Chapter Thirty-Three
This was all Jack’s fault. All of it.
If he’d only been honest with Ava, if he’d only told her what was happening, it would never have come to this. And she’d trusted him, hadn’t she?
Jack eased his gun back out of the potted plant—that had been a Hail Mary attempt to escape detection, anyway—and stood, confidently making his way down the hall. He was dressed as if he belonged here. He was on the guest list.
And people walking with a purpose were less often stopped.
One security guard glanced his way, and a member of the waitstaff team stopped to ask whether he needed a drink.
“I actually need to find Mr. Jacobson,” Jack told him. “Carson?”
He didn’t know where Ava had taken Clara, couldn’t waste time on guessing. But if he could find Carson, he could get some answers that would lead him there.
The waitstaff pointed him up the stairs, where Carson was supposedly with a few investors who’d flown in early. Maybe the investors were part of this, maybe not.
When Jack reached the third floor, he turned sharply right, stalking toward the wing where the waitstaff had told him he’d find Carson, to a home office with wraparound glass windows that overlooked the grounds. He’d studied this building, every inch of it—he could walk these halls in his sleep.
But no matter how prepared he was, the calm he usually had when carrying out a hit was nowhere to be found. Gone was any reserve or patience or care. Gone was any thought of escaping when this was done. Gone was any chance of subtlety or silence.
Ava was here.
And Jack wasn’t leaving without her.
He walked into the meeting room with every ounce of confidence the billionaires in front of him had. Carson was near the window, talking to an older investor, a white man with graying hair and a tan line where he’d taken off his wedding ring.
Near them was a table of food—hors d’oeuvres that looked like they cost more than most people would spend on groceries in a month.
Jack pulled his gun from his pocket and fired.
Just once.
Carson stared back at Jack across the dead body of his investor, his mouth hanging open.
“What the fuck? You can’t,” Carson said. “No, you can’t. Security—where’s security?”
“Move,” Jack said. There was no cost Jack would not pay to get Ava back—and if she didn’t want him, wouldn’t hear his explanation, he could at least try to save her life. He knew it was cold, calculated. Knew what it made him, that he didn’t care about the life he’d just taken.
There was nothing but Ava.
“I—where?” Carson asked. “Oh god. Is this about Cale?”
“Yes,” Jack said icily.
This man had hired him, for fuck’s sake. He’d hired Jack to kill his own brother, and now he had the audacity to play dumb about it all.
“Listen, if you’re here because of the investigation—”
Jack gestured his gun at the dead investor on the floor beside them. “Do you think that’s why I’m here?” he asked. “Where the fuck is Cale?”
If he found Cale, he’d find Ava, everything else be damned.
Jack was going to jail for this—or getting killed for it, more likely—but if he could get to Ava, if he could get her safe, it would all be worth it.
“He—he just left,” Carson said. “He had to go up to the rooftop for something. He was pissed about it, but—but he had to go.”
A braver man would have said he didn’t know where his brother was, but Carson looked like he was all but pissing himself.
“Please, please,” Carson begged. “I don’t know anything, I didn’t do anything—”
Jack crossed the space between them with two long strides, and Carson shut up with a little terrified noise. “Move,” Jack said.
“Where are we going?” Carson asked shakily. “Please. Wait—I know you.”
Recognition flooded the other man’s face. Jack’s beard could only go so far—he’d met Carson face-to-face before, and he’d known then that it would make this job harder.
Jack usually didn’t do this with jobs—talk to the mark he was going to kill, give them time to beg or wonder or even know something was about to happen.
It wasn’t that he clung to any compunctions that there was a morality to his work, that anything he did was justified.
He was long past caring about that. But it seemed both easier and kinder for them to never know they were at the end of their life, even if they deserved it.
“I’m the person who’s going to fucking kill you if you don’t take me to your brother,” Jack told Carson. “And you’re going to give me some answers.”
He didn’t particularly care that he had been lied to about this job. He assumed, when he met most clients, that anyone willing to hire someone to commit a murder on their behalf would also have no issue lying to him about it, or making sure he took the fall for it.
What he was furious about, though, was that they’d included Ava at all.
“Why Ava Cavalcante?” Jack asked, jamming the gun between the man’s shoulder blades with one hand and grabbing the man’s shoulder with the other, steering him from behind toward the staircase. “Why is she involved?”
“Who?” Carson asked. “Who the fuck? That crazy bitch who—”
Jack spun him around, halfway up the stairs as they were, and smashed the butt of the handgun against the man’s nose. “Don’t talk that way about my wife,” he snarled.
The words stopped him in his tracks. For a moment Jack and Carson stared at each other, both of them wide-eyed and horrified, though for vastly different reasons.
Ava wasn’t Jack’s wife. Ava wasn’t his anything—she’d made that clear enough when she’d called the cops on him and run off alone to finish the job. He couldn’t blame her.
Carson reached a hand to his nose, which was pouring blood on his fancy tailored suit. “I didn’t know she had a husband,” he said in confusion. “She was harassing my brother.”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Jacobson,” Jack said roughly, spinning Carson around again and shoving him forward up the stairs.
“I know you hired me to kill your brother. And I know you wanted me to kill Ava, too, because you think she knows something about the investigation into your family’s less-than-legal business practices. ”
Carson opened his mouth and shut it again. “You’re—you’re him,” he said finally. “You’re the man they’ve been looking for.”
“Open the door.”
Carson opened it and stepped through.
The wind roared in to meet them, the sun still strong up here even as it started to sink toward the forest to the west.
Clara and Cale were seated on a rock wall along the rooftop garden, and there, Jack’s gun in her hand, wearing that tantalizing little red dress he’d picked out for her, was Ava.