AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
jersey
I guess I’d call it fucking karma that I woke up in the trunk of a car. Even with a bullet still lodged somewhere in my left shoulder, they weren’t taking any chances with me. I had handcuffs on my wrists and ankles. They went so far as to put a fucking bag over my head before slamming me in here. I had no way to know how long I’d been in here, where we were headed, or what was coming next. I remembered busting out of a fucking window in that abandoned house to try to catch up to Trista and Memphis. I remembered hearing the gunshot, but I definitely didn’t remember feeling it. Somebody’s big ass boot stomping down directly on my face was what landed me in this trunk with no recollection of it happening.
The whole thing was less than ideal. I could admit that much. There was always a chance that the plan to rescue Memphis would go terribly wrong. The girls got away though. I was confident of that much. There would’ve been no point in keeping me alive if they’d managed to catch all three of us. So, what actually happened was something between everything going according to plan, and the worst possible outcome of all three of us dying right there in the hills of Tennessee.
I squirmed and writhed until I at least got the bag off my head so I could breathe just a little easier, but all the movement left my whole body in pain that might as well have been electrifying. It wasn’t my first time getting shot, but experience with such a thing didn’t lessen its pain with each new reminder. I tried to shift to lessen the weight my body was putting into lying on my shoulder, but it only furthered the stings of electrical current that radiated from the bullet wound. Trista had been entirely convinced that her stepdad, my boss, wanted her back to torture her before he killed her for the things that she’d taken from him. It was probably safe to assume that I was about to meet that fate. The organization that I worked for would use every bit of me to their advantage to try to draw Trista back out into the open where they could find her, and now Memphis, too.
I was formally trained to withstand torture to some extent, but I was about to find myself face-to-face with a version of me that I really didn’t recognize now. Where my mind went to be able to survive that kind of abuse turned me into something that really wasn’t even human anymore. Knowing that ahead of time didn’t usually offer any help in avoiding it though. Something about it was linked to a survival instinct, and it happened whether I was ready for it or not; whether I wanted to go down that route or not.
The only sliver of sanity that I held onto in this confined space was the knowledge that Triss and Memphis would stay together. Even if they ended up hating one another, they’d stay together. Wondering how they actually got along and what was happening in their interactions provided me with my sole form of entertainment for this trip to wherever we were headed. Did Memphis hate Trista for what was happening? Did she blame Triss for this predicament that we were all in? Or did she blame me? Trista had a temper the size of fucking Jupiter, with an attitude to match. But Memphis had never tolerated it when I got snappy with her, and she was the Queen of Sass when it came to me. Imagining them driving each other bat shit crazy was enough to make me smile, despite my current situation. I didn’t know if they’d get along beautifully because Trista was exactly like me, or if they’d despise one another for the very same reason. Either way, Memphis would cling to Triss because she could keep them safe, alive, hidden. Trista would take Memphis with her just because I’d told her to do it. And by now, they should be well on their way to Indiana.
CHAPTER TWO
trista
I finally worked up the nerve to give the little stuffed Tigger back to Memphis so she could tuck him safely into the glove box of Jersey’s Challenger, where he belonged.
“We should keep moving,” I said quietly, opening Jersey’s wallet for a card to pay for gas.
“Where are we going?” Memphis asked.
We both watched a folded piece of paper fall into my lap from the wallet as I opened it. I was ready for a fresh burst of tears when I realized it was the photo of Memphis that I’d taken from her house so Jersey could keep it, but I noticed writing on the back of it when I picked it up this time.
“What is it?” Memphis asked.
“We still went to your house after they picked you up,” I explained. “Jersey was worried that you might’ve had a family there, someone who might’ve gotten hurt and needed help. We picked up the stuff that you’d packed too. It’s in the trunk. But I found this picture in your living room and took it for him to keep. He wrote on the back. I don’t know what it means.”
I handed the photo over to Memphis, with the words still in my mind.
Triss – just in case.
Beneath it, he’d written an address somewhere in Indiana. Memphis sighed, and wiped the back of her hand across her cheek.
“It’s his dropout plan,” she said. “He knew I never had an escape plan. And he knew the chances of all of us making it out of that place together were slim, so he’s giving us his dropout plan. He’s telling us where to go. It’ll be safe there.”
“Indiana?” I asked, while she put the address from the photo into the navigation system on Persephone’s dash. “He picked Indiana for his dropout location? Why did I imagine him aiming for some tropical island with a beach where absolutely no other people lived?”
“He does kind of seem like a city slicker all the way to his core, doesn’t he?” Memphis added. “It’s hard to picture him settling down for the long haul in the middle of a bunch of cornfields.”
“Hard to picture him settling down. Period.”
My nose even scrunched up at the words. He was older than both of us by a long shot, but nothing about the man said settling down type in any sense of the words.
The two of us knowing absolutely nothing about one another made for a weird stint of silence in the six-hour drive between wherever we were and the house in Indiana where Jersey was sending us. We should’ve spent that time figuring out what we were supposed to do next. We could’ve spent that time actually getting to know one another if we were supposed to be staying together. We could’ve gone deeper into just talking about Jersey, since he was the thing we had in common. Instead, we both just stayed quiet.
I couldn’t make my brain move beyond this man who hadn’t even thought twice about sacrificing himself to get us out of that house. Or the fact that he’d just been a regular family man at one point in his life. Trying to picture him in the role of suburban dad, playing with his daughter in the backyard while a bombshell of a wife came outside to tell them that it was dinnertime felt…impossible. He’d been so cold and ruthless. He didn’t even seem to know how to behave when he was forced to just sit beside me in this car for long lengths of time. And I was supposed to accept that this man had been married to another human? A woman had agreed to marry him and birthed a child by him. Then it was just as difficult to try to get my head around the knowledge that the same woman had taken his parents, his daughter, and herself from him while he wasn’t even in the country. I’d been through some shit, but that was a very different level of some shit. Nothing in me could fathom having to just move on after the loss of a small child.
“Do you know anything about his family?” I finally asked when I couldn’t let go of the thoughts of his daughter.
Memphis sighed. “A little.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
The look on her face said she wanted to, but her words didn’t match it. “He doesn’t even know that I know. I don’t think I should be the one to tell you about them. If you guys are, you know, going to be a whole thing, he should probably get to decide what he wants you to know.”
For as much as I wanted to admire the sense of loyalty that she felt to him, I also wanted to reach across her and open the door to kick her little ass right out onto the asphalt. It wasn’t jealousy that she knew more about him than I did, but it was definitely in the neighborhood. The only thing I could cling to about it was that Jersey hadn’t been the one to tell her about them either. She’d found out on her own.
