Chapter 27- Jade
Phoenix doesn't want me to go alone.
He says it carefully, the way he says things now when he's trying not to sound like he's giving me orders, framing it as a preference rather than a command. He has people who can go for me. He can send Torres. It will take twenty minutes, less if Torres takes the freeway.
"I need an hour to myself," I tell him. "Just the grocery store."
"Torres can go with you. You won't even notice him."
"I'll notice him. I always notice him." I set down my keys and turn to face him fully.
"Phoenix, I have been inside this house for days.
I haven't driven a car or walked into a store or done a single thing by myself since Dominic grabbed me on the sidewalk.
I understand why. I'm not angry about it.
But I need to feel like a person again, not just something being protected. "
He looks at me for a long moment. I can see him turning it over, weighing the variables the way he weighs everything, and I can see the moment he identifies the one he can't argue past.
"One hour," he says finally. "Text me when you get there. Text me when you're leaving."
"I will."
"And take the route with the cameras on PCH, not the back road."
"Phoenix."
"I know." He exhales. "I know. Go.”
As I walk toward the door I hear him pick up his phone behind me. I don't turn around.
I text him from the parking lot. The grocery store is bright and cold and smells like refrigerated produce.
I take a basket instead of a cart, moving through the aisles slowly, letting myself be a person who is just buying groceries.
Olive oil. The good pasta Phoenix likes.
A bunch of basil that smells green and clean when I press it between my fingers.
For forty minutes I am just a woman in a grocery store, and it is the most normal I have felt in weeks.
The parking lot is half empty when I come out.
Late afternoon light, the sun already dropping toward the water, painting the asphalt gold and long-shadowed.
My car is near the back where I always park out of habit, away from the clusters near the entrance.
I'm thinking about what to make for dinner, whether Phoenix will be off his call by the time I get home, when I hear footsteps behind me closing the distance too fast.
I start to turn.
Something comes down over my head.
The world goes dark and close and airless, rough fabric against my face, and before I can process what's happening my arms are wrenched behind my back and something bites into my wrists.
I open my mouth and scream, or try to, but the sound is swallowed by the hood and whatever is outside it, and I'm already being moved, lifted half off my feet, my groceries hitting the asphalt somewhere behind me.
I fight. I throw my weight sideways, try to get my feet under me, kick backward at whoever is holding me.
My heel connects with something solid and I hear a grunt, a male voice saying something sharp and low, and then another set of hands closes around me from the other side and there are too many of them and I am not strong enough.
Then I hear Torres. What is he doing here?
His voice comes from somewhere across the parking lot, loud and commanding in a way I've never heard from him before, the professional quiet he always carries stripped away entirely.
He's shouting something a command, and for one suspended second the hands on me actually slow.
Like they didn't expect him. Like this changes something.
The gunshot is very loud.
Then a second one.
The quiet that follows is the kind that presses against your eardrums and stays there. The hands holding me don't hesitate, don't pause, don't react at all. They keep moving me forward like the shots were nothing, like Torres was simply an obstacle they'd already accounted for.
I scratch at the hands holding me and twist hard enough that one of them loses their grip for half a second, but there are two of them and the door is already open and my scream dies against the hood as they force me inside.
A door, the hollow metallic sound of it, the change in air pressure.
I'm pushed inside and the surface under me is hard and ridged and moving, the vehicle accelerating before whoever threw me in has finished closing the door.
The vibration comes up through my knees and shins.
The hood smells like oil and something older, accumulated and stale, and I press my face away from it and try to breathe through the panic squeezing my chest.
Think, I tell myself. Think.
But all I can hear is Torres's voice cutting off. The two shots landing one after the other. The silence that came after.
Phoenix will know something is wrong when I don't text.
He'll call Torres. The thought arrives and then collapses under its own weight, because Torres is not going to answer that call.
Torres is in a parking lot behind a grocery store on Pacific Coast Highway and he is not going to answer anything ever again, and Phoenix sent him to keep me safe and I fought to go alone and Torres is dead because of both of those things at once.
Torres had gone down behind a row of cars near the back of the lot, away from the main entrance. It might be a while before anyone walked close enough to see him.
I think about my phone and then remember the hands going through my jacket before they threw me in, the flat weight of absence in my pocket where it was. They took it. Of course they took it.
I count seconds instead, trying to build a map in my head from turns and stops and the sounds outside the hood. A left, then a long straight stretch where the engine opens up. A right. The road surface changes, smoother, then rougher again, something industrial under the tires.
The vehicle slows and stops.
The door opens and the hands come back, hauling me out by my bound arms, and the air that hits me through the hood is different now. Colder. It carries the smell of concrete and machine oil and something metallic, like rust or old water, the hollow smell of a large empty space.
We’re at a warehouse. I know it before the hood comes off.
When it does, the light hits me hard after the dark.
I blink against it, eyes watering, and when the world assembles itself back into shapes I am sitting on a concrete floor with my wrists bound behind me and the ceiling above is corrugated metal and high.
There are two men standing near a door I can't reach, and Dominic Webb is standing in front of me.
He looks exactly the same as he did on the sidewalk.
Dark jacket, dark sweater, his close-cut hair and those eyes that take me in without any emotion.
He's holding a paper cup of coffee, and the sight of it is somehow the most frightening thing in the room, the casualness of it, the suggestion that this is simply a thing he does, that I am simply a thing that is happening in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
"Ms. Catalano." He sounds almost polite. "I apologize for the method. I find direct invitations tend to get declined."
My wrists hurt where the binding cuts in.
My knees ache from the floor. My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat and in my fingertips and behind my eyes.
I press all of that down as far as it will go and look at him steadily, because the one thing I will not give him is the satisfaction of watching me fall apart.
"You know Phoenix will come for me." My voice is steadier than I expected.
"Of course he will." Dominic takes a sip of his coffee. "That's rather the point."
The warehouse settles around us. Somewhere above, wind moves across the metal roof with a low moan, and a chain hanging from a ceiling beam taps against itself in a rhythm that sounds almost patient.
The two men near the door haven't moved.
They're not looking at me, which is almost worse than if they were.
"What do you want?" I ask.
Dominic considers the question. He walks a slow half circle around me, not touching, just looking, and I track him with my eyes because turning my back on him is not something I'm willing to do even bound and sitting on a concrete floor.
His footsteps are quiet and deliberate. He stops when he's completed the arc, standing in front of me again.
"I want to know what he'll do," Dominic says.
"How far he'll go. What he's actually capable of when it's not just survival driving him.
" He tilts his head slightly. "With Marcus, it was instinct.
He walked in and found his property being threatened and he reacted.
Animals react. I want to know if Phoenix Crawford is something more than an animal. "
"I'm not his property."
Something moves in his pale eyes, brief and unreadable. "No. You're not." He crouches down so that we're at eye level, and this close I can smell him. "You're the thing he'd burn everything down to protect. That's much more interesting than property."
I think about Phoenix saying those exact words to me once.
I'd burn the world down for you. I don't know if Dominic has heard the recording of that moment or if he simply understands his brother's killer well enough to have arrived at the same language independently, and I'm not sure which possibility frightens me more.
"He's going to find you," I say. "Whatever you think this accomplishes, he's going to find you and it won't end the way you're planning."
"Perhaps." Dominic stands. He straightens his jacket and takes another slow sip of his coffee, looking down at me with those colorless eyes.
"Or perhaps he'll make a mistake. Grief makes people reckless.
Love makes them worse." He glances toward the two men by the door, some silent communication passing between them, before his gaze comes back to me.
"My brother made the mistake of being impulsive.
Of letting his appetites run ahead of his judgment.
I've spent my whole life watching him do it, cleaning up after him, making excuses for him to our mother. "
There's something in his voice when he says the last part. Something that isn't the controlled flatness he's maintained since I woke up on this floor. It's gone in an instant, smoothed back over, but I heard it.
"He was still your brother," I say quietly.
The pale eyes sharpen. "Don't."
"I'm not defending what he did to me. I'm saying I understand why you're here."
For a long moment he just looks at me. The chain above keeps its quiet rhythm. The wind moves across the roof.
"Understanding why I'm here doesn't change why you're here," he says finally.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a phone. Not mine, something older, a prepaid model with a cracked screen but a camera lens that catches the light. He crouches again and holds it up so I can see the screen, a number already typed in, waiting.
"You're going to call him," Dominic says. "And you're going to tell him where you are. And then we're going to see how much Phoenix Crawford really loves you."
He presses the phone into my bound hands. The plastic is cold against my fingers.
I look at the number on the screen. I look at Dominic's face, at the pale gray eyes that have decided exactly what they're doing and exactly what they want from it.
I think about Phoenix. About the way he looked at me last night in the dark, his hands framing my face, the absolute certainty in his voice when he made me a promise.
I press call.