At least, that was what I kept telling myself.
I focused on what they were saying, trying to work out if they were going to leave. I needed them out of there – I wanted to put all of this behind me, and I couldn’t do it with them standing right there in front of me. How many rooms had they crashed into? Or had this been the first one, some good intel taking them right where they needed to be?
I could feel the coldness of the gun pressing against me through the pillow, and I wished I could hold it right now, point it at them until they got the message and left me alone. I needed to play at being foolish, though, like I had no idea what anyone would have wanted with someone like me. As far as they knew, I was just some random woman who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they would forget I had even existed as soon as they walked out the door.
“Call him, tell him we can’t find Dean,” one of the men replied. They were making calls from my room now? I swear, if I got charged for the long-distance call when I tried to check-out, I was going to be pissed as all hell.
One of them pulled out a phone and dialed a number, and I listened in to what I could – someone answered quickly, and they sounded pissed. I furrowed my brow. I was pretty sure I knew that voice, though I wasn’t sure from where. It must have been a coincidence – the only reason I was in on any of this, after all, was because I had made the stupid choice to help someone in the middle of a crisis. I had no other connection to any of this shit, and I needed to keep that in mind.
“He’s not here,” the man told his boss.
“What the hell are you talking about?” the head of the operation exploded back at him. Even though it wasn’t aimed at me, I still found myself recoiling on the bed. I’d dealt with enough shitty bosses to know that was bad news. And, whether they ran a shitty dive bar or an entire criminal operation, they were all the same.
“He wasn’t in the room,” he continued, doing his best to keep his voice steady, though I could tell he was struggling. I didn’t blame him. He had been running around the whole country trying to find Dean, and now he was getting chewed out by the man who paid his bills – I would have been pissed, too.
“Anyone there?”
“Just this girl.”
“She still there with you?”
The man glanced over his shoulder at me, as though double-checking I hadn’t made a break for it. I quickly painted on an expression of cowering terror, biting my lip in a pantomime of fear.
“Yeah, she’s still here.”
“Let me see her.”
I tensed. I didn’t want to be on this guy’s radar. I wanted this whole thing to be over, but it looked as though I wasn’t going to get so lucky. And there was a nagging voice at the back of my mind, one that warned me about my recognition of this guy and the way he spoke – I knew it wasn’t good news. And I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere close to him.
The man spun the phone around to face me, letting his boss get a look at me. And as soon as I saw who was waiting on the other side of the camera, my heart dropped.
Jacob. The man I’d left sleeping back in that New York hotel. And one of the many men I’d hoped I would never see again as long as I lived.