Chapter Twenty-One #3
a few steps away, then turns to me. “You didn’t know that, did you? The Feed took his parents from him when he was four.”
I see pain. And anguish. But I’m not thinking about Harrison. I’m thinking about Jack. I’m thinking about how his parents
took off. I’m thinking about the weight Cleo spoke of and realizing these are weights no one put on him. He picked them up
himself, and I find that kind of determined nobility . . . moving. Important. Jack.
So I clear the emotion clogging my throat. “The Feed took your parents, too.”
He waves that away. “They’re alive. They just don’t want to be here.”
“Except people leave, and they forget. So that doesn’t mean—”
“Trust me, Lexi. They forgot about me long before they left Midas.”
My heart aches for the little boy underneath all that stoic hurt. Under all that weight. “Just because you don’t have the answers now, doesn’t mean—”
“The clock is ticking, Lexi. What the hell am I supposed to do if I can’t stop it? Let those flood doors slam shut and trap
all these innocent people?”
“Well.” I don’t have any real answers, but one strikes me in the way he phrases that. “Maybe change I to we, for a start. We’re a team, Jack. All of us.”
He lets out a frustrated grunt and crosses to the window, looking out at the dark night.
Maybe it really was his face in the window our first night. Wouldn’t that be funny?
Jack turns to look at me again.
Okay, it wouldn’t be funny.
He eyes me in a way that makes me very aware I am in my pajamas and not wearing a bra.
“You could try to run away,” he tells me, very seriously. “Head back to New York. Your dad did it. Maybe you can, too.” It’s
almost like he’s hoping I’ll take this course of action. Like he thinks he can save me, if nothing else.
I hold his gaze the entire time he’s giving me this potential out. One I can’t believe he’d actually sanction.
“No, I can’t.”
Jack sighs. Deeply. And not that frustrated-with-me sigh I’ve kind of grown used to in this short period of time. There is
a kind of resigned sadness to this sigh.
He crosses to me, but I realize it is not to me, because he is trying to pass me to get to the exit. When I move so I am in his way and blocking his retreat, he looks
down at me.
“You should go to bed,” he says.
But his voice is a little rough, like something affects him.
I want to be the one affecting him. To hell with demons and clock towers and dead people I never knew. I want to lift some of that weight off his impressive shoulders. I want to know what this is.
So I press myself to him. I angle my mouth to his.
His mouth is exactly what I expected it to be. Hot. Stern. Fantastic.
I could melt into this man and never come up for air. But I knew that.
His move to set me away from him is abrupt. Final. Yet, he doesn’t walk away. Just maintains that distance.
And I felt the way he almost kissed me back.
“Am I that repulsive to you?” I ask, trying not to take it too personally, even though the rejection stings.
And not just because I’m not used to rejection. It’s deeper. More meaningful.
This is Jack.
But he’s not looking at me. He’s staring out the window at nothing but darkness. Yet, when he finally speaks, he does not
confirm my worst fears.
That I am repulsive and unlovable, and he is particularly able to see that.
He introduces something else entirely.
“I knew your mother.”
In the grand scheme of possible things he might have said in this moment, the idea he’d bring up my mother wouldn’t have even
ranked in the top million. I would have guessed his heart belonged to a demon before I would have guessed my mother was in the mix.
“My mother,” I echo.
“She was not in that mine by accident. She was saving me.” He says this low and fast and he doesn’t stop to let me emotionally react, either. “The demons like to lure who they can to their hiding spots. Kids always work. Especially kids who aren’t particularly well watched after. I was four.”
Just like Harrison when the Feed came and took his parents.
I try to picture Jack at four and can’t get there, but what he’s saying is terrible no matter his age. “You were lured into the mine?” I shudder at the
thought.
Then I think about the way Logan was clearly being pulled to it. What if I hadn’t stopped him?
“My parents weren’t about to try and find me, but your mother did. It’s what she did. She found me and got me out, and she
told me—no, she warned me, that one day you would come. She put a picture of you in my head that’s been there ever since. Her daughter. Her harbinger.
You would come, and everything would change.”
And I get it now.
This is why he acted like he disliked me on sight. This is why everything is so charged and he avoids it, ignores it, rebels against it.
My mother told him I would change everything.
My mother.
Who was in that mine. Saving Jack.
“And then she died,” I say, because that’s what the article Logan found said. That she died in the mine. Not giving birth.
In that mine.
Jack’s green graze meets mine. “She died saving my life, Lexi. So there’s no shortage of people I owe to stop this damn Feed.”