The man’s pleas, ironically, fell on deaf ears. Steel wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t. Not even when he had the names, because this man aided and abetted Melanie’s murderer. He wouldn’t be walking out of here, and not just because Scar had discovered a sledgehammer in a maintenance room two floors up.
There was nothing humane about what Steel was doing, but then, there wasn’t much humanity left in him. There was no peace, no solace, no redemption. A monster had taken his daughter from this world, and nowhehad become the monster.
Twenty-six days since his little girl had been taken from him, stripped of her future and he had lost his soul. Sixteen days since Steel had watched her coffin be lowered into the ground and he had embraced the darkness.
He didn’t know what was happening at home. He knew Scar was in contact with Tally, but Steel had not reached out to anyone. Not his wife, his sister, or his sons. He’d failed to keep Melanie safe, and he wouldn’t rest until he’d wiped Griffin Shaw off the face of this planet.
Pressing the screw hard enough against Harris’ face that droplets of crimson trailed down his outer cheek and into the edges of his pornstache, Steel had the fleeting thought of whether he’d ever go home. After he found Shaw and carved his daughter’s name into the man’s chest, did he even have a home to return to?
The monster had been unleashed, and there was no guarantee that the man worthy of his family, ofJenna, would ever reemerge.
When Jenna wasfive years old, she’d nearly drowned. Her parents had been hosting a gathering at their Seattle estate to show off something they had purchased that was so insignificant that Jenna couldn’t even remember what it was. The glamour of the event, though, was overshadowed by Jenna being pushed into the pool by a boy around her age. At the time, Jenna had not yet learned how to swim. Her sister, Caroline, had been the only person to realize what had happened and jumped in after her, but by then, Jenna had panicked so much that she’d inhaled a lot of water.
Until a month ago, Jenna would have sworn the memory of drowning was one of her worst. She’d eventually learned to swim and got over her fear of the water, but the useless flail of a panicked five-year-old child was never forgotten.
Over fifty years later and Jenna was back in that pool, flailing, panicking, drowning… Only this time, there was no one there to bring her up. She was utterly and completely alone. Abandoned by the man she loved. The hypocrisy of that statement was not lost on her when she’d been the one to send him away, to tell him to go, to find the man who had taken their daughter from them and make himhurt…and yet, she couldn’t help but resent him.
Jack was gone, and she wasn’t just talking about physically being absent from her side. The man she’d married, the boy she’d fallen in love with, was gone. She’d seen it at the viewing, the night before the funeral when neither of them could sleep, and then at the graveside. Jack was gone. Only Steel remained.
Jenna and their children were likely the only people on the planet who’d ever metJack. The steel mask he wore around the rest of the world was a stranger to her. She’d seen glimpses over the years, flickers of the coldness. It always baffled her how others perceived her husband, because he wasn’t hard or cruel with her. She could understand to a point the respect and the loyalty that he cultivated over the years, yet there was a difference between her admiration for her husband and the fidelity others offered him.
But shecouldn’thave understood, not fully anyway. Because she’d never seenSteel. Not the way others had. Not until now.
In addition to her grief and sorrow that weighed so heavily on her that each breath took enormous effort, fear gripped her. Reality was adding to the force, pressing down on her chest like a boulder. Jenna didn’t know Steel. She thought she knew all of her husband. More than their children, his sister, and theirfriends, Jenna thought she was thesoleperson who knew Jack Duncan.
Sitting next to him at the viewing and then the funeral, feeling the coldness radiating off him like an iceberg, Jenna realized how wrong she’d been. There was a part of her husband that she didn’t know, the darkness within that had kept him alive for twenty years in the Marines. And she had no choice but to come to the terrifying conclusion thatSteelwasn’t the mask.
Jack was.
And that fear that gripped her throat like a noose came from the unknown answer of whether she could love Steel.
She wasn’t so blind as to not know her husband had darkness inside him, but she thought she’d known that darkness, understood and embraced it with him. Seen it as a part of him, a sliver of the man he was.
What if Jack didn’t come back to her? If her husband walked up to her right now, would she even recognize him?
How could she—when she didn’t even recognize herself? Drowning and flailing in an ocean of despair, she was a ghost of the woman she’d been, and it had nothing to do with her disease. Her heart felt crushed, like the weight of an industrial press was pushing down on her breastplate. Contrary to how alone she felt, she was aware of the people always around her.
Lilly had stayed. She’d taken over care of both Jenna and Ollie. At one point, she’d forced Jenna to finally eat by practically shoving broth down her throat. She made Jenna get out of bed and come downstairs. She was sympathetic, grieving too, but ultimately, Lilly was ensuring that Jenna’s children did not have to bury their mother alongside their sister.
Jordan left college. Only a semester away from graduating, he found he couldn’t return to the campus where his sister had been murdered. Instead, he was packing his bags and going to spend some time abroad to help deal with his grief.
Lucy and Carter had returned to their home with Drew, needing to get back to their jobs and lives. Lucy’s pregnancy was no longer the joy to Jenna it had been only a month ago. The prospect of a new grandbaby hurt, because that baby would never know Melanie and it only drove home the reminder that Drew was too young to remember his aunt.
Jenna knew it was unfair of her to shun her children. They were in pain just as she was, but she couldn’t stop the endless stream of fear, hatred, and anger floating around her head and infecting her every thought. If she were a better person, she’d be keeping her distance in order to protect her children. They should not see her in such an ugly state. But the truth was,shedidn’t want to seethem.Because every person who walked into her room, into her house, was not the one person she wanted to see. Even Steel fit that category.
She was long past denial and trying to bargain with the universe. The moment Steel had left her alone at the reception, the moment she’d realized that her husband no longer existed, she’d stepped into anger, and unless Melanie walked through her front door, Jenna had no idea how to let go of that anger.
A lot of it was aimed at Steel. She didn’t blame him or think that Melanie’s murder was his fault. She knew who had pulled the trigger, and Griffin Shaw was the only person who deserved that portion of her anger. No, her fury at her husband lay in the fact that he couldn’t be in two places at once. She was aware of how irrational that anger was, but she was in no way trying to stem it. She wanted Griffin Shaw to pay for what he’d done, what he’d taken from them, but she also was pissed beyond reason that Jack wasn’t here to hold her, to grieve with her.
Mostly, though, she was angry at God. Church was the only place Jenna would willingly go now. In a fucked up way, she felt more powerful there. Not because she felt God’s presence or comforted by the scripture, but because her anger, her hatred,was stronger within the walls of the sanctuary where many had said their final goodbyes to Melanie.
Between Lilly and Louisa, they brought her nearly every day. Her legs were practically useless, unable to hold her weight or support her for long periods of time. Jenna couldn’t even find the energy to add her diagnosis to the list of reasons why she was pissed at God. That would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Thankfully the church had a wheelchair ramp. Cage had actually been the one to build it, nearly single handedly. When the club had created the construction business and Cage had agreed to manage it, he’d been the sole employee for a while. Building handicap ramps on several of the churches in town was one of the company’s first contracts.
In Jenna’s church, he’d also removed the two front pews and installed shorter pews, a little bigger than a loveseat couch, so that two wheelchairs could fit on either side. Prior to Melanie’s funeral, Jenna had never had to use one of the wheelchair spaces. Jack had dutifully carried a seat cushion in a large reusable shopping bag when they attended services and never cared how slow she had to walk, allowing her to lean on him as much as she needed to.
She didn’t have him to lean on anymore. Neither Steel nor Jack was here to lend her the strength she needed to find the desire to walk again.
