Chapter 18 #2
Jessica reached for the passenger door.
“Jessica!”
The voice bounced off the concrete. She knew it immediately.
Trent emerged from behind a parked police cruiser.
He looked terrible. His uniform shirt was untucked, his face blotchy and flushed, and he was moving with the unsteady energy of a man who'd been driving for hours on no sleep and too much adrenaline.
His hand hovered near the weapon on his hip in a way that looked less like training and more like a reflex he couldn't control.
He stopped about ten feet away, chest heaving, his eyes jumping between her and Dante.
“Trent?” Jessica's hand tightened on the edge of the car door. “What are you—how did you find us?”
“Come with me,” he said, ignoring the question. “Right now, and I can protect you. I'm a cop, Jess. I can make this go away.”
Dante hadn't moved. “You're a long way from Corpus,” he said. “And you're way out of your lane.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Trent snapped, his attention swinging to Dante with a heat that sounded like it had been building long before today. “I'm not talking to you, Castano. I know who you are. I know what you did in Chicago. You're the reason she's in danger in the first place.”
He turned back to Jessica, and the shift was jarring, the anger dropping away, replaced by something softer and needier that made her skin crawl.
“Jess, honey, come with me. I can tell them he kidnapped you. We can go home. We can fix this.”
Jessica stood very still.
She should have felt nothing. She should have been past this—past him, past the duplex, past the version of herself who'd believed that Trent's presence was the same thing as safety. But hearing him say it, those words—we can fix this—she felt something pull at her. It wasn’t love, and it definitely wasn’t want.
It was the gravitational drag of the familiar, the terrible comfort of a door you'd already walked through.
Her hand slipped off the car door.
She felt Dante register it beside her. He didn't grab her, didn't block her path. He just stepped slightly forward, not touching her, close enough that going to Trent would mean choosing to go around him.
“Don't,” he said softly.
The moment stretched. Jessica looked at Trent and made herself see what was actually there.
The sweat, the desperation, the hand that wouldn't leave his sidearm.
She'd seen that face across the kitchen table a hundred times.
It was the face of a man who believed his love was the same thing as his ownership.
Now he was standing in a parking garage in a city he had no business being in, offering to take her home like home was still something that existed.
She stepped back toward the car.
“Trent, you shouldn't be here,” she said. “You don't understand what's happening.”
“I understand enough.” His voice rose, the softness curdling. “I talked to them.”
The words landed in the concrete space and kept echoing.
Jessica felt them hit before she even understood them. “You what?”
“I talked to them,” Trent repeated, faster now, like saying it again might make it sound less insane. “The people who broke in. I talked to the woman. She told me what this is about—it's him they want, not you. If you come with me, you're out. You're safe. It's that simple.”
Jessica stared at him.
The information arrived in pieces, each one worse than the last. He'd talked to them.
He'd talked to the people who had kicked in her door and put an armed man in her bedroom.
He'd talked to them, and instead of calling it in, instead of doing the single thing his badge required of him, he'd made a deal.
He was standing here offering her safety that he'd purchased by collaborating with the people who'd tried to kill her.
“Trent,” she said, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears. “How did they know where I was?”
He blinked. “What?”
“How did they find me? The duplex, Trent. No one knew that address. Not the marshals, not anyone from before.” She watched his face and saw the flinch—tiny and involuntary, there and gone. “How did they know?”
Trent's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Dante took a step toward him. “She asked you a question.”
“That's not—I didn't—” Trent's voice had changed, the bravado cracking, something desperate and cornered leaking through. “I was trying to protect you. I've been trying to protect you this whole time.”
“How did they know where I live?” Jessica said again, and this time her voice wasn't calm. It was shaking.
Trent's eyes darted between them. She watched him search for a version of the story that kept him clean, watched him realize there wasn't one, and watched him do what Trent always did when the truth closed in: he pivoted to anger.
“This is his fault,” Trent said, jabbing a finger at Dante. “All of it. You were fine before he showed up. You were safe. I kept you safe for a year, and then he walks back into your life and suddenly everything falls apart—”
“You gave them my name,” Jessica said.
The words came out quietly, but they stopped him dead.
“You gave them my name, and you've been lying about it ever since.”
Trent's face went through something ugly: shock, then denial, then a fury that had nowhere to go and settled into his body instead. His breathing changed. His hand dropped to his holster, and this time it wasn't hovering. His fingers closed around the grip.
“Trent,” Jessica said. “Don't.”
“I'm not the bad guy here,” he said, his voice cracking. “I'm the one who came for you. I'm the one who's been trying to fix this. And you're standing there with him, wearing that fucking ring—”
He'd seen it. His eyes had locked onto her left hand, and whatever thread had been holding him together snapped behind his expression.
He pulled the gun.
The motion was clumsy and rushed; it was the draw of a man who'd qualified at a range and never pulled his weapon in the field. The barrel hadn't even leveled before Dante moved.
He knocked the gun sideways with one hand and drove his fist into Trent's face with the other.