Page 33 of Break for Me

Still didn’t mean they weren’t fuck buddies.

I could feel my face heating up all over again at the thought. My God.

“And how did you know them?” He asked. “What’d you do to Texas?”

“How many of you have been from the same…company? Group? Whatever you’re called,” I asked thinking back through the years about the people who’d tried to catch me. I couldn’t remember any of them behaving the way that Jersey and Memphis did. I didn’t get to listen in on their conversations, they didn’t answer questions, or even talk at all for the most part. Some used gadgets and electronics I didn’t recognize, but nothing like these two utilized.

twenty-five

JERSEY

“Trista,” I tried again. “What did you do? How’d you get away from him?”

She looked at me in silence again, thinking hard about what she wanted to say. I fucking laughed.

“Can’t tell me because you plan on trying it on me too later?” I asked.

“He drugged me with something,” she said, and looked down into her own lap.

I don’t know why that surprised me. I wasn’t familiar with the methods of any of the other Executioners, but even I had to admit that the unconscious jobs progressed way easier than any other kind. I just preferred old school methods of rendering people unconscious. It made sense that some of the others wouldn’t. The world was always evolving, even the messed up parts of it like ours. But the way that she’d said it made something unpleasant tingle to life inside me.

“And?” I asked.

I realized about a second too late that I probably sounded like a colossal d-bag for asking it that way when a woman had just admitted to being drugged by someone she didn’t know. Her whole body seemed to flinch at that one little word like a bee had stung her.

“What happened, Fancy Face?” I tried again. I didn’t spend much time around other people in civilized settings. Holding a regular conversation with me was probably ridiculously taxing on other humans.

“He tried to keep me drugged,” she said. “Every time I woke up, I was already being injected with something. Like he’d timed it perfectly down to a matter of seconds each time. I don’t remember much of anything, really.”

“And he missed the timing once?” I asked.

“I don’t really know. I don’t know if he got the dose wrong or if he was late. I woke up. I had time to really wake up. And he didn’t seem to have any idea that it went that way. I got my hands on his little prepped syringes and used two of them on him, crashed his car, dragged his big ass out of the seat, stripped him, stole a bunch of his shit, and left him in the middle of the road.”

What in the actual fuck? Who was this teeny tiny Rambo?

“I thought I killed him,” she said and swallowed hard.

One piece of that story stood out much more in my mind than the others though.

“Why did you leave him naked?” I asked. Her gaze shifted from her lap to the window at that question just to be able to look further away from me. I was nearly certain of her answer by then, but something in me wanted to know how I needed to handle things if we were to run into that team again.

“Why, Triss? Why did he have to be naked?”

She shocked the hell out of me when she looked straight at me.

“Because that’s how I woke up.”

My silence made her noticeably uncomfortable, but hell if I knew how I was supposed to respond to that. We were all shitty people. And shitty people did shitty things to each other at just about every opportunity. She was playing a dangerous game with dangerous people. So yeah, she was in danger. She wasn’t in any less danger with me either. I imagine we both knew that. I had plenty of my own fucked up thoughts about her and I’d already lost count of how many times I’d threatened her. I wasn’t above hurting her if that was what it would take to get her back to the drop point.

And for whatever it said about my own fucked up morality, I was more than prepared to abandon the no murder rule if I encountered Texas again. At that moment, I even felt like Chicago landed in the same territory. It didn’t really make me any better than either of them. I wouldn’t be balancing anybody else’s shitty deed with a good one. I’d be adding another set of murders to my already lengthy list. I didn’t even know for sure what might have been done to Trista while she wasn’t awake. But I was fairly certain that the ring of hell reserved for people who drugged women to hurt them while they were unconscious was a little closer to the worst part of the inferno than whichever ring I’d find myself in one day. It was the same hell we’d all be in eventually, just for different reasons.

My frustration with the whole thing had me questioning whether I even really wanted to place the tracker on a separate vehicle when I pulled into the parking lot of a truck stop. Some piece of me thought I might just stick the little fucker in my own pocket to sit here and wait. But the risk of things not working out in my favor just because it would’ve been poorly planned kept my brain in charge. All of that meant the risk of losing this job and even losing Memphis to whatever was supposed to happen when teams were removed. I parked right beside a giant Mack truck and stepped out of Seph just long enough to place the little tracker in one of the front wheel wells before I was back in the car and on our way again.

We made it all the way to the hotel that Memphis had reserved for us just before the Illinois state line without another word spoken between the two of us. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but I was entirely certain that we were mad at each other and fighting about something. Most likely about what I’d said, or hadn’t said. Maybe the tone in which I’d said it, or the tone in which I’d stayed silent. I imagined this was how old married couples felt at the end of the day. Spent way too much time in the presence of one person and just the way that they breathed rubbed all of your senses the wrong way. I wasn’t much of a drinker these days but I definitely took notice of the lonely bar that sat adjacent to the hotel we were staying in and I was very much considering stopping in there. If I hadn’t been exhausted to the point of nearly falling asleep while standing, I probably would’ve done it. I unlocked Trista’s door and went to the trunk of the car to wait, but she stopped dead to stare at me from where she stood.

“I’m not getting in there again, Jersey.”

I sighed so hard that I wondered if Memphis could hear me all the way in Tennessee.

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