Chapter 26- Jade
Inotice the car on a Tuesday.
It's a black SUV, parked at the end of the block when I walk to the coffee shop in the morning. It’s still there when I come back two hours later.
I tell myself it means nothing. People park on streets.
People sit in cars. The world does not rearrange itself around my paranoia just because a man with told me he was going to take everything from Phoenix and smiled like he meant it.
On Wednesday, the car is there again.
On Thursday, I take a different route to the coffee shop, cutting through the side street behind the house and doubling back along the beach path.
Halfway back, I glance over my shoulder and see a man standing at the top of the cliff steps, hands in the pockets of a dark jacket.
He's too far away for me to see his face.
He's watching me anyway. I can feel it the way you feel eyes on you in a dark room before you turn on the light, a prickling along the back of the neck, a cold settling in the stomach that your brain registers before your eyes catch up.
I walk home quickly. I don't run, because running would mean I'm afraid, and I'm already afraid enough without performing it for whoever is watching.
Phoenix is on a call when I come through the door. He reads my face the moment I walk in, and he ends the call in under ten seconds.
"What happened?"
I tell him about the car. The man on the cliff steps. The three days of noticing before I let myself believe it was real. He listens without interrupting, which is something he's been practicing.
When I finish he's quiet for a moment. The kitchen smells like the coffee he made an hour ago going cold in the press, and outside the window the Pacific sits under a flat gray sky, the waves small and rhythmic, completely indifferent.
His jaw is tight. His eyes have gone somewhere colder than usual, that particular quality of stillness that is not calm at all but something that has moved past calm into something else.
"Dominic is escalating." He says it quietly. "I need to handle this."
"Handle it how?"
"You don't want to know."
The sentence lands in the kitchen like a stone dropped into water, sending out rings I can feel moving through my chest. I think about the last time secrets accumulated between us, the weight of them, the way they changed the shape of everything until I couldn't recognize what we'd built together.
I think about Dominic Webb standing on that sidewalk with his hand on my arm and his dead gray eyes and the recording he has stored somewhere I'll never find.
I cross the kitchen and wrap my hand around Phoenix's arm. He looks down at where I'm touching him and something in his face shifts.
"No more secrets," I say. "Not between us."
He holds my gaze for a long moment. I watch him weigh it, the cost of telling me against the cost of what happens if he doesn't. I watch him decide.
"My father has people." His voice is careful and low. "People who can make Dominic disappear."
The word disappear does a lot of work in that sentence.
"You mean kill him."
He doesn't flinch from it. "If it comes to that."
I let go of his arm. I turn to the window and look at the ocean, at those waves that keep coming regardless of what happens on shore.
My stomach has gone strange and hollow. I keep seeing Marcus's face.
Not the Marcus from the cabin, not the one with the firelight catching his eyes and his hands closing around my wrists, but the body afterward.
The way he looked when it was over. The thing he became when there was nothing left.
More death.
"Is there really no other way?"
Phoenix is quiet for a long moment. He comes to stand beside me at the window and I can feel the heat of him close without him touching me. The two of us staring at the same water.
"If you can think of one," he says, "I'm listening."
I stand there and I actually try, turning the problem over the way I'd turn over a plot problem in my manuscript, looking for the angle I missed, the door that might still be open.
Give him money he's already refused. Go to the police with the recording before he can, confess everything and hope the circumstances outweigh the act.
Disappear ourselves, leave the country, start over somewhere he can't follow.
Every road ends at the same wall.
Dominic Webb is not a problem with a clean solution. He's a patient man who has thought three moves ahead. He doesn't want money or the police. He wants to hurt us.
I don't say any of this out loud. Phoenix already knows it. That's what the silence is.
That night I can't sleep.
I lie in the dark and listen to Phoenix's breathing beside me, slow and even, and watch the shadows on the ceiling move when headlights pass outside.
Every car that slows on the street pulls my attention to the window.
Every creak of the house settling feels like a footstep.
The night has a different texture now than it did a month ago.
It has weight and teeth and things that watch from the edges.
I turn onto my side and look at Phoenix. He's on his back, one arm across his chest, his face in sleep stripped of the controlled expression he keeps on it during the day. He looks younger like this and more like the man who threads his fingers through my hair when he thinks I'm asleep.
I don't know how long I watch him before his eyes open.
He doesn't startle. He just looks at me, trying to read my face.
"Come here," he says quietly.
I move into him and he pulls me close and for a while that's enough, just the warmth of him and the sound of his heart. But then his hand moves in my hair and I lift my face and his mouth finds mine, and the kiss is soft at first.
The answer I give him is not soft.
I push him onto his back. His hands find my hips and stay there, not directing, just holding, because he understands what I need without me having to say it.
This is what I need right now. To be the one choosing the pace and the pressure and the angle, to feel the kind of power that exists in this.
This is the one thing in my life that hasn't been taken out of my hands.
I lower myself onto him slowly, watching his face as I do. His fingers press harder into my hips. He keeps his eyes open and on mine, which is something I've come to depend on, that eye contact, the way it anchors me inside my body and keeps me from disappearing into my own head.
I start to move.
It's different from the other times. There's no tenderness in it, or there is tenderness but it's under something else, something rawer.
Fear channeled through skin. The need to be alive in a way that overwrites everything.
His breath goes ragged and his hands slide up my back and I lean down and press my lips to his, tasting salt and warmth and the faint cedar of his soap.
"If anything happens to me," I breathe against his skin. The sentence barely makes it out.
"Nothing is going to happen to you." His voice is strained and certain.
I lift my head and look at him. "Promise me."
He holds my gaze and his hands come up to frame my face, thumbs against my cheekbones, and he looks at me the way he looks at things he has decided are his to protect regardless of what it costs him.
"I promise."
I kiss him hard and he pulls me down and I stop thinking about Dominic Webb and recording files and men in dark jackets watching from clifftops. There is only this. His hands and his voice and the weight of a promise pressed into my skin like something that might hold.
Afterward I stay where I am, my cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow. His hand moves through my hair. The ceiling shadows shift and settle.