by B. J Daniels
The compliment warmed her far too much. Much more so than when the girls gave it to her. Then it felt like a weight, a responsibility, but when Jaime said it, it sounded like an asset.
“It’s not exactly brave to survive a kidnapping. You don’t get much of a choice.” No, choice was not something she had any of.
“There is always a choice. And the ones you’ve made have made this possible, Gabby. The things you remember, the theories you’ve come up with... You’re making this all the more possible. I know you don’t believe in endings, or maybe you can’t see the possibility of them, but I am going to end this. One way or another, we will end him.”
We. It was that final straw, a thing she couldn’t fight. To be a “we” after so long of feeling like an I. Like the only one who could do something or be something or fight something.
“I believe you,” she whispered. Too much. She shouldn’t feel it, and she shouldn’t say it. She should feel none of the things washing through her at the way his face changed over her saying she believed him.
She shouldn’t want to kiss this man she’d known for two days. She shouldn’t want to feel what it would be like for him to kiss her for real. Without weapons and fake identities between them.
But there was something kind of beautiful about being a kidnap victim in this case. That she had no life to ruin, no self to endanger. Nothing to lose, really. There was only her.
What choices did she have? Jaime thought she had a choice, but he was wrong. She was nothing here. A ghost at best. What she did or didn’t do didn’t truly matter.
Even now, with The Stallion after Natalie, there was nothing she could do except hope and pray the Texas Ranger with her was a smart man, and a good man, and would protect Natalie the way Jaime was protecting Gabby right now.
Because no matter that he shouldn’t, she knew that was the decision he’d made. He would protect her above himself.
Tentatively she touched her fingertips to the vee of his chest between the straps of guns. She could feel underneath her fingertips the heavy beating of his heart. A little fast, as though he had the same kinds of swirling emotions inside him that she had inside her. She glanced up at him through her lashes, trying to read the expression on his face. A face she’d memorized. A face she thought she would always remember now.
There was enough of a height difference that she would have to pull him down to meet her mouth.
It was such an absurd thought, the idea of wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling his lush mouth to hers. She smiled a little at the insanity of her brain. And he smiled back.
“Thank you for that,” he said.
She had lost the thread of the conversation and had no idea what he was thanking her for. All she could think about was the fact he was stepping away from her. Letting her shoulders go and making enough distance that her fingers fell from his chest.
“I should let you sleep,” he said, backing slowly away and toward the door.
Gabby should leave it at that. She should let him go and she should sleep. But instead she shook her head.
“Please don’t go. Stay.”
* * *
It was wrong. It would be wrong to stay. It would be wrong to let her touch him. It would be wrong to let her belief in him change anything. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was doing his duty. His duty included protecting her, not...
“There are things I could tell you,” Gabby offered, for the first time in all their minutes together seeming nervous without fear behind it. “More things to help with making sure we can end this.”
It didn’t escape him the way she halted over the word “end.” Like she still didn’t quite believe a life outside these walls could exist, but she was trying to believe in one. For him? For herself? He had no idea.
He only knew that everything he should do was tangled up in things he shouldn’t. Right and wrong didn’t always make sense anymore, and it would take nothing at all for him to lose sight of the fact that anything more than a business partnership with her was a gross dereliction of duty. It was taking advantage of a woman who had already been taken so much advantage of.
But she wanted him to stay. She wanted him to stay. Not the other way around.
“I was just thinking before you got here that if I could tell you where the holes were that we dug two years ago, you might be able to connect it all together. If The Stallion does go in a few days, you’d be able to dig it up or something, and... Maybe that would be... Surely finding a body would be enough. Your superiors would want to press charges at that point, wouldn’t they?”
The way she cavalierly talked about digging holes for bodies scraped him raw. It had always been hard to accept that there were people in the world who could hurt other people in such cruel and unusual ways. He’d always had a hard time reconciling the world as he wanted it—with law and order and good people—to the world that was with people who broke those laws and that order and had no good intentions whatsoever.
He didn’t know what to do with the kinds of feelings that twisted inside him when he knew that nothing should have ever happened to her. She had been a normal girl, picking her father up from work, and she’d been kidnapped, measured and emotionally tortured into this bizarre world of being hidden away. Not touched, but put to work digging graves and hiding drugs.
“Don’t you think?” she repeated, stepping closer to him.
She reached out to touch him and he sidestepped. He was too afraid if she touched him again, all of the certainty inside him would simply disappear and he would do something he would come to deeply regret. Something that would go against everything he’d been taught and everything he believed.
He was there to protect her, and that meant any deeper connection—physical or otherwise—was not ethical. It was screwing with a victim, and he wouldn’t allow himself to fall that low. He had to keep a dispassionate consideration for her own good, not develop a passionate one.
“It’s possible that evidence would be sufficient,” he finally managed to say, his voice sounding raw. “But even if The Stallion goes to another compound, Layne and Wallace will still be here. Me doing any kind of digging is going to be hard to explain.”
“Not if you told them that The Stallion ordered you to do it. He stays away for three months. So you’d have time before they’d tell him, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know how they communicate with him when The Stallion isn’t here. I’m sure there’d be a way for them to keep tabs on me, and we both know that’s exactly what Layne will be doing whether he’s supposed to be or not.”
“What about Wallace?” Gabby demanded.
Jaime scratched a hand through his hair. “I don’t think Wallace is the brightest, but he’s the most loyal. Layne is out to get me. Wallace will do whatever it takes to protect The Stallion. Either way, I don’t think I have much hope of getting anything past them. At least, not anything tangible like digging.”
Noticing her shoulders slump, he hurried on.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not useful information. Maybe we can’t use it right this second to shut this whole thing down, but every last shred of evidence we have when we finally get to that point is another nail in The Stallion’s coffin. Men like him—powerful, wealthy men with connections... They’re not easy to take down. We need it all. So it’s still important.”
“Right. Well. What else could I tell you that would help?” she asked hopefully.
A million things, probably, but he thought distance might do them both a bit of good. Too close, too alone, too much...bed taking up a portion of the room. “Don’t you want to sleep?” Because he wanted to convince himself sleep was why he was thinking about beds.
She looked at him curiously. “I haven’t had much to do in eight years except sleep. Day in and day out.”
“Right, but...” He struggled to find a rebut
tal and failed.
The curious look on her face didn’t disappear and he couldn’t exactly analyze why he suddenly felt bizarrely nervous. He’d been prepared for a lot of things as an undercover FBI agent, but not what to do with nerves over a woman.
A woman he’d known for all of two days. Who knew his secret now, and was thus her own dangerous weapon, but even in his most suspicious mode, he couldn’t believe she’d turn him in. They were each other’s best hope.
“Is it hard to switch back and forth?” she asked earnestly.
“Switch back and forth?” He’d been so lost in his own thoughts he was having a hard time following hers.
“Between the real you and this character you have to play?”
“Are you sure they’re so different?” He’d tried to say it somewhat sarcastically, or maybe even challengingly, but the minute it came out of his mouth, he knew what he really wanted to hear was that she could tell the difference. That she absolutely knew he was two separate people. Because if she could see it, if this stranger could see it, then maybe it was true. Maybe he really hadn’t turned into someone else altogether.
“I’ve been nothing but Rodriguez for two years. You’re the only one who knows any different. I don’t know if it’s easy. I only know that... This is the first time I’ve had to do it.”
She stepped toward him again and he should sidestep again. He knew he should. Everything about Gabby called to him on a deep cellular level, though, and he didn’t know how to keep fighting that call. There was only so much fighting a man could do.
She brushed her fingertips across his chest again. “Do you always wear these?”
Jaime looked down at the weapons strapped to his chest. “I try to. Not a lot of trustworthy men around.”
Her fingertips traced the leather strap, which was strangely intimate considering the fact he never let anyone touch his weapons. It was a part of the persona he’d created. Slightly paranoid, always armed and always dangerous. No one touched his weapons.
Yet, he was letting her do just that. Touching them in ways she couldn’t begin to understand he was touched.
“You could take them off in here.” She looked up at him through the long spikes of her eyelashes.
It was tempting enough to lose his breath for a moment. “Wouldn’t be smart,” he rasped, surprised how visceral the reaction was to the thought of not being strapped to the hilt with guns and ammo. What would that feel like? He’d forgotten.
“Right. Of course not.” She offered him a smile, something he supposed was an attempt at comfort, and that, too, was out of the ordinary. Something he didn’t remember.
“I have to go.”
“Why?”
He should lie. Tell her he had important henchman duties to see to, but the truth came out instead. “I can’t stay in my own skin too long. It’s too hard to go back otherwise.”
Then she did the most incomprehensible thing of all. She rolled up on her tiptoes and brushed her lips across his cheek. His cheek. Soft and sweet. A soothing gesture. She came back down to be flat-footed and gave him a perilous smile.
“Then you should go. Good night, Jaime.”
That, he knew, to be a challenge. He should correct her. Tell her that she absolutely had to call him Rodriguez. Lecture her until she wished he’d never come into her room.
Instead he returned her smile and said, “Good night, Gabby,” before he left.
Chapter 8
Gabby didn’t know the last time she’d felt quite so light. Probably never here. It was probably warped.
Maybe if Jaime had showed up in her first year, it wouldn’t be quite so easy to fall into comfort or friendship or even pseudo-flirting. Maybe there would have been enough of the real world and non-ghost Gabby to keep her distance or to keep her head straight.
But she had been here eight years, and all of those things before ceased to exist. All she had was these past eight years, and they had been dark and dreary and horrible. It was nice to have something to feel light about.
It didn’t mean she wasn’t worried about Natalie. It didn’t mean she was happy to be kidnapped. It didn’t mean a lot of things, but it did give her the opportunity to feel somewhat relaxed. To breathe. To smile as she thought of Jaime’s bristled cheek under her mouth.
She made breakfast for the girls, which she did every Sunday. Even after she’d stopped counting the days, she made sure to know what days were Sundays so she could do this for them. Give them something, if not to look forward to, something that felt like this was home and not just prison.
She didn’t know if any of them still believed in home. She didn’t. This was a prison no matter what, but sometimes it was nice to feel like it wasn’t.
“We’ve been talking,” Alyssa announced with no preamble, which was her usual way of broaching a subject. She had only been here for two years and one of the illuminating things about being imprisoned with other people was the realization that victims could be good and bad people themselves.
Alyssa was a bit of a jerk. Had been from the first moment, continued to be these two years later. She was too blunt and always abrasive, never kind to the softer girls. In real life, Gabby thought she might have ended up punching the woman in the nose.
But this wasn’t real life.
“What about?” Gabby asked pleasantly, as if she cared.
“Rodriguez and his interest in you.”
That certainly caught her off guard, but she feigned interest in her breakfast. “Interest?”
“He’s traipsing in and out of your room at all hours.”
Gabby slowly turned to face the trio of women in the exact same situation as her. They should be friends and yet all she felt like was an irritable babysitter. “Are you watching me, Alyssa?” Gabby asked, not bothering to soften the threat in her voice.
She wouldn’t let anyone figure out what was going on, mostly because she didn’t think the girls could hack it, but also because she didn’t trust any of them. Perhaps same circumstances should have made them something like sisters, but when you were struck by senseless tragedy it was damn hard to remember to be empathetic toward anyone else.
“I’ve been watching him,” Alyssa said with a sniff. “Are you sleeping with him?”
Gabby blinked. She couldn’t tell if it was jealousy or fear or what that sparked Alyssa’s interest. She only knew she was tired. Tired of navigating a world that didn’t make any sense, and yet she barely remembered one that did.
She sighed. “The Stallion has gifted me to Rodriguez. I’m supposed to do whatever he wants.” She almost smiled thinking about how surprised The Stallion would be to discover what Jaime really wanted.
Alyssa’s eyes narrowed at the information but Jasmine gasped in horror and Tabitha looked frightened.
“Why you?” Alyssa demanded.
“I’m sorry, did you want to be offered up as payment for a job well done to any bad guy who walks through?” Gabby snapped.
Alyssa fidgeted, her expression losing a degree of its hostility. “Will it get you out?”
Gabby didn’t know what to say. What little pieces of her heart that were left cracked hard for Alyssa thinking there was any possible way of getting out. And then there was the very fact that if anyone was ever going to get them out, it would be Jaime.
But not like Alyssa meant. “No,” Gabby replied flatly. “Nothing we do for them gets us anything. We’re things to them, at best. Certainly not people.”
“What do we do then?” Jasmine asked, her voice wobbly and close to tears.
“We wait for him to die,” Tabitha said morosely, lowering herself to a seat.
Jasmine sniffled and sat next to Tabitha, but Alyssa still stood, staring at the girls and then at Gabby. “Maybe we hurry that along.”
Gabby’s eyebrows winged up. It wasn’t that she’d never wondered
what it might take to kill The Stallion and escape on her own. It was just... She never thought the other women would have the same thoughts.
But Alyssa’s face was grim and impassive, and the other girls were contemplatively silent.
“There’s four of them, though,” Tabitha offered in a whisper, as though they were plotting and not merely...thinking aloud.
“And four of us,” Gabby murmured. A few days ago she would have shut this conversation down. She would have reminded them all that there was no hope and they might as well make the best of their fates.
She would have been wrong. Wrong to squash their hope, and their fight, like she’d been wrong to squash her own.
Jaime had brought it back, had reminded her that life did in fact exist outside these walls. Natalie, on the run. Blue skies. Freedom.
A dangerous kind of hope built in her chest. An aching, desperate need for that freedom she’d tried to forget existed. Even as Jaime had talked of ends and bringing him down, she had tried to fight this feeling away.
But it was all his fault she’d lost the reserves, because he’d appeared out of nowhere and trusted her in his mission. He’d somehow crashed into her world and opened her up to life again, not just existence.
“How would we do it?” Tabitha asked, her eyes darting around the kitchen nervously.
Alyssa eyed Gabby still. “Rodriguez wears a lot of guns, and if you are a gift, it means he gets awfully close to you.”
“I couldn’t steal his gun without him noticing.”
Alyssa shrugged easily. “That doesn’t mean you couldn’t get it and shoot before he had a chance to notice.”
The three women looked at her expectantly and she wondered if they hadn’t all gone a little crazy. “Or, he stops me and shoots me first.”
Alyssa raised a delicate shoulder. “Maybe it’d be worth the risk.”
“Then you risk it,” Jasmine said, surprising Gabby by doing a little standing up for her. “It was your idea, after all.”
This time Alyssa smirked. “But Gabby is the one with access to his guns.”
