Page 9 of Torment

After a while, I figured she could find me if she had any intention of getting in contact again. When that still hadn’t happened by late 2014, I accepted that she didn’t want to speak to me. That was fine. I figured I probably reminded her of that terrible time.

Then, after a harrowing dream one night in mid-2015 involving flames and blistering agony, I woke up drenched in sweat, gasping for air. My memories were finally returning in a deluge of disorienting information. They were all jumbled up like pieces of the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle, but eventually, I was able to sort through most of them.

With a stark shock, I remembered Jolie hadn’t just been an informant and friend at New Eden. We were lovers, and not just in a sexual way. I was a man obsessed. I’d fallen for her the second I stepped foot in that place, and she was the reason I’d decided to stay. Even now, all these years later, I could feel her in my heart. In my bones, my marrow, my blood. She was everywhere.

She loved me too, didn’t she? So where the hell was she? Why hadn’t she tried harder to contact me over the years?

Then the rest of it came back to me. Old conversations filled my head, fragmenting like artillery shells, shrapnel flying everywhere. It tore through my mind, leaving charred trails behind as the rush of love and adoration I felt for Jolie abruptly vanished.

I remembered it all now.

I remembered the plan we had to expose the evil cult to the world. I remembered worrying about her safety and wanting to take her with me before I called the FBI. I remembered her insistence on staying behind, and I remembered sitting in my car reading the card Jacob gave me. I also remembered the recording in the card. Jolie’s voice. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but there’s something I need to tell you. Something big. It’s about Mason Ashwood.’

At the time, I’d worried that she simply grew tired of waiting and told her father the truth in a sort of ‘fuck you’ gesture. I was even fucking concerned about her, and in those last few seconds before I triggered the bomb in the box, my only thoughts and wishes had been for her safety.

Now I knew better.

As much as I loved Jolie, I wasn’t blind. The whole time I’d been with her down in the shelter, I’d had a niggling fear in the back of my mind; a worry that she might be too brainwashed. Too conditioned to the cult. I thought I’d broken through all that, was almost certain of it, but up until the very last minute, there was still the tiniest shred of worry that she might start to feel guilty and return to what she’d been taught all those years.

And she did. She went and tipped off her father about what I was doing.

That gave him and the other men the opportunity to go after me and my family as revenge for trying to fuck them over, and it also gave them the opportunity to try and escape instead of waiting for the FBI to throw them all on death row like they deserved.

I knew it had to be Jolie who snitched. She was the only one who knew the details of my plan. In fact, it was supposed to be our plan. Not just mine. She knew every part of it as well as I did.

I knew we’d been careful, and try as I might, I couldn’t think of anyone else who might’ve overheard so much as a few words here and there. So it had to be her. I knew it. Especially since I had that recording playing on an endless loop in my mind now that I finally remembered it. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but there’s something I need to tell you. Something big. It’s about Mason Ashwood.’

Jacob put that recording in the card to fucking taunt me. He wanted me to know in my last agonizing breaths that I’d been betrayed by the woman I loved.

In different circumstances, I may have swallowed my anger and understood Jolie’s willingness to betray me. I may have been lenient and accounted for the years of brainwashing she endured. But I couldn’t. Not when my fucking family had been roasted alive by the fire she started.

She might not have struck the literal match and killed them with her own bare hands, but she was the one who set it all in motion. Thus, she was the number one target on my list.

I hired several more PIs to try and track her down again. None of them were successful, and my rage grew with every month that passed with Jolie no closer to being found.

The longer I waited, the more I hated her. Despair and loathing stained my soul. It spread throughout my entire system, shutting down all other feelings until it was central to my existence. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without picturing Jolie on her knees, bruised, battered, and bleeding with my hands wrapped around her throat, choking the life out of her. My mind was sick now, my heart colored black with hatred. There was no room for love in there, and there never would be again, at least not until I had vengeance on all those who had harmed me and my family.

About six months ago, fortune finally swung my way. My phone battery died while I was on a rare trip to the office downtown (I usually worked from home via Skype), and no one could find a charger, so I’d asked one of my assistants to let me borrow her phone to look up something on the calendar. I usually used Android phones, but she had an iPhone, so it took me a few minutes to figure out how to use it. I accidentally clicked on Instagram at one point, and in a moment of serendipity, Jolie appeared before my very eyes.

Some random tourist had uploaded a photo taken at a piano bar right here in New Orleans, somewhere in the Quarter. It was a group shot of a mixture of guys and girls, all drunk and grinning at the camera as they displayed colorful beads they’d obtained at a street carnival. In the background was a waitress, turning her face directly toward the camera, though it was clear she had no idea it was there. She was simply swinging around to pick up an empty glass to put on her tray.

Her hair was dark red and her eyes were shadowed with black makeup, but I still recognized her immediately. Every inch of her face, every curve and shadow, was burned into my mind and had been for years. Those green eyes shot their arrows right into my chest all over again, and I nearly dropped the phone out of shock.

All this time, she’d been right under my nose.

I went and found the piano bar, a dingy little place on Toulouse Street. The owner was a hard-faced woman who recognized the waitress from the photo immediately. ‘That’s Jo Sinclair,’ she told me. ‘What do you want with her?’

Jo fuckin’ Sinclair. Ha.

Jo was obviously short for Jolie, and I guess she chose Sinclair as a last name because it had eight letters and was of French origin, like her old surname. Or perhaps she picked it at random. I had no clue. All I knew for certain was that I’d found the little bitch.

Finally.

Now that I had her in my sights, I decided to play with her like a cat with a trapped mouse while I figured out a plan. I told the bar owner who ‘Jo Sinclair’ really was, and I offered her ten thousand bucks in cash to get rid of her. I told her to make up any excuse. Didn’t matter. As long as Jolie felt like lowdown dog shit for getting fired.

Then I got my favorite PI to look into the new name. It turned out Jolie had been all over the goddamned country after leaving Baton Rouge. In fact, while I was back in New York, she’d been there for around five months, only a few streets away from my fucking building. Same with Chicago, not long after I had my execs set up a new branch out there. She’d lived in a shitty little apartment only a few blocks from our office.

After that, she’d gone to live in a shit-ton of small towns dotted all over the map before finally moving to New Orleans around eight months ago. Since then, she’d worked at a few low-end jobs, and she’d been let go from the ones I hadn’t had her fired from. She drank a lot, too. Seemed miserable.

---