Chapter 10 Jesse
JESSE
Rafferty was laughing when he said I was in for a treat, so I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or not.
He pulled the game box—frayed at the corners and held together by yellowing Scotch tape—from an upper cabinet and displayed it to me like a slightly deranged game show host. As he set out the trays and numbered tiles, he explained that he’d spent many summer afternoons divided between swimming in the lake and playing Rummikub with his grandparents.
The game itself was simple to learn and surprisingly addictive.
It also made us chatty. Rafferty told me his mom had him young and he’d been raised by his grandparents.
Even though they’d been much older than your average parents, they’d always been active in his life, supporting him in everything from his sexuality to his career.
Both had hated his husband, which made me laugh.
They would’ve liked me.
I wondered if he’d regret telling me so much about his personal life, but he seemed at peace with what he was saying.
I was surprised to hear that since his grandparents died, he’d been wondering if he was truly happy with the direction of his life and didn’t like the answers he was getting.
That was why he’d intended to spend the holiday drunk. He wanted to figure things out.
I knew that feeling intimately. Having been a criminal for as long as I could remember, I had no idea what to do with the new life I’d been given.
Rafferty even spoke about the way he and his ex-husband were so hot in the beginning, but they were better off as an idea than as an actual couple. Given that Rafferty was straight-up disrespectful in bed, I could see how a fancy lawyer could forget about the reality of his life.
Hell, I wished I could spend a little more time with him.
Thankfully, I was under no delusions as to what this little bubble of time meant. As soon as the snow melted, the bubble would pop, and we’d be right back in our old roles of cop and convict.
In a way, though, I was glad I’d gotten to know the man. The hatred I’d carried for him this past year had been heavy and impossible to maintain from the second I was in his care. And it made me feel a little less fucked in the head for all the jacking off.
Rafferty wasn’t the only one oversharing though.
I told him my favorite memory—a fishing trip with Kyler off the coast of Isla Mujeres. I admitted how much it’d hurt when everyone, save for my cousin, had turned their backs on me after my arrest.
“Then why didn’t you bargain for immunity from the beginning?” he asked.
My face went hot when I thought of my answer, and I shook my head.
“Loyalty,” he guessed, zero judgment in his tone.
“Stupidity, more like it,” I said, shaking my head. “Didn’t take me long to work out that some of the attacks on the inside had been ordered by my father.”
Rafferty nodded in agreement, and it reminded me that he’d doggedly pursued my family for months and probably knew us—and my father—better than almost anyone. I confessed that I wasn’t quite the stone-cold killer the courts had made me out to be.
At that point, he took my hand in his and kissed my knuckles. “I know.”
My eyes widened at his certainty.
“I’ve known since I saw you taking meals to Mrs. Adaluz,” he explained, a soft look in his eyes.
“My father put a gun in my hand at the age of sixteen and said I had to start earning my keep.”
“But that wasn’t what you wanted to do.”
I shook my head. Just a few months into my sentence, with multiple targets on my back and my father’s betrayal fresh on my mind, I hadn’t hesitated when the prosecutor’s office gave me a second chance to turn state’s evidence. I was tired of paying for a life I’d never had a shot at avoiding.
“I threw up the first time I…” I stopped abruptly, shaking my head. I had full immunity, but I didn’t know where any of that stood in this moment. “Wow. You are way too easy to talk to.”
“I am,” he admitted with a proud smile. I wondered how many criminals he took down by merely being charming. “And while I can promise that nothing leaves this conversation, I’ll understand if you prefer to keep a few things to yourself.”
Our hands were still linked. And it felt important that he understood the kind of man I really was inside.
“Hypothetically, if I were the kind of person who had to kill people, I’d make sure they were very, very bad people first.”
“What if—hypothetically—you were told to kill someone good?” he asked with a quirked brow.
“I’m sure that would have been a rare occurrence. Almost exactly as rare as my fail rate would supposedly be.” I shrugged. “Sometimes people get away before you can complete the order.”
“So, if someone got warned ahead of time that you were coming…”
“Well then, that’s just bad luck.” I brought his knuckles to my lips. “Hypothetically.”
The one thing I didn’t share with Rafferty was that I didn’t know what I was going to do after this, but it might involve stealing his truck.
I’d been promised a new life, a new identity, but never once had I felt safe.
After being attacked in the open with two heavily armed Texas Rangers driving me around, I knew I couldn’t trust law enforcement to protect me from my family.
“Can you tell me more about what happened yesterday?” Rafferty asked as we shuffled the tiles in the middle of the table.
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you think they knew where the safe house was?”
I wondered if he’d already guessed my plan. Still, I answered, “We were only a few minutes away from our location when they ran us off the road, so…yeah.”
“You said everyone was dead. How did that happen?”
“Arnold, the Ranger who was driving, tried to correct for the impact, but there was already ice on the bridge, and”—I pause, the screeching metal loud in my ears—“we got hit again. Both cars went over.”
“Did you see the other car underwater?”
I started choosing tiles.
“Jesse?”
“I heard it when it hit the water, but when I got to the surface, it was all I could do to fucking breathe. Like my whole throat seized up.”
“Laryngospasm,” Rafferty said matter-of-factly. “From trying to suck in oxygen from the cold air.”
“Yeah, well, whatever you call it, it hurt like a son of a bitch.”
“And the officers?” he asked carefully.
“They were dead on impact.” I needed him to believe this next part. “I wouldn’t have let them drown if I thought I could’ve saved them.”
He looked up from his tiles and reached out, closing his hand over mine once more. “Hey. I believe you. I think it’s a miracle you survived the crash. That you didn’t have to fight off your uncle after surviving all of that.”
I couldn’t tell if there was a question in that, but I felt I had to come clean.
“I did see my uncle.” I arranged the tiles a bit more with my free hand. “He didn’t make it out of the lake.”
I let the truth of what I’d done hang wordlessly between us. Rafferty dipped his chin, a sign of acceptance.
“Probably for the best.”
It was, but I feared the price I’d pay if Kyler ever found out. Despite the long-standing issues I’d had with my uncle—he was a ruthless asshole and a homophobe—Ky loved his dad and would be devastated by his death.
That wasn’t the reason I stayed quiet in this moment though. As much as I wanted Rafferty to think I was a good person, I knew I wasn’t.
“Hey,” he said, squeezing my hand. “He was trying to kill you. That’s endgame. It was either him or you. And I am perfectly fine with the way things ended up.”
I chanced a look in his direction and saw only honesty.
“I really hate killing people,” I said quietly as I made a few other adjustments to my tiles. “But some people need killing.”
I was surprised when he laughed.
“What?” Rafferty leaned forward. “Did you think you would shock someone in law enforcement by saying that? We know it’s true.”
“You say that, but you put me in jail for taking out a real scumbag.”
“That’s also true.” He sent me a sad smile. “I did.”
I tapped a tile on the table. “And what do you think of the people who take out the trash? Are they good guys or bad guys?”
I held my breath, waiting for his answer.
He took a moment, adjusting his own tiles. Then he looked me in the eye.
“Yes.”