Page 62 of A Series of Rooms
He could feel the rise in tension as Jonah refused to look at him, refused to speak or move or otherwise acknowledge his presence. The throbbing in his face—a constant reminder of the price of his resistance—should have been motivation enough, but numbness settled over him, dulling his senses.
For a moment, he entertained the idea of going limp. Playing dead and accepting the consequences, whatever they might be. What would happen?
Would Shepard simply drag him upstairs, into the shower, and into a car by force? But then if Jonah still refused? After that? What would he do? Would he hit him? Rape him? He had done all that a hundred times before. What more was there left to fear from the devil he knew?
Maybe this would be the final straw. Would that really be all it took? Could ending this be as simple as lying flat on the basement floor and waiting?
Jonah closed his eyes. There was no order to his thoughts, if they were even complete thoughts at all. There wasn’t even any particularly strong feeling behind them. It was just a rush of numbness so sudden and intense that itrendered him a statue. He couldn’t obey even if he wanted to. He was no longer at the helm in his own body.
(How long had it been since he was?)
“Okay, then,” Shepard said, a frightening chill in his voice. “Let’s skip the pleasantries. I have something else I wanted to show you.”
Jonah wasn’t interested. What more could Shepard possibly have had on him? As if the threat of breaking his court order, the threat of turning him in for murder, and the constant threat of violence to him and his family wasn’t enough. What was there left to take from someone who had nothing?
That was what he had thought, anyway.
The moment Shepard pulled out his phone and showed Jonah what he had pulled up on the screen, he knew he had underestimated him.
“It’s amazing,” Shepard said with a smile, “how muchinformation you can trace from a simple phone number.”
From the brightness of the screen, Liam’s green eyes stared back at him in a photo that looked only a few months old. He was wearing an apron and smiling, his arm around a woman with long, beaded braids. Jonah was going to be sick.
“Liam Cassidy,” Shepard said, the name sounding poisonous and wrong on his tongue. “Twenty-one years old, a student at the College of DuPage. Works at Lenny’s Diner in Naperville, Illinois. That’s not too far from here, Jonah. I could have someone there within the hour, if I wanted.”
“He hasn’t done anything.” Jonah’s voice was broken from disuse when he spoke.
“Oh, there he is.” Shepard grinned, clicking the phone off and pocketing it once again. “I don’t know if that’s true. He seems to know a lot more than he should.”
“He doesn’t know about you,” Jonah promised. “I never told him the truth.”
“How can I believe you? You’ve proven to me over and over again how much of a liar you are. No. On second thought, I think I’m done giving second chances.”
Jonah’s heart was beating out of his chest.
“You, my friend, are going to follow through on this job tonight. You are going to be a good boy and make me back the money you tried to steal from me yesterday. And then you can come back here, and we can discuss how things are going to work going forward.” He leaned down, dangerously close. “Because if you step one toe out of line from now on, little Liam is going to get a bullet in the head. Is that what you want? Two bodies on your conscience?”
He watched as Shepard stood to his full height.
It was never going to end.The realization spread over him like a physical chill.
If one threat ever weakened with time, there would always be one more thing to hold over him.
There was no expiration date on Shepard’s plan to run Jonah’s life into the ground, short of finding someone new to target, and Jonah didn’t want that either. He didn’t think he would last long enough to see it happen.
Shepard could do what he wanted to him as retribution; Jonah wouldn’t allow him to wield Liam’s life as a threat. He didn’t dare show him that it would work.
He felt the moment the final thread snapped. The rest was freefall.
“You can go fuck yourself,” he heard himself say.
An eerie stillness fell over Shepard. His eyes trained on him like a heat-seeking missile. “What was that?”
With all the strength left in his body, Jonah forced himself up and onto his knees, swaying slightly on the mattress. He braced one hand against the stone wall and looked Shepard in the eyes. “Go,” he said slowly, “fuckyourself.”
He was weak enough already that the first backhand flattened him, but it didn’t matter. He had coaxed Shepard back into his space, and Jonah would fight like a cornered animal to kill him before he could ever lay a hand on Liam.
He barely recognized the fingers as his own as they scraped bloody lines down Shepard’s face. A scream—a year’s worth of anger and fear and bottled-up misery—erupted from his throat. He swung out wildly, never knowing if the hits landed before he threw the next. It all became too much to follow, just a storm-rocked ship of blood and pain and rage.
