“You can take some of the clothes from the dresser,” he says casually. As though he didn’t have a gun to my head ten minutes ago.
He’s giving me whiplash, and honestly, I’m too emotionally wrung out to try and decipher his motives right now. My attention moves to the dresser, stopping on a photograph of two dark-haired women, both resembling Jude and Caleb. It shouldn’t stand out to me. After all, it’s just a picture. But a picture in the room of a man as seemingly cold as Jude—it’s something that makes him innately human, and that bothers me. It’s easier to see him as a monster.
Jude crosses the room and opens the closet, taking a pistol from the top shelf, followed by one from the nightstand, then another hidden beneath the mattress. He turns to head for the door then stops, glaring at me before he snatches both lamps from the nightstand, then leaves.
A set of keys jingle against the wood before the lock clicks. The fact that all the rooms in this house have actual locks–with keys–is creepy.
I guess he’s more prepared for kidnapping than I thought.
I wait for his footfalls to fade before I finally allow every bit of the fear and anger from the last half hour rip through me. Tears pour down my face, and I let out a scream, grabbing the thing closest to me—that picture—and throwing it at the wall.
Glass shatters and the wooden frame breaks, and then a blanket of guilt falls over me. I’m pretty sure his sister is dead, and I just broke her picture. I shouldn’t feel guilty when it comes to Jude, but I’m not like him, so I do…
Clutching the towel around me, I reach for one of the drawers. I’d rather die trying to save myself, instead of just waiting for Euan to pay or Jude to snap.
I take a shirt and a pair of boxers from the dresser, then dress myself in my captor’s clothes like I’m some live-in girlfriend. I ran once, and I’ll do it again the second I get the chance. I will not give up until he puts a bullet in my head.
Jude’s woodsy scent lifts from the T-shirt as I move across his room. I hate that every time I inhale it, I’m reminded of my weakest moment.
Fuck him.
I tear through his room, searching for anything I might be able to use as a weapon. Hell, at this point I’d take a damn pencil to jab in his eye. It’s not until I rummage through the adjacent bathroom that I find the only thing Jude seems to have missed–a disposable razor hidden in the back corner of the cabinet.
Smiling, I skim a finger over the dull blade, then use the vanity's edge to snap the plastic edge off. It’s not much, but I’ll take anything I can get.
Jude
Out of all the terrible things I’ve done in my life, scaring her to the point of pissing herself is what has my conscience in a death-spiral tailspin as I descend the stairs.
Not murder.
Not arson.
Scaring her.
When her fear-filled eyes locked with mine, the guilt started to eat away at my soul like a pack of vicious piranhas, taking away entire chunks. And then she went on a rambling monologue of her life. She has a sister. She lost her mother. She’s a doctor.
She saves lives, while I take them. Jesus Christ…
I’m halfway through the foyer before I see Caleb through the window, sitting on one of the porch steps with a bag of ice to his head.
I dump the guns and lamps on the entranceway table, then step outside, swatting the gnats out of my face as I move down the steps. “So, she hit you over the head?”
“Yeah. With my lamp.” He huffs. “Can’t we just let her go? She’s not going to rat us out.”
I clasp my hands behind my head and pace the pine-strewn walkway, my mind lost in a rolling vortex of scenarios, none of which end well for her. Because no matter what, we can’t let her go. “Marney found out that her boyfriend’s Tom’s nephew. So no.”
A blank expression falls over Caleb’s face, the gravity of the situation quickly setting in. And I see it right there, the worry.
He’s worried about the girl who knocked his ass out, the girl who could possibly be working with Tom. “No,” he says. “There’s no way she’s working with Tom.”
“And since when did you become J. Edgar-fucking-Hoover, Caleb?”
His expression hardens. “I’ve been stuck in a room with her for three days. She’s just a girl, Jude.”
I want to believe that, but with shit like this, I can’t take a chance. “You sure enough to bet our lives on it?”
His face reddens as he stares at me. Not even see-the-good-in-everyone Caleb can say he’s that sure because a wrong assumption will cost us both our lives.