Chapter 46
EvanAnn
Jackson sits next to me, eating the chips and not saying anything. It’s more nerve-wracking than listening to him talk about how nothing in my life is good. He’s mentioned Mia, Damon, Cam, and Hawk.
The blackness of the night closes in on us, suffocating me. The longer I’m here, the more I worry no one’s coming to save me. What if they can’t find me? What if it’s up to me to escape?
The crunching of the chips is the only sound. It’s too much.
But I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I don’t want to upset him or get on his bad side.
“What did you do to tick off Brandt Stanwell?” Jackson says, startling me. He’s practically sprawled in the chair. His legs surround the chair I’m on, boxing me in, but I pretend it’s not making me uncomfortable. Like he’s caging me.
“I didn’t do anything to Brandt.” I straighten. Maybe I should have pretended to be a little less self-righteous, but I don’t know why Brandt decided I was his enemy. I’m his competition. I guess that was enough for him.
Jackson smiles knowingly. “You must have pissed him off good because he wanted me feral when I came for you. I don’t usually let assholes manipulate me, but between him and his sister.
..” He laughs, but there’s no joy in it.
“They thought they were so much better than me. Smarter too. Thought everything they told me was precious to me. Assholes.”
I relax back into my chair. “They wanted you to kidnap me?”
“Probably not.” He arches an eyebrow. “But it’s not like those fuckers, who claim to be your boyfriends, could protect you.
You belong to me. I saw you first. I recognized your potential.
They went to school with you for three years before they saw you.
Damon acts like you’re his property, but you’re mine. You’ve always been mine.”
I swallow and take a sip of water. With the medicine kicking in, the fog of pain is receding a little, so I can focus more. “So what’s the plan?”
He smiles and eats a chip.
“I mean, you brought me out to the middle of nowhere. You saved me from the evil hockey boys and theater kids of my school to do what exactly?” I glance around the small house to see what there is, and there’s not a lot.
The moonless night means beyond the windows is blackness. That should help my guys sneak up or the police or whoever ends up finding me. Someone has to find me. Jackson couldn’t have a flawless plan.
I’m not just going to disappear.
“I need to make sure you know you’re mine and only mine before we go back.” Jackson takes the bag of chips into the kitchen. “I can’t risk them turning you against me.”
“We are going back though? Because I still want to finish my production or Brandt will win.” Maybe he cares about whether or not we win this game. Or maybe he doesn’t care about playing it at all.
“This is the problem.” He stands in the doorway of the kitchen, looking at me like I’m the one who’s broken. Like he needs to fix me. It sends a pulse of fear through my veins.
“The problem?” I tuck my feet up on the chair and wrap my arms around them, like I’m small and helpless. The more he underestimates me, the better.
“They’ve drilled into your head that you need to win the game.
But the game is fixed, pretty girl.” He shakes his head and comes over, pulling his chair close to mine and sitting directly in front of me.
“They aren’t going to let us win ever. Not you.
Not me. It doesn’t matter that we’re better than all of them.
The game is rigged. They don’t want us.”
“What do you mean? You go to a top tier school to play hockey. You were invited to visit a D1 college to play on their team.”
Jackson shakes his head like I don’t get it.
“They didn’t do that for me. They don’t want me to succeed.
They do it to feel better about themselves.
See this boy who’s good at hockey with the second-hand skates and taped together hockey stick?
We can make him look like us, dress like us, and act like us, but we’ll always know we’re better than him.
That the only reason he made it was because we chose him to lift out of the gutter. ”
Jackson jerks to his feet and walks toward the window, staring out into the night.
“Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? They’re doing the same thing to you.
You’re like me. We don’t have money to do this kind of shit on our own, and they know it.
So they see this little girl who can act and they give her her wildest dreams. Hold it out like it’s a brand new life.
That somehow, we can rise above where our parents had us. ”
My heart beats a little faster as he gets more agitated. Agitated isn’t good. I let the fear trickle into my voice to try to pull him back. “Jackson?”
“Fuck them. They just want to use us. They used you. Don’t you see it?
Can’t you feel it?” He turns and hits himself in the chest with a thump.
I try not to startle. “Evan, they want you to almost taste what you can’t have unless they give it to you.
College, a career, the future. Nothing will be ours, because they gave it to us.
And we should be grateful to them because they gave it to us. ”
He crosses the room and lifts me out of the chair, forcing me to my feet. I let out a surprised noise, but don’t resist.
“They own us. They want to control us, but we don’t have to give in to them.”
I swallow as he hovers over me, large and intimidating. My head swims a little from the shift in position. He releases me, and I stay standing.
I collect my thoughts and say, “But what if that’s what we want too? What if we’re the ones using them to get there?”
His smile doesn’t meet his eyes as he slowly shakes his head and closes in on me. I back up. I can’t help it. Standing my ground isn’t an option. The wall stops me, holding me in place as he hovers over me.
My breath catches in my throat, and suddenly the monster is back. Every nerve in my body is on edge because I recognize this monster. He was hiding, but now he’s back. And no one’s going to save me.
“That’s what they want you to believe.” He lifts his hand and slides the back of his knuckles down my cheek and jaw.
I control the urge to flinch and squirm and shiver, holding his gaze, trying to play the part when I want to curl up or run away.
He wraps his hand around my throat, pushing me back against the wall.
There’s a wildness in his eyes I’m not sure I can tame.
It won’t matter what I say because this is his truth. The monster holding me is the real Jackson.
“Damon took everything from me. He got hockey. He got into the USHL. He got the offer to go to Crowne Mawr.” His eyes drop to my lips and his hand tightens around my throat, making it hard to breathe. “He got you.”
“But you have me now. You got the offer to go to Crowne Mawr.” I resist the urge to grab his hand at my throat. He’s not choking me, not yet. I can’t give him a reason to. I don’t want to be his broken toy.
Broken toys can’t run away. My heart trips over itself. My hands shake, but I keep them hidden. They’ll find me. They’ll always find me, but I have to stay safe while I wait.
He shakes his head and lowers his forehead to mine.
“Do I have you, pretty girl? Or are you just an illusion like the rest of it? You were mine years ago. I had you and let you slip from my fingers because I thought I wasn’t good enough for you.
I saved you from that dumpster fire of an apartment.
Made your mom think she wasn’t safe there.
But I thought if I worked harder I could prove to you that I deserved you.
But it wasn’t enough. I was never enough. ”
I want to run. I want to knee him in his junk and bolt out the door and pray someone finds me before he does. But I know I won’t get far. To do this, I need to sink into what he needs me to be. That means I can’t be EvanAnn right now.
I close my eyes and pretend it’s Damon hovering over me, holding me like this. He’s done it before. My hand shakes as I bring it to his jaw and feel the rough day’s growth. I try to control the thundering of my heart.
“You’re enough,” I whisper. “I see that now.”
He releases his breath against my lips, and I realize I’m trapped. I’m sixteen again, held against the wall by a boy I thought I liked until he pushed me too far, too fast. I freeze, and there’s nothing I can do to stop this.
No mom to save me this time. I can’t. I just can’t.
“No.” It bursts out of my lungs.
He squeezes my neck harder, and I open my eyes to glare up into his.
“You don’t get to make me into who you think you’d like better,” I say.
He laughs, and the kind mask he wore slips away. A chill rolls down my spine. “I could have pretended for you, pretty girl. For a while.” He shrugs. “Guess I don’t have to now.”
He presses his face toward mine, and I sink my nails into his jaw, struggling to lift my knee between us. His hand tightens, and I gasp to take a breath, but his eyes meet mine as black edges around my vision.
“You don’t get it. You’re mine, Evan. No one’s ever going to take you from me again.”
Before I lose consciousness, he releases my neck and I drag in fresh air, too desperate for oxygen to fight. He lifts me and throws me over his shoulder. It knocks the breath out of me, and as the blood flows down to my head, the bump throbs.
He opens the door to the bedroom and tosses me on the bed. My head hurts so bad. I struggle to roll to the side before he can grab me. His hand closes around my neck again, but this time I dig my fingernails into his hands, prying them away.
He slaps me with his other hand, amplifying the ringing in my head. My vision goes black for a moment.
There are ties on my wrists before my head stops spinning. Fuck. He moves to my ankles and I twist and kick, desperate to get loose.
“Let me go,” I scream and buck and twist.
A blur of movement bursts into the room, and the hand on my ankle disappears, followed by a loud thud.
I struggle to catch my breath and push my body toward the top of the mattress, pulling away from him and tucking into myself.
My eyes aren’t focusing quite yet, but I see two of Jackson as he falls out of the room.