I've got most of everything picked up before he even sighs heavily, and I still don't have answers. I know for me that I need his muscle and the way he thinks like a criminal. If not, some of these men on the list will be a handful. But I have to question them all to see who will fight with me. But I don't see what's in it for him.
When he doesn't answer, I turn and walk out. I don’t think I'll ever get a straight answer out of him. He's using me, no different from the way I'm using him, and that's it. Right now, it's a functional partnership, and that's all I need.
I head to the kitchen and pull out a frozen pizza from the freezer. Then I set the timer on the oven and set the temperature to four hundred degrees before turning back to tear the pizza box open. When I hear his footsteps behind me, I steady myself.
Jace Morelli owes me nothing at all. I could very well have killed him. I still could. I bested him at full strength. I could take him right now with the fever and the stab wound. But unlike him, I really am not a murderer. I don't want to kill. Not even Jason Bryan. He's a lowlife dirtbag, but he deserves a fair trial and a life in prison where he'll rot for the things he did. A bullet is too easy, too quick.
"I'm sorry he hurt you…" Jace's voice is soft, a rumble that makes goosebumps rise on my arms.
"What do you mean?" I don't turn around to face him because I have no one to answer to but myself. I don't know what he knows or how he knows it, but I know Bryan buried things deep.
"I read your journal, Sabine. I know what he did to you."
Those words make me freeze. When I left this morning, I knew he would go through my things. I just didn’t think he'd actuallyread my diary. I pegged him as more of the "take her money and run" sort of person. This feels like a violation, but also like a relief. I don't have to say the words to him.
I can't say any words to him anyway. I'm frozen there, planted like a thirty-year oak with no way to articulate the storm of emotion just those words bring up in my mind and heart.
Footsteps cross the kitchen behind me and then his hands are on my shoulders. He doesn't try to turn me around or force me to look at him. He just stands there with his hands on my shoulders while I shake and struggle to breathe through the memories that won't stop flooding back.
Bryan is a pig, a monster of a man, and I hate him. I hate what he did to me. I hate how I hate myself because of what he did to me.
Then Jace's hands slide down my arms. He moves closer until he warps them around me and rests his chin against the crown of my head, and I break. Tears well up, and my chest heaves. I've never been able to let this out, never a tear over this because I'm trained to push that emotion away. But somehow in his arms, I let it flow.
"They dismissed everything," I sob. "Pushed me out of Special Forces, stuck me behind a desk… And Bryan walked away clean. The fucker!"
The shaking is getting worse and tears are burning down my cheeks, years of refusing to cry finally catching up with me in my own kitchen while a man I tried to kill yesterday stands behind me offering silent support. I haven't cried since the night it happened because breaking down means admitting that what Bryan did ruined me and that he won.
"I will help you take that bastard down." His arms tighten around me, and the baritone of his voice rumbles through me. "Whatever it takes, however long it takes. We're gonna expose that motherfucker for everything he's done and make sure he pays for all of it."
I'm crying silently with my face turned away and my hands still gripping the counter. Jace doesn't move or try to force me to look at him, and somehow, that makes it easier to let the tears fall without feeling weak or exposed.
Something about him makes me feel safe. Maybe it's the fact that he's outside the military system that failed me. Maybe it's the understanding in his voice when he promised to help. Maybe it's just exhaustion and desperation making me reach for any anchor I can find in the chaos of what's coming.
But standing here in my kitchen with his arms around me while I cry for the first time in years… I'm grateful he's here.
The tears slow eventually and I straighten, wiping my face with the back of my hand and taking a shaky breath that feels cleansing now. Jace's hands slide from my shoulders and he steps back to give me space, and when I finally turn to face him, his expression is serious but not pitying.
"Thank you." The words feel inadequate, but they're all I have, and he nods once in acknowledgment before limping back toward the bathroom to vanish and give me privacy.
I don't know how to reconcile what just happened except that I’m finally doing what I should've done years ago when this all happened, and somehow, the man who came here to kill me has had a sudden change of heart.
I can only hope that change of heart lasts.
Otherwise, I may as well just let him finish what he started. Because I'm as good as dead.
7
JACE
Ethan Caldwell's house sits three down from where I've parked my truck, a narrow two-story with peeling paint and a sagging porch that speaks to decades of deferred maintenance and poverty that never quite lets go. Gary, Indiana looks worse in person than it did on the map, blocks of abandoned buildings and empty lots where houses used to stand before the city's economy collapsed and took half the population with it. Three hours from Chicago, far enough that the drive gave my leg time to stiffen and ache despite the antibiotics working through my system.
Sabine sits in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on the house where Caldwell lives with his mother, and the tension radiating from her body is palpable even in the confined space of the truck cab. We've been parked here for forty minutes waiting for movement, and the silence between us has shifted from comfortable to oppressive somewhere around the thirty-minute mark.
"I heard he was an alcoholic now…" Sabine sits with her arms crossed, staring up the street with a glower on her face. "Serveshim right. He left right after that shit went down overseas and moved back in with his mom… I think there wasn't a single one of us who handled that well." The puffer coat she wears hardly flatters her figure, but she's beautiful when she's mad.
This bloke probably pissed her off good. I don't figure he's going to be the type to cave easily or want to help us if he's drowning his sorrows with drink. Those types are more like steel traps that hold everything in until one day, they implode.
My eyes stay fixed on the house because I don't want to miss it if he leaves. We could end up doing this for a few days if he's a home body. I won't take the risk of going in and being forced to kill an elderly woman for no good reason. When I was in my twenties I wouldn't have cared, but as I age the value of life seems to rise. I understand how life is like a vapor and extinguishing it feels irreverent unless it's necessary.
