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“There. See. Now you’ve upset her,” he said and paused to listen again. “Because it’s fucking weird man. That’s why. I asked. She said no. Drop it.”
“Yeah, I’m leaving,” I said and started to back away, because I was a little terrified about turning my back to this man.
“Oh, okay. That’s one way to treat people after you’ve done exactly as they’ve asked. Moody little shit hung up on me,” Utah said, walking the rest of the way toward me. “Sorry about that. Indy doesn’t do a lot of face-to-face interaction. He’s — amusing. So, Virginia was unconscious when I left him. Should give you a solid head start, but do you want me to follow you back just in case?”
“Virginia?” I asked. “He’s another Executioner?”
“He is.”
“Why would you do that? Won’t they start coming after you now?” I asked.
“Oh, they have no idea who I am,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known who he was if his Judge hadn’t been screaming his name from the speakers in his car.”
“Yeah, if you’re still working for them, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have you follow me anywhere,” I said. “I have several million dollars’ worth of skepticism about you.”
His smile in response to that scared me even more.
CHAPTER TWELVE
jersey
I spent most of my time just attempting to sleep to pass the days. They’d been giving me just enough water and just enough rotten food to make sure I wouldn’t die. They brought someone in to make sure I wouldn’t bleed to death from the shot to the shoulder, but they didn’t bother to remove whatever bullet fragments were still embedded in my body so the pain from it never really subsided for more than a minute or two of sitting perfectly still. Even in the moments that I did manage to fall asleep, just breathing too deeply would send bolts of pain through my body to wake me right back up. That, combined with being trapped in the body of a thirty-seven-year-old man who was being forced to sleep on nothing more than concrete left me in a pretty perpetually shitty mood. Everything ached all the way into the fucking marrow of my old man bones.
Keeping my thoughts under control hadn’t reached a difficult point yet. The real torture hadn’t started though. I didn’t believe they’d actually made contact with Memphis yet, so they had no use in torturing me. It wouldn’t do them much good to risk killing me before they’d gotten any use out of me. The only thought so far that bothered me more than the others was having to acknowledge that if the girls had made it to Indiana like I’d hoped, it meant they both had access to the master bedroom in that house.
There was nothing I could do from here about the picture that sat next to my side of the bed. It wasn’t something that I’d planned to keep from Triss forever, but having the chance to hear it from me first probably would’ve gone over better. I had no way of knowing if Memphis knew about those years of my life. She’d never mentioned any of it, but she’d also never mentioned knowing my real name before she screamed it when she was being abducted. Whether she’d heard about my previous life from Memphis or from Kyle by this point, I couldn’t imagine it was an easy pill for Triss to have to swallow without me being there to answer her questions about the situation.
It surprised even me that the sound of the door opening felt like a relief. Drag my ass out of those thoughts before they could actually start this time around. The small woman who usually brought the camera and the tripod in had been replaced by the President himself for this visit with Bryson. They looked even more alike when they stood side-by-side with the same overly annoyed expression.
“We’re going to discuss this like adults now, Mr. Jersey, because my patience is wearing thin,” Nate said.
“Then you might want to excuse your baby boy from this conversation,” I managed to choke out, despite having a mouth that was still filled with dried blood and a throat that hadn’t had water in hours. Baby boy immediately stepped forward and clocked me right in the jaw another time for good measure.
“We’re going to be honest with each other, because that’s how men handle these problems,” Nate said. “I’m tired of waiting. Tell me where Trista is.”
“You can see that I’m not currently with her, right?”
Another punch from baby boy, to my nose this time.
“We’re both broken men, Mr. Jersey. And it stems from a common pain.”
“It’s a little early to be playing that you and I aren’t so different card, isn’t it?”
“We both know how it feels to lose a child,” he said. “And wouldn’t you do whatever was necessary to be able to face the person who took your child away from you?”
“Yeah, I’m going to have to stop you there. Your shitball of a son got exactly what he deserved.”
“That’s a pretty awful thing for one father to say to another father.”
“But a pretty accurate thing to say to an asshole.”
“Then I might as well say it right back to you if talking to an asshole is the only requirement for it,” he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “That my four-year-old deserved to die? Sure. The difference there is that you and I both absolutely know that that isn’t true. Just like we both know that your son raping and tormenting a girl who had no one to help her puts him squarely in the category of deserving it.”
That brought all of Bryson’s fury down on top of me another fucking time. To drive his point home, he wasn’t even aiming for my face anymore. He dragged my ass out away from the wall to drop me to the concrete below him so he could stomp right down on the already wounded shoulder. For as much as I normally preferred to not show my torturer the kind of pain he was inflicting with every blow, I couldn’t do fucking shit about the scream that came out of me after that. I about passed out that very second. The only thing that kept me conscious and coherent was realizing that if this asshole ever did get his hands on Trista, this was exactly what he intended to do to her. And to prevent that, I was more than willing to just endure this until my last breath.
“You can make this easier on yourself by telling me where to find her,” Nate said. “Or even just by telling me how to contact Memphis.”
