Chapter Sixteen #3
I turned back toward the window, mulling everything over.
Something about this whole situation felt just a little…
off, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
My mind kept circling back around to Daniel King.
Why was Jakob so focused on Redding instead of him?
I hated enigmas, and Daniel King was a giant one dressed up in leather.
One minute he breaks into Jakob’s apartment and makes cryptic comments, and the next he’s slapping him on the back at the bar.
Then he’s bitching Jakob out over the phone, and just a few hours later, he’s acting all buddy-buddy at a party.
His abrupt shifts in behavior were bizarre.
Unsettling. Jakob said nothing the man did ever made sense to anyone else, and now I wondered why.
Was Daniel King just paranoid? A mastermind? Or a fucking whack job?
Even with the mounting evidence against Daniel, Jakob hesitated to condemn the man last night, and God only knew what he’d told Liam while I’d been with Gran.
I couldn’t wrap my head around Jakob’s reactions.
It seemed so obvious to me that Daniel King was involved.
The man had served with Redding, and now here Redding was, working for the Jokers to destabilize Kearny.
Daniel King had to be working with him. Maybe he was sick of heading a subchapter of the Specters, beholden to Liam.
Maybe he wanted to lead his gang without any oversight.
Of course he wouldn’t tell Jakob about what he was up to; Liam was his dad.
Of course he’d bitch Jakob out for getting involved; he was probably scared Liam was going to find out about his treachery.
So why was Jakob giving him the benefit of the doubt?
Why was he so goddamn loyal to a man who treated him like absolute shit?
I wanted to turn to him and demand answers, but if my past inquiries had taught me anything, it was that Jakob clammed right up every time I mentioned his evil overlord.
Jakob’s phone chimed from between us. He picked it up and glanced at the screen, slowing the van down so he could get a better look at it. His jaw clenched, and he threw it back down.
“God damn it,” he ground out.
“What’s up?” I asked, not liking the look on his face.
“Change of plans,” he said, pulling out onto the main road. “We need to go talk to someone after we drop this shit off.”
“Who?” I asked.
In answer, he just shook his head.
I stared at his profile, fighting back the urge to scream. “If you ever call me stubborn again, so help me God, Jakob.”
He reached out and grabbed my hand, drawing it toward him so he could plant a kiss on my knuckles. His eyes met mine over the top of them, briefly, holding both a promise and a warning. A promise that he would answer me soon? A warning to stop asking questions?
Argh!
Why did I feel like I never really knew what was going on with this man? Why did I constantly feel off balance and in over my head?
I tried to pull my hand from his, but he held on tight, his thumb stroking over my skin as he drove.
“Let me go,” I said, sounding angrier than I was. I needed to think, try to sift through my thoughts about what was going on and my ever-changing, ever-conflicted feelings for this impossible man, and I couldn’t seem to do either of those things with him touching me.
He glanced over again and caught sight of my expression. A scowl crept across his face, and he dropped my hand and flicked on his blinker, pulling off to the side of the road.
I looked around us—cornfields to the left, cornfields to the right.
Jakob put the van in park and came over to my side of the vehicle. Before I could ask him what the hell he was doing, he wrenched open my door, unbuckled my seat belt, and hauled me out of it.
“Jakob!” I yelled, grabbing on to his neck as he strode into the cornfield.
The van was still on, and both the doors were wide open, like we’d been abducted. If anyone drove past, they’d be so overcome with Children of the Corn vibes that they’d either take the fuck off or call the cops.
“You drive me crazy sometimes,” he growled.
“Ditto, buddy,” I said, poking his meaty chest for emphasis.
“Why couldn’t you have trusted that I would answer you when I could?”
“I didn’t know that’s what you were asking me to do!” I shot back. “Why didn’t you just say that to me?”
He made a frustrated sound and then hauled me forward so he could seal his mouth over mine. My head spun as he kissed me, hard and fierce, and I did that stupid thing where I forgot to breathe again. By the time he pulled back, I was lightheaded and thankful he was holding me up.
“We’re going to see Daniel King,” he said.
Just like that, the lightheadedness vanished. “Um, what?”
“And I didn’t say anything in the van because my father might have bugged it.”
“Um, what?”
“Now we need to quit wasting time and get back on the road before he looks at the GPS tracker on it and wonders why the hell we’re parked here.”
With that, he turned on his heel and headed out of the cornfield.
I clung to him, dumbstruck, looking back over the past few days and beginning to realize that the reason I had felt like I never knew what was going on was because I hadn’t.