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“Don’t move,” a new voice said firmly. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted, so I just listened to that one.
“Can’t have you dying already, New Jersey,” Bryson said from somewhere nearby.
I tried to remember what put me into that spiral, what sent me back to Liz. Whatever it was, the top of the table felt cool against the side of my face and that took precedence for a few seconds while I let all my weight slump forward the rest of the way onto it. Then it hit me like Bryce’s fist had been doing.
“How do you know about Tigger?” I asked again. I managed to get my eyes open and focused well enough to realize someone was bandaging part of my left forearm.
Fucking potato peeler.
I heard Bryce laugh. He’d moved closer again.
“I remember when Dad hired you,” he said. “You were supposed to become the best. You were supposed to be smart enough to be able to do whatever he told you to do, supposed to be able to survive anything. But your worst trait is how fucking stupid you become the moment you feel anything at all. He thought he gave you enough time to just get over it. But here you are, still making dumbass choices over pussy. Still not piecing together what actually happened to your own family. I tried to tell him that if you were even half as good as he thought you’d be, you’d figure it out and then it all would’ve been a waste. Turns out, he was right on that part. You were only smart enough to do the job you were told to do.”
My brain hurt too much to try to sift through the insults and the nonsense to get down to what he was really telling me. Instead, I laid there with my eyes closed and hoped I’d just back fall asleep. I’d worry about thinking and logic later.
“He needs water,” the voice right next to me said.
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He won’t make it more than another day or two at this rate if you don’t give his body what it needs to withstand this kind of torture. If you need him functioning for these recordings, he’s going to need water, food, a minute in between to recover.”
Still not piecing together what actually happened to your own family.
I rocketed out of that chair like I hadn’t been tortured, starved, and dehydrated for who fucking knew how many days and whirled around to look for Bryson.
“See,” that motherfucker said immediately. “He’s perfectly fine.”
“What actually happened,” I repeated.
“Liz was really pretty. Do you think she was depressed all the time because she really should’ve been with someone better than you from the start? Someone who knew how to keep her happy?”
Even through the rage intoxication, I could sort out that those words were weightless taunting. Anger-inducing all the same, but just words. And I wanted real answers.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You never stopped to consider how convenient it was that everyone who knew you was wiped off the face of the Earth in a single night just for someone to show up and offer you a job where you couldn’t have an identity?”
“The implication being that Nate had them killed,” I concluded. I did have a brain. And it worked. But I needed him to say the words. Something in me still hesitated about it.
No, I absolutely hadn’t dug any deeper into their deaths myself. I couldn’t. I wasn’t even human anymore in the days after. Liz had never been stable. That was no secret. Everyone who knew her already knew that about her. She put up almost no fight when I suggested leaving Faith with my parents each time I was deployed because she also wanted our daughter to be cared for in the way that a helpless infant needed. It took an outrageous amount of love on her part to be able to acknowledge that she was not always the thing who would be best for her own child. And she crashed hard every time I had to leave. She knew that. I knew that. My parents knew that. The police were told that.
But everything about this could also have just been another layer to the torture game that we were playing. What better way to break a man apart than by making him realize that the thing he’d been devastated by for years didn’t actually happen the way that he’d believed?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
trista
The people inside Nate’s organization got weirder by the day.
From the foul-mouthed, pushy asshole with the face I wanted to sit on every second of every day also being this deeply loyal and protective, unrecognizable father figure all the way to the new muscled truck man who started out terrifying and morphed into a soft-spoken kid with a crush before my very eyes, they were all just fucking strange.
I wouldn’t have imagined Indy looking anything like the way he actually did either. He was sitting next to Memphis at the island in the kitchen by the time I’d followed Utah back into the house, but he stood to come toward us as soon as we’d walked into the room. Another unreasonably tall man to tolerate. Five-foot-five used to feel average, but Jersey was at least six-two. Utah and Indy were about the same height, but maybe just barely shorter than Jersey. I had the sudden urge to ask Memphis to stand up to really find out if I was that much taller than her. I felt like a giant around her anyway just because she was a damn rail compared to me.
Indy stuck his right hand out in my direction to shake mine and my eyes lingered for a second on the bright purple nail polish on his fingers. He wore wide black rimmed glasses that made his light blue eyes easier to see. And he had perfectly styled light brown hair that was so big and fluffy that it actually made him look a couple inches taller when I was closer to him.
“Yep, I can see why he’d just go blind to the millions being offered for you,” Indy said and pulled my hand all the way to his face to kiss it.
“Indy,” Utah said.
