Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
Jessica sat pressed between the two men, her arms pulled tight against her ribs. Every time Trent shifted gears, his elbow brushed her sleeve. Every time the truck swerved, she felt the hard, steady line of Dante’s shoulder. She felt like she was the only thing keeping the two men from colliding.
She looked out the window as the industrial bones of the harbor blurred into the flat, grey-green expanse of the marshlands. The further they got from the sirens, the more the frantic pounding in her ears began to subside.
He’s dead, she thought, the words a silent prayer. Ferrera is actually dead.
Jessica let her head rest back against the seat, closing her eyes. She felt a hysterical relief bubbling up in her chest. Trent had done it. Her broken, jealous mess of an ex-boyfriend had actually finished what the rest of world couldn’t.
“We’re almost there,” Trent muttered. His voice was thick, his jaw barely moving.
“Good,” Dante said. His voice was cold, a flat line of indifference.
He didn't thank him for the shot. To Dante, Trent was still the man who had sold her out—a man who had finally paid a very small installment on an unpayable debt.
The truck slowed, turning off the asphalt onto a track of crushed shells and weeds. The tall grass scraped against the sides of the Ram like fingernails on tin. At the end of the path sat a leaning, corrugated metal shed.
Trent pulled the truck into the darkness of the shed and killed the engine. The sudden silence was suffocating.
Jessica exhaled, her shoulders finally dropping. “We did it,” she whispered, looking at Dante. “He’s gone. Ferrera is gone. We can find a way off the island, Dante. We can go.”
Dante didn't look relieved. He looked at the shadows stretching across the marsh. “Ferrera was just the one we could see, Jessica. There must be others.”
“But he was the one,” she insisted, her voice rising with a desperate kind of hope. “He was the link.”
“Back in Corpus,” Trent interrupted, his voice barely a whisper in the gloom of the shed. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his hands still gripped tight on the wheel. “The woman that came to the house. She wasn't talking about Ferrera. She didn't even mention the cartel.”
Jessica felt a cold prickle of unease crawl up her spine. “What are you talking about?”
Trent turned his head slowly. The bruising on his face had turned a deep, sickly plum color. “She said she was working for a 'Russian.' What does that even mean?”
The air in the cab seemed to turn to ice.
Jessica’s heart didn't just speed up; it stopped. The word “Russian” hit her with the force of a physical blow.
She remembered the dog crate in the dilapidated Philly house.
The smell of blood and death coming from the tortured and strangled woman in the cage beside hers.
The dog bites on her flesh. The blood-encrusted power tools on the table in the center of room.
Power tools that had nearly been used on her, by the three thugs Borya Sokolov had sent to fetch her years ago.
She’d escaped them, but she’d never escaped the memory of his name.
She thought too of the girls she’d met back in Panama City Beach, the ones with the hollow eyes and the stories they only told after a few drinks.
Stories of clubs up and down the East Coast, and the men who worked for a man named Borya.
They’d talked about the “rooms” he kept, places where girls went and never came out the same.
They’d talked about the scars that never faded and the way he treated women like property to be broken and traded.
“No,” she breathed, her hands starting to shake. “No, not him.”
“Who?” Trent asked, his eyes moving between her and Dante. “Who is the Russian?”
Dante’s face had gone completely still. “Borya Sokolov.” He didn't elaborate any further, leaving Trent looking just as confused. But Jessica knew he had drifted down his own dark memory lane, filled with his own terrifying recollections of the man who'd made his life hell too.
Jessica gripped the edge of the seat until her knuckles turned white. Ferrera was a thug. But Borya was the architect of the nightmare she had heard about in every strip club and dive bar from Florida to Texas. He was the one who owned the darkness.
“If he's the one who actually sent her,” Jessica whispered, her voice trembling, “then it isn't over. It was never about Ferrera.”
She looked at Dante, her eyes pleading for him to tell her she was wrong. But Dante was looking out the windshield, his hand still resting on the gun.
Jessica watched Dante standing ten feet away in the shadows of the shed, his back to the cab, watching the mouth of the dirt track. He hadn't spoken to her in twenty minutes. He hadn't spoken to Trent at all.
Inside the truck, the silence weighed on her. Trent was slumped against the driver's side door, his head lolling back against the frame. The ego that had fueled his chase from Corpus Christi seemed to have leaked out of him, leaving something hollowed-out behind.
“Why did you do it,” Jessica said. She didn't turn to look at him. She kept her eyes on Dante's silhouette. “Why did you give them my name?”
Trent's breath hitched. The pause before he answered was long enough that she thought he might not.
“I was angry,” he finally said. “I hated that I'd spent two years trying to make you love me and you were still just—waiting for a ghost. Every time you looked at the door, or the phone, or just stared out at nothing, you weren't looking for me. You were looking for him.” He stopped.
When he spoke again, his voice had lost whatever was left of its strength.
“In that moment, I wanted you to hurt. I didn't care if they killed you. I just wanted the weight of you off my chest.”
Jessica said nothing for a long moment. She kept expecting the words to hit her, kept bracing for the impact, but it didn't come.
What settled over her instead was something else, something more like tiredness than pain.
This was the man she had lived with. The man she had cooked for and slept beside.
A man who had been capable of trading her life for the relief of his own wounded pride, and had waited until now to find the honesty to admit it.
So she didn't say anything back. There wasn't anything to say.
Dante tapped on the passenger window, two knuckles against the glass.
Jessica startled at the sound, her pulse spiking. Dante opened the door, the wet heat of the marsh rolling in. He didn't look at Trent. He looked past him, his eyes finding Jessica.
“You can't stay in the truck,” he said. “There's a loft above the bait counter. It's rotting, but it'll hold. Get up there.”
“What about him?” she asked, nodding toward Trent.
Dante let his eyes move to the man in the driver's seat. “He stays on the floor. He watches the door. If he tries to leave, or if he tries to call anyone, I'll finish what I started in that parking lot.”
Trent didn't argue. He climbed out of the truck with the slow, stiff movements of a man twenty years older than he'd been yesterday. He walked to the corner of the shed and sank onto a stack of moldy burlap sacks. Something about the way he folded into himself made Jessica look away.
She followed Dante to the ladder. Her hands were shaking as she gripped the old wood, and she focused on that—the grain of it, the way it bit into her palms—because it was easier than thinking.
The loft was dark, the air dense with dust. The floorboards groaned under her weight. Dante climbed up after her and pulled the ladder up without a word.
They lay down on a pile of old canvas sails, the fabric stiff and smelling of salt. Jessica stared up at the dark and listened to the marsh outside, the distant sound of frogs and water moving, and beneath that, barely audible, the shift of Trent settling on the floor below.
Then Dante's arm came around her, heavy and deliberate, pulling her against his chest, and for a moment the rest of it receded.
“He's coming, isn't he,” she said, quieter than she meant to. She felt the words leave her like something she'd been holding in a fist. “Borya.”
Dante's arm tightened. He didn't answer right away. She could feel his pulse against her cheek, steady and slow.
“He's been coming for thirteen years, Jess.”
She closed her eyes. The image of the dog crate swam up behind them—the smell of it, the sound of it—and she pushed it back down, the way she'd taught herself to. She focused on the heat of Dante's skin. On his breathing. On the fact that she was here and not there.
After a while, she became aware of Trent again. The occasional creak of the floorboards below. It was the sound of a man sitting in the dark with what he'd done.
She didn't feel sorry for him. She wasn't sure she felt anything toward him at all anymore.
But somewhere between the sound of his breathing and the slow shift of the night, she understood something she hadn't before: that the man downstairs wasn't guarding them because he wanted to be a hero.
He was guarding them because he had nowhere else to go, and no one else to be.
Trent sat on the stack of moldy burlap, the cold of the concrete seeping through his slacks. He could hear the faint creaking of the wood above him, two people shifting their weight to be closer. Every time the floorboards groaned, he felt it somewhere behind his sternum.
He reached up and touched his nose. The bone was a jagged, throbbing mess of heat. He pressed his fingers against it harder than he needed to, because the pain was at least something solid in a night that had come apart at every seam.
He'd been a cop for eleven years. A good cop, he'd told himself. He'd worn the uniform like it meant something, let the badge authorize things he didn't want to examine too closely. But sitting in the dark of this shed, in someone else's jurisdiction, the uniform felt like something he'd borrowed.