Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jack secured waitstaff uniforms after they’d bought Ava’s dress—a skintight red dress that made his mouth water. Ava, for her part, was strangely quiet as the sun set Friday evening.
He’d asked her—twice, maybe three times now?—whether she was okay. She’d redirected, joked her way around it. He’d tried to chalk it up to nerves, as they were less than a day away from killing Cale, but there was an undercurrent that worried him.
Jack was up before dawn on Saturday morning, only to find Ava already awake.
“T-minus twelve hours until the gala,” she said, but she avoided his eyes as he flicked on the lamp at their bedside.
She was standing at the window, looking out into the predawn darkness.
“Ava,” he said. “We should talk.”
There was so much he needed to tell her.
That for the first time since Jay, she’d made him feel something.
A flicker of hope and something else, feelings that were burning brighter than he knew what to do with.
That he admired her courage and grit and that he thought she deserved better.
That he thought Ari would be proud of who she had become.
“Let’s talk on the way to the venue,” Ava said. “We’ll have about two hours, right?”
Jack let out a slow breath. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, of course. I’m going to do some last research, then. And I’ll grab you cinnamon buns for breakfast?”
Ava nodded distractedly.
Jack changed into his tuxedo, packing his go bag carefully, before retreating to the lobby, where the Wi-Fi signal was stronger.
Jack had been combing the darker corners of the internet for hours, trying to find any gossip about the Jacobson family, their health insurance empire, but especially the insider trading scandal Ava had been interrogated about.
What was it they thought she knew? What was it they thought she was avenging?
Was there an investor, or group of investors, so worried about their bottom line that they wanted Cale and Ava out of the way?
He couldn’t protect her if he didn’t know exactly what they were up against—and that meant learning exactly who was gunning for Ava.
It had been so clear to Jack from the beginning that Ava’s grievance was far more personal than fraud like insider trading, even when he hadn’t known her or what that was. Even before she’d told him, in that fierce, fragile voice, about the wife she’d loved so much and lost so brutally.
About the insurance claim that had been approved only after it was too late to help Ari.
She’d wanted to cost Cale what he took from her, and she’d go to any length to do it. That was the first thing he’d admired about her, if he was being honest. Her ruthless, blinding determination to see her goal to the end.
Of course, he was also worried it would get her killed, but that particular worry had come after he’d started to care about her.
Now he was wading through any news footage of the Jacobson family.
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. The headache from too much screen use was always only about an hour of intense focus away, ever since he’d had a job that went badly wrong and left him with a TBI. Of course, he’d still finished the job, but now screens left his head aching.
He clicked play on a recent video in which Cale was speaking about Ava’s attack on him outside his building. Jack closed his eyes, letting the sound come through his headphones and giving his eyes a break.
“We’re shocked and horrified at this blatant attack that threatens all of our safety,” Cale said into the microphone.
“Jacobson Health values each employee and takes the safety of all its members seriously. Premeditated violence like this cannot be allowed to stand. We are working closely with law enforcement and providing our own resources to assist in the capture of this dangerous individual.”
Jack rolled his eyes internally. Ava had a point—was her premeditated violence any worse than the kind of premeditated violence that refused to pay for lifesaving treatment? Ari was gone because Cale and his company had acted, in a premeditated way, to prevent her treatment.
Then another voice came on, and Jack’s body stilled.
“Here at Jacobson Health, we are a proud family company. As a family-owned, family-run company, we consider every member of our community a key part of our Jacobson Health family,” the second voice said.
“Any attack on one of our employees would be treated with the utmost importance, and we are initiating new safety standards in each of our corporate offices.”
The words were bullshit someone else had written, of course, the voice familiar because Jack had spoken to each sibling after Ava’s failed attempt at the Portland café. But there was something else about this, something tugging at Jack’s mind just below the surface.
Jack followed his instinct. He opened his eyes, and then flipped to a new tab, where he narrowed his search to Carson Jacobson Health.
As CFO, Carson’s role was much less public-facing than Cale’s, but he was a public figure nonetheless.
Jack scrolled through a few videos—a press release or two, a “meet the team” collection of micro-videos, and a company-wide statement at last year’s acquisition of another small company—until he found a video of some holiday party, posted by an employee.
Jack closed his eyes again, listening. He picked up a few voices—Clara’s, telling someone it was time to gather by the tree, Cale’s, booming and loud as he joked with investors.
And Carson’s, his voice clipped and measured.
Just like the person on the phone, their voice garbled by technology, demanding that Jack move up the timeline of the hit. That he kill Ava.
Jack jumped to his feet, slamming his laptop shut.
Even Bucko at the desk, forever unflappable, actually looked up. “You okay, man?”
“Yeah,” Jack said distractedly. “Great.”
He had to warn Ava.
This was even worse than a pissed-off investor, and he should never, ever have taken this job. Many hits came from inside the house, a family member hiring him to kill someone in their family they didn’t like. A cheater, an abuser, a thief. There were infinite reasons for it.
But this was a different type of house, and a different type of family.
Cale Jacobson’s brother had hired Jack to kill him, maybe to stop the investigation into his insider trading, and now Ava had drawn more negative PR at the exact wrong time, so they needed her gone as much as they needed Cale gone.
It was the perfect setup, and Jack had walked into it with his eyes shut.
He ran to their room, knocking first and then managing to get the key in the lock with a hand that was, somehow, shaking. They had to get out. He had to take Ava and get out of the city, the state, the country.
They could go south, cross the border to Mexico and then travel down through South America. He knew enough Spanish, he had enough cash, and there were plenty of countries farther south with limited extradition to the United States.
But when Jack got the door open, the bed he had left Ava in was empty. The window on the far side of the room was open, the screen missing, wind blowing gently through the gap.
Ava Cavalcante was gone.