale’s company. The appeal delayed and delayed and delayed.
Ari, gone.
The appeal coming back the day of Ari’s funeral. Treatment approved. Full coverage.
But Jack wasn’t asking her to bleed for him, to share details that opened her like a wound.
She could talk about who Ari had been. That, Ava could do.
“I met her in high school,” Ava said. “It was so cliché. I was a loner. I hung out in the library at lunch, and she was an all-star athlete who played lacrosse, and one day she was in there studying for a test, and she said—she said I had the most magnetic eyes she’d ever seen.”
Jack nodded. “You do,” he said softly. “She was right.”
Ava couldn’t even tell him to shut up. She’d dropped the walls she’d made out of banter and humor and teasing, and now it was too late to put them back up.
“And that was it. I loved her so much. We started dating senior year, got married at the end of college. We bought a house just outside of Cedar Rapids, and we grew tulips in the front yard and tomatoes in the back every summer. We went to the skating rink together every Friday and played cards on Saturday. I became a librarian, and she became a groundskeeper for the conservatory, and then, three months after her diagnosis, she was—”
She was gone.
Ava didn’t realize tears were running down her face until Jack reached out and caught them with his thumb, swiping them away.
“I’m sure you’ve had enough people tell you they’re sorry for your loss,” Jack said softly. “So I won’t say any of those meaningless words. But I know the kind of love that burns you down when it’s gone. And I wish there was anything I could do to take that kind of pain away from you.”
Ava leaned heavily against him. “You only know that if you’ve felt it,” she said. “You must have, with Jay. You have to love someone an awful lot for it to ruin you like this.”
And they were ruined, weren’t they? Ruined beyond any hope of rescue. A hit man and an ex-librarian with a grudge, both gunning for the same man.
For a moment Jack stiffened, and she thought he would refuse, say he had shared all he meant to earlier. But then he leaned his elbows on his knees and leaned forward with a heavy sigh.
“His name was Ajay, but he usually introduced himself as Jay,” Jack said slowly.
AJ.
The name Jack had given her first. Who knew that it had been weighted with so much history?
Ava threaded her hand through his arm and squeezed.
“We met at a bar, and he asked me to dance,” Jack continued. “Jay loved to move—he did salsa and swing dancing and even dabbled a little in Irish dancing. We got an apartment in Atlanta together, and . . .”
Jack’s voice trailed off.
“You don’t have to talk about this part,” Ava told him.
She could feel Jack’s grief as palpably as her own.
He walked around with his mask up to the whole world, literally and figuratively, but she could see every impossible, beautiful layer of this man unfolding in front of her.
“You can talk about the part where he made you laugh and you argued about laundry.”
Jack shook his head. “Do you ever forget?” he asked. “Do you ever forget the good things? Like they’re so far away—”
“It’s almost like you can’t remember they happened at all,” Ava finished for him. “Yeah. I do. I used to sit at a kitchen table with Ari and steal strawberries off her plate, and now I’m not sure I remember what her laugh sounds like.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I was going to marry him. I—I called him my husband, but we never got that far, not officially. I was meeting him at a park north of the city to propose to him. I left early, even though he wanted us to drive together because he was an anxious driver. But I wanted to get there before him to set everything up. And Jay never came, because a drunk driver in a pickup T-boned his car and left him to die. When I found him, he said—you came for me. He died before knowing I wanted to propose to him. I’d set up the park for our proposal when the EMTs called me, and I just .
. . I just left it all there. I couldn’t bear to go back and get it. ”