Page 167 of Dead Girls Don’t Forget

“I built this pack for you.”

“No,” Jackson replied. “You built it for yourself and expected me to live in it.”

For a moment the room was silent.

Then Thomas smiled. It wasn’t pleasant.

“Do you know what happens when people make bad decisions?”

Jackson didn’t move. “Say what you mean.”

The phone rang again. Thomas declined it, jaw tightening. His eyes flicked toward me for a split second before returning to his son.

“Jason’s scholarship. Lia’s internship. Rick’s father’s job. All of them depend on pack connections. Those things are fragile. They can disappear faster than people expect.”

The threat was quiet. Precise. Aimed through Jackson, not at him.

“You’re threatening my friends,” Jackson said, voice dangerously low.

“No,” Thomas replied smoothly. “I’m reminding you how connected everything is.”

The phone rang a third time, shrill and insistent. Thomas finally answered, irritation snapping through his posture. “What?”

The voice on the other end was loud and panicked. Thomas’s expression shifted — confusion, then dawning horror.

“A video?” he barked. “What video?”

I watched the color drain from his face as the person on the line kept talking. For the first time since he’d barged in, Thomas looked genuinely shaken.

“Goddamn it.” He ended the call with a violent stab of his thumb and glared at us. “This isn’t over.”

Then he turned and stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the walls.

For several seconds neither Jackson nor I moved.

Artemis finally emerged from under the table and let out a loud, offended meow. My cat wasn't nearly as forgiving.

I looked toward the door, then back at Jackson. “He’s getting desperate.”

“He’s losing control of me and he knows it.” He turned to me, eyes dark. “But those threats… He can make Jason, Lia, and Rick’s father suffer without ever touching us directly.”

I nodded. “He’s trying to force your hand. Make you choose between me and them.”

“There’s no choice.”

For a moment neither of us moved. Then Jackson exhaled and gestured toward the laptop.

We returned to the couch. I reopened it. “Let’s see what we missed.”

The live feed was still running, but the packhouse looked worse than before. We rewound through the recording.

In the ten minutes we had missed, the videos had kept playing and the crowd’s reaction had turned ugly. People were on their feet, shouting and pointing at the screen. Several of Thomas’s inner-circle members tried to restore order, which only made everyone angrier. One man I recognized from the blackmail notebook was red-faced and yelling at someone near the stage. Another woman stood a few feet away, openly crying. Someone finally reached the projector and yanked the cords free. The screen went black a second later.

The room didn’t calm with it.

The fighting continued. Voices rose. People shoved past each other. Chairs scraped and toppled as the crowd refused to settle.

As we watched the playback, Jackson’s phone started buzzing nonstop. Notifications lit up the screen one after another.