Page 144 of Waiting For A Girl Like You
“Are you…” Jamison didn’t exactly care, but reflex had her asking anyway, “okay?”
“Sometimes I see her.”
Oh, shit. The ice already seizing her internal organs crystallized into a hard freeze, stopping her heart. Not only was Michael Sinclair a raging terrorist who was currently holding her hostage, but he also had some sort of misfiring happening in his brain.
“Do you see her now?” she asked cautiously.
He blinked a few times, the moisture gathering in his eyes receding. “Not anymore.”
“Do you see Cecilia often?” She kept her voice soft, trying to find her inner Bernie. “Does she talk to you?”
“Yeah.” Michael went to one of the bedside tables. “Give me a sec.”
He rummaged through a drawer, pulling out a prescription bottle to pop two pills into his mouth before returning to the table to gulp them down with his water. “Finish eating.”
Taking a bite of her sandwich, she chewed slowly. With food in her system, she could stay more alert, but the nausea was still right there, riding her stomach as it threatened to revolt.
“You’re worried Zanmi might try something with Kris,” she said. “But what about Claudia and Emily? Shouldn’t you be worried about them, too?”
“I’d be more worried about Damon than his sisters,” Michael replied before swiping up his own sandwich. “He’s got all those sickos in heat.”
Michael clearly hated Zanmi. He hated Taylor. Hated Toby. And yet, here he was.
It didn’t add up.
Jamison studied the man across from her. “Why are you doing this?”
Chewing his sandwich, Michael Sinclair kept his eyes averted. “Cecilia and I had a fight before my last deployment. It was time to start our life together, and I told her she had to cut ties with Toby and Taylor. I’d been working hard to transition her out of that relationship. It was working, with Toby only showing up now and then.”
“Transitioning her out of a relationship? So before that, you were just sitting back while your girlfriend’s brother was torturing and murdering women?”
Michael's gaze snapped to her face. “Our fight was about Toby. He had killed those girls in Missouri, and we had agreed that she wouldn’t get involved, but he convinced her to help. Then he went after her student. Her fucking student, and yet she still wouldn’t cut ties with him, too afraid of what he would do. By then, he was planning to move back to Hollingsdale and had planted Taylor pretty deep at Fairweather.”
She almost asked why he hadn’t just gone to the police, but the answer was obvious. If he had, CeCe would have been arrested. Locked away and left to rot.
But she would’ve still been alive.
“Why didn’t you just kill him?” Giving up on her food, she was ready to ask the big questions. Her emotional and physical state couldn’t get much worse, so she figured, why not go for the gold? “You were a soldier. A hero. Heroes don’t let the bad guys win.”
Michael found her reasoning funny. “Bad guys always win, Jamison. War is not comprised of good versus evil because they’re all evil. It’s just one monster battling another for supremacy.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s still true. And Toby?” He gave a humorless laugh. “Toby’s nothing new, nor even the worst monster I’ve come across.”
She tilted her head to the side, noting how his pupils dilated. The pills he’d taken were for pain, and likely why he was willing to talk. “Is that why you bombed those buildings?”
“All my targets deserved what they got.” Michael sobered, and he lifted his shirt, showing the tattooed names of the children who died. Right over his heart, just as he said. “Except them. I carry them here. Like I carry Cecilia. The innocent victims of violent men.”
Now or never, she chose to use his statement as an opening. “Cecilia killed herself. She wasn’t a victim. She killed herself. She ate that manchineel willingly.”
The entire atmosphere went still. There was no air, no sound, nothing but the staccato of her heart as it hammered with the knowledge that Michael Sinclair was about to kill her. The fire in him—the absolute hate and pain he carried—shone through, etched in every line on his face and tightening muscle of his body.
Michael tilted his head, observing her as if she were the prey and he the predator. “As I previously stated, Cecilia and I got into a fight the night before I deployed. I told her we couldn’t move forward with our lives if she were still involved with Toby. She got upset and said it was over. She chose you and your family—a family that abandoned her—over me. It cut deep, so I left and slept my last night stateside at Bruce’s place before flying out a few hours later.”
“What does that—”
“I didn’t say goodbye. On Christmas.Fucking Christmas. It was her favorite holiday. She never got to really celebrate it growing up, so I always made it special for her. And then I left. I ruined it. I ruined her.” His massive chest pumped rapidly with a mixture of loss and desperation to be understood. “I got on that plane thinking we’d work it out. But Toby beat me to her. He showed up at our place and tried one more time to pull her back. She refused and said she wanted to wait for me, so he drugged her. He drugged her and dragged her back to Florida. That’s what they were doing on that inlet across from Haven House. He was trying to show her their old home, thinking it would convince her to return.”
