Chapter 61
Chapter Sixty-One
FINN
I’m going to end her.
I’m going to save her first.
And then she’s dead.
Adrenaline rushes through me when I see J hurtling from the rooftop. It’s a clean shove.
I don’t even hear her screaming.
She moves fast, a shadow skating through darkness and air.
“This way! This way!” I yell at Kurosaki’s men.
Ren translates in Japanese, and with the help of twenty men, I drag the inflatable rescue cushion under the target.
Sweat pours down my face and my heart slams into my ribs.
If my calculations are off even by a milliliter…
An object smashes into the inflatable cushion and bounces back up, but it’s not too aggressive of a ricochet as she remains on the rubber material.
I let out an animal-like sound that’s part relief and part rage and scramble on top of the inflated mat.
J sits up in a daze. Her hair is out of its ponytail, the clip probably wrenched free by the wind’s fingers. She’s not bleeding, and nothing seems broken, but it’s hard to see because there aren’t that many lights at the back of the hospital.
I want to cradle J’s body against me, but I resist the urge. If something is broken, moving her might make it worse.
Instead, I look up at the rooftop. Gina peers over. From this distance, I can’t see her expression, but I think she’s covering her mouth with a hand in shock. When she notices that I’m looking up, she pulls out of sight.
“Ren!” I growl loudly.
“Hai.” He dips his head, gestures for Hayato to follow him, and races into the hospital.
“Gina won’t get away,” I tell J. “Hold on.” I glance around. “Dr. Kenji! Where the hell—Kenji!”
“So… loud,” J rasps.
I look down at her, noticing that her watch is flashing red and beeping to the point that it’s one long shriek. What the hell did they do to her?
J struggles to sit up, but the cushion is like a trampoline that bounces with every movement. I put a hand to her shoulder, a silent instruction not to move.
However, she stubbornly keeps trying to sit up. Her head sloshes around like the bobble head Zane stuck to our tour bus dashboard last summer. I move closer to her and catch her when she teeters sideways.
“Stop moving,” I growl.
“Finn?”
“What?” I snap.
“Your… heart… is beating… so fast.”
I grit my teeth together so hard that it almost breaks.
“J! Finn!” Dr. Kenji scrambles on top of the cushion, making us jolt and shift on the mat. I hand a half-conscious J over to him.
He peels one of her eyes open and flashes a light across her irises. “We need to get her inside. Now.”
Dr. Kenji slides off the cushion first while I move more gingerly with J in my arms, trying not to shake her too much. One of Kurosaki’s men steps forward to accept J from me. My instinct is to keep her to myself, but the cushion is so unsteady that I might drop her while dismounting.
I hand her over, slide to the ground, and then snatch her back.
“Thanks,” I mutter.
He dips his head and begins clearing the inflatable mat away.
Dr. Kenji leads the charge into the hospital. Everyone in the emergency room stares as we shoot through the doors and find an empty cot.
“Put her there,” Dr. Kenji directs.
One of the nurses dashes over to us. “J! Oh my gosh!”
“Bailey, I need…” Dr. Kenji jumps into a spiel, mentioning a bunch of drugs I’ve never heard of.
I grab him by his white coat. “My men are bringing Kelly down. We need to know what they did to her before we make it worse.”
“J told me what to prepare.” Dr. Kenji pushes my hand away with a surprising firmness. “If we wait for a confession, she might die.”
My fingers loosen from his coat, and he snatches it back. Whirling around, he continues shooting instructions at the nurse.
The nurse hands him what he needs and then drags the curtain. “Can you step back please?”
I don’t want to let J out of my sight, but I also don’t want to get in the way of her treatment. Moving back, I watch her small body in the cot until the curtain sweeps her out of sight.
My phone rings at that moment.
It’s Ren.
I tear myself away from J’s cot and go into a quiet hallway.
“Do you have them?” I growl.
“Yes.” The sound of female shrieks blares in the background.
Someone screams, “Who the hell are you? Let me go!”
“Should I take them to the shed?”
It’s tempting, but I have a personal rule not to hit women, and I have a feeling that if I talk to Gina outside of the law, she’s going to say something that’ll make me want to break that rule.
“No.”
“If we personally call the police, there might be issues,” Ren advises.
“I know. Call hospital security. Report her for attempted murder and then stay out of sight.”
J might disagree with that decision. I have a feeling her curiosity isn’t satisfied, and she’ll want to ask the imposter more questions, but I want Gina out of my grasp and behind prison bars before I feel the need to handle her myself.
Ren speaks to Hayato in Japanese, and then I hear a door thud and shouts break out. Ren breathes hard over the line. The wind howls in the background and clothing rustles.
My shoulders tighten, and I demand, “Ren, what’s going on?”
There’s no response.
“Ren?”
The line goes dead.
I grit my teeth and head straight to the elevators. Did Kelly overpower them somehow? I find that hard to believe. Ren and Hayato are elite fighters.
Just then, my phone chirps with a new notification.
I look down, hoping that it’s from Ren.
But it’s an email.
From: J_heart_pacer
I suck in an uneven breath when I see the subject of the email:
IN CASE OF DEATH
Hi, Finn,
I’m writing this in the car while we’re on our way to the hospital. You’re currently staring angrily out the window. You really shouldn’t clench your jaw like that. You’ll wear down your enamels.
I pull the phone closer to make sure I’m reading that correctly. On the trip back to the city, I did notice that J was fumbling on her phone, but I never expected that she’d be writing to me.
I’m scheduling this email to automatically hit your inbox in two hours. There are two links to an online document. Read the first one if I’m still alive.
Only read the second if I’m dead.
Sincerely,
J
I open the second file immediately, wondering what Jinx wanted me to know if she ever died. Will she admit her alter ego? Will she explain why she’s been targeting me and my brothers?
Dear Finn,
You read this one first, didn’t you?
I’m still confused, but that makes me smile a little.
Sometimes, death is the only way to reveal a secret. Now that I’m gone, a lot of things will come to light. Some of them will surprise you. Others won’t, I’m sure.
It seems like she’s referring to herself being Jinx, but what secret does she think will surprise me? Does it have anything to do with her real name or who her family is?
You and I were bound to be enemies, and I had no other choice but to deceive you.
Even though you threatened to kill me half the time, I also feel like you wanted to protect me too. Or maybe that’s in my head.
My heart beats faster.
Below is the password to my AI infrastructure.
I’ve given you administrative access to Henry.
He’s running the encryption that located Cadence and Grey, and he can also answer all your questions the way I would.
I created him and trained his database myself.
It’s basically like talking to my consciousness.
There’s a lot of things I lied to you about, but I sincerely mean this…
I hope you, Dutch, Zane, and Sol find the girls.
Something prickles in my nose and behind my eyes. What the hell is this emotion that’s making my midsection feel all jumbled?
One last thing, Finn. I’ve written and re-written this part so many times, wondering how to tell you this in a way that you’ll believe. When we first met, I kissed you. Do you remember that?
Of course I do.
I thought she was insane. J kept calling herself a fan, but her eyes didn’t glow with devotion the way others’ did. Even though I could tell that she didn’t like me, she kept throwing herself at me every time she had the chance.
After a while, I got used to it and just chalked it up to her being bizarre.
It wasn’t me.
The email ends there, and I recall that J had gotten a call from Dr. Kenji while she was furiously typing on the drive back. She must have gotten distracted and never finished the document.
What does she mean that it wasn’t her?
It was definitely J’s lips and J’s body. Who else kissed me?
The elevator doors open, and people jostle out, breaking my concentration.
“Is that Finn Cross?” someone whispers.
I duck my head and get on the elevator. As I’m going up, Ren calls me back.
“What the hell happened?” I hiss.
“Someone called security before we could,” Ren whispers. “As soon as they came up, every light in the hospital flashed upwards, putting the two women under a spotlight. We got away before they swarmed the place.”
“What?” I jerk my gaze to the red numbers changing on screen.
“Who called them?” It wasn’t Dr. Kenji. He’s still with J.
“I don’t know.”
“Are the guards still there?”
“No, they took the targets. I heard one of them saying the police were on their way,” Ren admits. “The slimmer one screamed that she was innocent, but the guard warned her they had a recording of her admitting to a crime.”
A recording? How did the security guards magically get a recording?
The whole thing feels easy.
Too easy.
Almost like someone choreographed every move.
Realization dawns, and I let out a short laugh of disbelief.
Dr. Kenji knew exactly what medicine to use on J. He didn’t want me to interrogate Gina at all. He already knew what to do because J told him.
The security guards had already been alerted too.
Maybe even the police got a scheduled call.
I lift my phone, putting it all together. This email that was sent automatically to me was a mere cog in the machine, a step in a sequence, meticulously planned by J. How did she get all this done on the journey between Mrs. Codd’s trailer and the hospital?
I think back to the night J programmed the showers to go off in the bathroom.
This building is hers—not legally, but digitally. She’s been secretly taking control of the security cameras, maintenance schedules, and climate control.
“She’s psychotic,” I mutter even as my pants tighten.
The Jinx Paradox at play.
I hit the button, so the elevator takes me back downstairs to the five-foot-one mastermind I’m pretty sure I’m either going to murder… or marry.