17. Michael Miller #2
I can't breathe for what feels like forever.
Because when I was small, he used to tap that exact spot every time I climbed into his lap.
Right here, sweetheart, he'd say, and I'd press my whole hand flat against it and giggle, because I believed him without a crack of doubt.
Then he'd kiss the top of my head and tell me I was the most important thing in the world.
The memory slams into the footage hard enough to split something.
Because the man from that memory and the man on this screen—half-undressed in a private room while a stranger lowers herself between his knees, my name riding over his heart the whole time—cannot be the same person.
One of them has to be a lie. The father who carried me up to bed when I fell asleep on the couch, or this.
The man who swore I lived inside his chest, or the man who wore me like a charm while he betrayed my mother in the dark.
I don't know which answer hurts worse.
The tears come without stopping now. The footage rolls on. Another woman. Another night. Another lie.
"My Papa worked late." The words come from somewhere far outside my body. Jackson says nothing. "He missed birthdays. Anniversaries. Dinners. He missed everything, because he said people needed him."
Another private room. Another woman waiting. Another date. And everything I thought I knew rearranges itself so violently I feel it tear.
He wasn't working. He was here. In this club.
Choosing this—while Mama sat at home and kept his dinner warm past nine, then past ten; while she wrapped his plate in foil and left it on the counter and told me he's just working hard, sweetheart, with that too-bright smile she wore when she was trying not to worry where I could see.
While she defended him to anyone who so much as raised an eyebrow.
While she sat on the couch pretending she wasn't counting the minutes, pretending the cold half of the bed didn't cost her anything.
I used to crawl into her lap on the nights I couldn't sleep, and she'd comb her fingers through my hair and tell me how hard he worked for us. How lucky we were. How important his job was.
He wasn't sacrificing anything. He was choosing them. Choosing himself, over and over, with my name sitting over his heart like it made him a good man.
The chair legs shriek across the marble as I shove to my feet. "I can't watch this."
A metallic click cuts clean through the room.
My eyes snap up. Jackson is watching me, his expression almost bored, the pistol already lifted, the barrel settling against my chest like it's the most ordinary thing in the world to point at a girl over dinner.
"Sit down."
My pulse crashes against my ribs. "Jackson—"
"Sit. Down."
For one wild, shining second I think about running anyway.
About letting him fire. And then I look at his eyes and understand, with a certainty that turns my stomach, that he would never shoot to kill.
He'd wound me, carefully, and then he'd make sure I didn't die of it.
There's no mercy waiting at the end of that gun. Only more of this.
Slowly, my knees fold, and I lower myself back into the chair.
Only then does he let the barrel drop.
The laptop screen goes dark as he closes it with a soft, final click.
For a long moment neither of us speaks, and the smell of food keeps drifting in from the kitchen as if this were a house where people simply sat down to dinner.
My stomach knots again—not with hunger this time, but with grief, with betrayal, with the specific horror of trying to hold onto the father I loved while the proof of the one I never knew cools on a screen in front of me.
"Is this why?" I ask at last, and my voice comes out steadier than I have any right to. "Is this why I'm here? Because he was your friend, and he betrayed you?"
Jackson looks at me, and for the first time since he took me, the mask slips in a way that runs my blood cold. Something raw surfaces—something wounded and violent both—before he forces it back under.
"Michael Miller," he says, and the name leaves him like poison, lip curling, "was the farthest thing from a friend I have ever encountered in my life."
The disgust in it is total, as though letting the word friend share a breath with my father's name is its own small obscenity.
"Then why?" I whisper. "Why me? Why any of this?"
The sound he makes wants to be a laugh and isn't. It's the noise of something splitting after being held shut too long, and there's something beneath it—something unhinged, rattling low—that lifts the hair along the back of my neck.
The kitchen door swings open. The cook comes through with two plates balanced in his hands, head down, moving quick without quite hurrying, as if the trick to surviving this room is making himself small enough to overlook.
He sets them down—chicken, vegetables, fresh bread, an ordinary meal made grotesque by the place it's landed in—and the china rattles against the wood, and only then do I see the fine tremor running through his hands.
He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at Jackson. He backs away and is gone.
I drop my eyes to the plate and my stomach rolls. The chicken still steams. Butter glistens over the vegetables. It smells like something a person would be grateful for, and the thought of putting any of it in my mouth sends bile surging up my throat.
"Eat." Jackson's voice is gentle.
"I can't."
"You can."
"My Papa—"
"Is dead." He says it for me, flat, and the words go straight through me, cold and thin as a blade. "I said eat."
And I will. Because if a chance comes—tonight, tomorrow, a week from now—I'll need a body that can take it. I'll need legs that will run and a head that will stay clear. Jackson can force food into me. He doesn't get to decide why I swallow it.
My hand shakes so hard the fork chatters against the plate.
I spear a piece of chicken and stare at it a moment, my whole stomach in revolt, and then I put it in my mouth anyway.
The first chew is almost impossible; my throat closes and I have to force it down.
It doesn't taste like chicken or butter or bread.
It tastes like ash. Like grief. Like the salt still drying at the back of my throat from tears I won't give him.
Every mouthful is another small surrender, and I hate him for making survival feel like giving in—but that's all this is. Survival. Nothing more.
Just stay alive until I find the way out. Or until Jacob gets here.
Jacob is coming.
I say it to myself like a prayer, over and over, until it almost feels solid. The silence stretches, and it's worse than anything he could put into it. I can feel him watching me eat—cataloguing every tremor, every hesitation, waiting to see whether this is the mouthful that finally cracks me open.
I set the fork down. My stomach clenches as if it means to reject everything I've forced into it. I fix my eyes on the door at the far end of the room and count my breaths, because breathing is easier than thinking, and thinking is easier than breaking.
Then Jackson claps.
Three slow, flat cracks, ricocheting off the high ceiling before the quiet has a chance to settle. A heartbeat later the kitchen door opens again.
The cook returns with a large domed serving dish, the kind meant for grand reveals at the kind of dinner this is only pretending to be.
His face has gone gray. His hands shake so badly the metal shivers as he walks.
He sets it in the center of the table, and something cold and instinctive moves through me before my mind can name it.
The cook reaches for the lid.
"No." Jackson's voice stops him cold. Then, softer, almost courteous: "Ladies first."