Page 56 of A Series of Rooms
“I don’t have it.”
There was a nearly tangible shift in the air inside the car. He heard the creak of leather on leather as Marcus turned back to look at him.
“I don’t have it,” Jonah repeated, louder, before he could ask again. When he opened his eyes, Marcus was staring at him with that same indiscernible expression Jonah knew so well.
Jonah braced for shouting, for violence, but Marcus just sighed and turned back around. He heard him rummaging for something in the glove compartment, and there was a wild, unmoored moment of thinking Marcus might be reaching for his gun. Instead, he grabbed something and extended it behind him for Jonah to take. In the dark, it took a moment to see it was a handful of fast-food napkins.
Jonah blinked at the offering, then up at the mirror where Marcus was pointedly avoiding his eyes.
“Take them.” He shook the napkins in Jonah’s direction. “Try not to bleed out on the seats.”
Unwilling to provoke him, Jonah reached out with his uninjured hand and took the offering, pressing one softly to his bottom lip and the other to his bloody palm.
As the car rolled out from the lot and onto the main streets, Jonah watched the lights from the city slowly taper off into darkness, the high-rises giving way to short brick buildings until those turned to withering houses along old back streets. Every mile, every inch that brought him closer to the house pulled Jonah further and further away from the certainty, the clarity, he’d had back at the hotel. Under thethreat of what was to come when he walked through the door, he started to question whether he had made the right choice after all.
He could have kept his head down like he’d planned, could have gone through the motions he’d done a hundred times before. Maybe it would have been over by now. Maybe Nathan was right, and Liam never would have needed to find out. Maybe Jonah could have found a way to live with that secret the same way he learned to live with everything else—tucked away in the corner of his memory where the light didn’t reach.
The thing about regret, though, was that it didn’t do a thing to erase the past. Whether he stood by his decision now or he didn’t, the damage was already done, left in a pile of bloody glass on the other side of the city.
Anxiety thrummed in his veins as they turned onto the street he knew too well. His pockets were empty of the money he was owed, but Jonah, undoubtedly, would pay.
CHAPTER 25
Liam
The week leading up to Christmas was one of the worst of Liam’s life.
Not a minute went by where Jonah did not consume his thoughts, both sleeping and awake.
Twice, he had called in sick for his shifts at the diner in favor of staying under his covers. He couldn’t fathom the idea of walking into that restaurant and laying eyes on the corner booth where he’d spent an evening bumping shoes under the table with Jonah.
When he got his credit card statement, however, he remembered he couldn’t really afford to skip any paydays, debilitating depression be damned.
His behavior raised an eyebrow from his mother, who had watched him pick up hours relentlessly for the past several months, and who knew well what Liam looked like when he was spiraling. She was worried about him, and he felt bad forit, but every time she tried to nudge him toward a conversation, he pulled a little further into himself.
The isolation weighed on him. He felt like he was living a double life, and to some extent, he was. He was navigating this dark underbelly of a world that, a few months earlier, he hadn’t even known existed, and there was no one there to share the burden of his knowledge. Of hisguilt.Even his mother, whom he trusted more than almost anyone else in the world, couldn’t know about this. If he told her everything that had happened, beyond being appalled at the danger her son had gotten involved in, she would undoubtedly tell him to go to the police.
Maybe that was exactly what Liam needed to do.
The temptation was there. Every day, he came a little bit closer to breaking. He would stand with his trembling hand on the doorknob of his bedroom, listening to the sound of utensils scraping in the kitchen, telling himself that she was right there, that he could walk out there and break the dam, let everything that beat against the walls of his chest pour out of him like it so badly wanted to. Because Liam couldn’t stand it. For as long as he lived, he would never, ever forgive himself if his negligence, hiscowardiceended up being the reason Jonah...
There was still some part of him that believed there was a way out. Even after everything Jonah told him.
“I killed someone.”He could still hear the way Jonah expelled the words, like they were an illness his body wastrying to rebuke. It wasn’t the confession of a cold-blooded killer.
There was no world in which Jonah should be held prisoner by an act of desperation he had committed while fighting for his life. Nothing he had ever done justified being blackmailed and abused. What was this man’s role in Jonah’s life that he could wield so much power? Make him so afraid that he wasn’t even willing to try and speak a word against him? Liam didn’t know. There were still so many unanswered questions, and even more unasked. He had tried to respect Jonah’s wishes, and in doing so, he was afraid that he’d wasted any chance of helping him. Now he was stuck in this miserable in-between, constantly pulled in two directions and fraying at both ends.
His performance was suffering at work, which he might have given a shit about if it was anything more pressing than delivering plates to tables, but getting screamed at by customers over a side of ranch dressing was doing no favors for his mental health.
“I want this meal taken off the bill,” a gruff middle-aged man barked at him on Friday evening, ten hours into a double shift. By that time, Liam could practically feel his eye twitching.
“Sorry,” he gritted out, long past the pleasantries of a forced smile. “I can bring you a new side.”
“No, I said I want it comped,” the man replied, speaking slowly as if Liam was too dense to comprehend it the first time. “My food will be cold by the time you get back.”
It’s a salad, dipshit, it was served cold,Liam wanted to—but very bravely did not—say.
“I’ll get my manager,” he said, then turned on his heel toward the kitchen, not before the customer could make a poorly whispered remark about incompetent waitstaff.
