I muttered a curse, shifting a pawn into his path, knowing I was sacrificing it by doing so.
“Past,” Jack grunted but I wasn’t convinced that men like us ever got the luxury of leaving the things we ran from in our past. They haunted us like ghosts with fingernails lodged deep within our souls, refusing to let go no matter how much we wanted a chance at a new life. That said, there weren’t many men who took the risk of escaping the kinds of lives we’d been given. Organisations like the one I’d been a part of, and the one Jack had clearly sworn into didn’t just let people leave. There was one way out and that was bloody and brutal. Even now I knew that eventually I’d find myself paying for the freedom I’d tried to steal while bleeding out at the feet of a Castillo one day, no matter how much time I managed to escape with in the meantime.
“You have a lot of words for a man who never speaks more than one at a time,” I said slowly, wondering what I might be able to glean from this man and what I might be able to use.
Jack said nothing, focusing on the game and only proving my point that he was no victim of a lobotomy. His mind was sharp and his moves full of a cutthroat kind of cunning. It had been a while since I’d played this game, but it was one I’d won regularly when I used to play it. I knew the rules and strategies well and yet he danced his pieces across the board, concentrating on his knights and taking down piece after piece of mine while barely taking a moment to consider his next move.
Granted, he could have spent a lot of time playing this game in the facility he’d so recently escaped from but even so, there was something about him which was very much off to me.
“This place,” I said slowly. “This house we are in. It was mine before that Irish bastardo came and stole it from me.”
Jack looked up with interest as I reached up to the shock collar which was cinched tight around my throat, trying to find some weakness in the lock that secured it for the hundredth time, but there was none. He touched his own collar, his irritation mirroring mine and a clear demand for me to go on in his expression.
“No one knows about it,” I continued. “No one at all. This place is like a scrap of gold dust among a pile of soot. And I plan to take it back from him.”
“Rook?” he questioned.
“I plan to take her from him too. She’s no more his than this house is.”
Jack considered that, his hand drifting to the board almost without care as he lifted his knight and casually moved it to lock me in checkmate, making my jaw grit as I realised I’d lost.
I knocked my king on its side in surrender, trying not to be bitter over the loss as Jack supressed a smirk.
“I’m going to kill him,” I went on, banishing the memory of Niall dragging me away from my demons when that woman had attacked me during the Eden Heights massacre, because one small act of mercy did not come close to making up for the endless days and nights he’d locked me up and tortured me in my own basement.
Slowly, Jack nodded, his fingers drifting over the collar once more as he clearly found his own motivation to end Niall’s life simply enough.
I watched as he reset the board, wondering if I might have earned myself an ally in my war against Niall O’Brien or not. It seemed, at the very least, that he wasn’t opposed to me ending our captor’s life. And if he could help me to achieve that goal then who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth?
There was nothing to say I couldn’t kill said horse once he was done helping me either. Then all I’d have to do was dispose of two bodies, clean my fucking house, and get back to the life I’d stolen for myself here with mi sol at my side and my freedom restored.
It was such a pretty dream. And I was all for making it come true.
W e flew right over a glitzy strip of lights, a street so vibrant it made my eyes nearly pop out of my skull and fall into my lap.
There was a pyramid with a beam of light cutting right up into the sky, a shiny Ferris wheel and towering hotels, all of them illuminated in white, pink, blue, green. It was a feast for my eyes and they wanted to eat up every piece. I spotted the Eiffel tower and whipped around in my seat, gasping as I looked to Niall.
“We’re in Paris?” I cried.
“Las Vegas, love.” He smirked and my heart did a dip and a spin then bounced off somewhere into my gut.
I felt lots of things about that all at once. Las Vegas was the most exciting place in the world. It was a city built on a foundation of sin and I had always, always, always wanted to visit. But on the other hand, this was the city my mom had run off to with her fancy new man Esteban. Yuck.
She’d promised we’d see each other regularly, but I hadn’t heard a peep from her since. She’d tossed me away like a mouldy potato which had recently been up a convict’s butt and I had never forgiven her for it. She was a flyaway hag, a runaway ho, and I didn’t care about her one bit. Because she had abandoned me for Esteban. Fucking Esteban of all people. The man who’d eaten the last special box of Coco Pops my dad had brought home with us from our trip to England. A snarling creature awoke in my chest, snapping off pieces of my ribs in a fit of rage over that memory.
The plane bumped as it landed suddenly and I gasped in surprise, looking to Niall.
“You’re not taking me to my mom and Esteban, are you?” I blurted. “They won’t take me back if that’s what you’re thinking. They don’t want me, Hellfire, and I don’t want them. Please don’t take me to them. They’ll put me in a box and ship me off to Peru. And I don’t know anyone in Peru. I can’t even speak Perusian – I mean, I’ll probably pick it up after a while because I’m really gifted with languages, but I hear there’s a lot of llamas in Peru and everyone knows llamas are snobs and hate everyone. Even if I can speak their language perfectly, they won’t let me into their llama clan, so I’ll be all alone again, and I just want to go home. Let me go home with you.” I was struggling with my seatbelt, trying to get it off so that I could run and find a space in the back of the plane where I could hide, but Niall got out of his seat, leaning over me and pressing his hands to my shoulders as he held me down in the chair.
“I’m not taking ya back to them, little psycho. Listen to me, I meant what I said to ya. You’re mine. Nothing’s gonna change that now, understand? Where you go, I go, and vice versa. So if ya ever end up in Peru somehow, I’ll be there too, alright? But it ain’t gonna be me who sends ya there.”
A lump rose in my throat and bobbed there like a ship on a rocky wave.
“You promise?” I whispered, stilling as I stared up at the powerful man above me making such beautiful declarations that they simply didn’t seem real. When we’d had sex, it had been such a wonderful dream to buy into it, but now reality was here and she was a blonde bimbo of a bitch, slapping me around the face repeatedly while her friends watched and laughed.
“I promise, Brooklyn,” he said roughly.
I swear every time he used my real name some broken piece inside me fixed back into place. But it wasn’t rebuilding the old me, it was a new version which I liked the feel of.
I took a slow breath, letting myself believe that dream again, even while reality’s laughter tittered in my ear. Niall unclipped my belt and drew me to my feet, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear and leaning into me.