Page 91 of Break for Me

Please, don’t die.

I smiled at it, and then I watched the address pop up across the screen. I took a picture of it on my phone, and I held my breath as another set of words appeared.

I WON’T BE MAD, JERSEY BOY.

The screen was black for another second before it returned to the map that showed the tracking device.

“What’d she mean?” Trista asked quietly. “She won’t be mad?”

I raked my fingers over my face several times and tried to just breathe.

“She won’t be mad if I decide to keep you instead of trading you for her,” I explained. “She thinks I’m going to choose you.”

“Everything about that is heartbreaking.”

We were both quiet for a long time after that, lost in our own thoughts. I needed to stop somewhere to rest and to plan out what my next steps would be now that I had a location. I needed to be prepared for whatever I was walking into. That would give all three of us a better chance at walking back out of this alive and together. I was already looking on my phone for hotels between where we were and that address.

“Jersey, if you need to trade —.”

“Don’t,” I interrupted her immediately.

“Just if you don’t think we can —.”

“I. Said. Don’t.”

“Will you stop interrupting me and —.”

“No. I completed a job that our President has been trying to get done for years. Then I turned around and undid that very task in a matter of minutes. There’s no trade on the table here. They already have Memphis. She was a part of it just as much as I was. And once you and I walk into that building, they’ll have all three of us in the same place. They’ll never let us leave.”

That was apparently enough to keep her quiet through getting to the hotel, getting in the room, and even after I’d made an extra stop at the liquor store that was across the road from us. I got the computer out as quickly as I could to start looking into the address that they’d given me. That turned into an immediate headache to discover that it was just some rundown, abandoned house in the fucking mountains; some nightmare straight out of those awful Hills Have Eyes movies. After Trista watched me try to claw my own eyes out with my fingers, she got up to open the bottle of Fireball and poured a significant amount into one of the little paper cups that sat next to the coffee pot. She still didn’t say anything when she sat it on the table next to me, or when she put her hand on my cheek. I wondered if it would make her feel any better if I just told her that I didn’t know shit about comforting other people either. I didn’t expect her to do anything about it because I wouldn’t know what to do about it myself. People weren’t my strength any more than they were hers. That was the result of becoming used to being alone.

Once I was satisfied that I wasn’t going to find any other information about that house of dread, I took the little paper cup of liquor with me to stare absentmindedly out the window at Seph in the parking lot. I couldn’t stop thinking about the words Memphis had sent me. She wouldn’t be mad. We’d worked together for nearly five years. We spoke every single day in that timespan. I might not have known anything at all about her family history or how old she was, but I could predict every response she’d have to one of my nicknames. I knew what she’d tell me to do in every situation that I found myself in. I knew when she went to bed every night and what time her alarm was set for for the next morning, unless it was Monday because she refused to set alarms for Mondays. She’d said that everybody everywhere always complained about Monday mornings, so she liked to sleep through them. She made Monday her Sunday since we didn’t really have days off anyway. But she wouldn’t be mad if I simply chose to sacrifice her to keep Trista for myself. How was that even possible? Five years together and she would just understand if I picked this girl who I’d only known for a week?

Just as she crossed my mind, I felt Triss against my back and her little arms wrapped around me. Her hands crumpled something against my chest. I slipped the small, folded piece of paper from her fingers to open it and found myself smiling again at the picture of my little rocker girl with her friends and their books.

“I don’t think she’ll care that I took it for you,” she said.

No. She wouldn’t.

If she didn’t care if I came for her at all, she wouldn’t be upset about me keeping a picture of her. I turned the image over and noticed she’d written a date on the back side. It was taken nearly three years ago. She didn’t look like she could’ve been any older than a teenager when it was taken. I couldn’t get my head around how she’d ended up working with this organization in the first place. She should’ve been way too young to be able to do the kinds of things that this job required. I knew how I landed here, but I was damn near a middle-aged man by the time my life was ripped apart. Where were her parents? Had she even finished school? How the fuck could I know that she was perpetually angry about the fact that she was allergic to strawberries because she loved the taste but could never eat them, yet have no knowledge of who she really was after all this time?

“Are you okay?”

I barely even heard her question. Every muscle in my body was flexed and so tense that all of me was shaking, and her arms had tightened around me so hard that she seemed to think she could prevent whatever was about to happen from actually happening.

“I just need to get her out of there. Away from them. Away from this,” I told her. I moved away from her to sit the paper cup back down and pace around uncomfortably.

“What you need to do is sleep,” she said.

She wasn’t wrong. I only had a few hours before we’d be leaving again. I wanted to get to this house while it was still dark outside. We were disadvantaged in every way about this arrangement. The timing and the darkness were quite literally the only things I could make work in my favor.

sixty-three

TRISTA

I’d never seen someone buy an entire bottle of liquor just to drink none of it. I sat and stared at the cup, from which he hadn’t even taken a single sip, once he was asleep. For as much as getting completely trashed sounded like the best idea in the entire world right then, I couldn’t stand the taste of cinnamon. The smell of it gave my clit its own heartbeat now because of this man, but nothing about it was supposed to mix with whiskey. Ultimately, it left me wondering if he was an alcoholic in another life. I’d heard of people buying alcohol just to keep it close to make sure they were still in enough control to keep themselves from drinking it. Everything about this guy was difficult to understand. Every single thing.

I gave up trying to make sense of his oddities and climbed into the bed next to him. I stared at his back for a whole two seconds and wondered if it was weird that I wanted to be right against him. Then he rolled toward me and engulfed my entire body in his arms and I was thankful that I didn’t have to make any awkward decision about it myself. I didn’t share beds with people just to cuddle. It had quite literally never worked out that way once in my lifetime, and that was all I wanted. Apparently, it was what he needed, too. He tried to tell me that he couldn’t offer me safety or stability, and I supposed for the most part, that was true; but for this one moment tonight, I did feel safe. There was no doubt that he was dangerous and maybe even a little deranged. He seemed to get a good deal of pleasure out of hurting me, making me squirm and squeal. Even with that, somewhere along this weird as fuck week, I’d gone from wanting to murder the man to feeling like I’d probably sleep better than I ever had in my life if I just stayed in his arms.

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