“Let me go!” I screamed. “I’ll call the cops! He’s killed him!”
“Sir?” one of them asked.
“Let her go, right now,” came Jace’s voice.
“Are you s-”
“Right fucking now. Kendall, please, let me explain…”
The men let me go and I pushed between them in a mad dash for the doors ahead of me. I pressed the button and, mercifully, the elevator made its little beep sound straight away and the doors opened.
“Wait-”
Somebody’s phone rang as I entered the elevator and one of the security guys answered it. He listened for a moment, cursed, and then paused again.
“Sir, you need to listen to this,” said the guard.
With eyes blurred from tears, I turned to press the button for the ground floor and took my first and only look back. Jace was standing between the elevator and his security guards, looking at me with a phone pressed to his ear. My vision was too fuzzy to catch his expression, but I could see he was still holding that gun.
I slept with a murderer…
Chapter 26
Kendall
Unlike the hallway outside Jace’s door, nobody downstairs tried to stop me, despite my obvious panic. I rushed out the front doors and straight into one of the waiting taxis.
“Where to, miss?” the driver asked.
“Just go!” I did my best not to scream.
He shrugged and set off at a frustratingly calm pace.
“Hurry!” I said.
The driver looked in the mirror. “If you want me to hurry, you’re gonna have to tell me where to go.”
I was about to tell him to take me to the nearest police station, but the words caught in my throat. Could I really go there? What if Jace owned the police? What if he didn’t but they asked me why I fled the scene of a crime to go have sex with a murderer?
Worst of all, would they even believe me? Did I even believe myself? This was Jace, the man who took my virginity, who stood up for me and showed me love like I’d never dreamed of. How could the best person I knew be the worst? I needed time to get through this.
“Woodville,” I said.
“Where?”
“It’s a couple hours south-west of the city.”
“You got enough cash to pay for that kind of ride?”
“We can stop in Foxdell and I can get cash out, please just go.”
“OK, you’re the boss.”
I sat back in the seat as the driver picked up the pace a little. The faster he went, and the further we got from where I’d witnessed Jace kill Lorenzo, from where the Mafia had unleashed automatic weapons at us, the further my heart rate edged away from the red zone.
Pretty much every emotion that existed washed over me as the taxi driver listened to music in some foreign language and we passed city limits. I looked out my window at the city that had chewed me up and spat me out in ways even the people back in Woodville couldn’t have imagined.
Out to my left in the distance, I saw a huge plume of smoke as something burned. It kind of reflected what was going on inside me and was typical of the kinds of carnage I’d seen in the last day.
Every time I saw an image in my mind of Jace, even the image of him with that gun, I was surprised at how much my heart still went out to him. This was another thing on the list about love that nothing had prepared me for. I still saw everything that was good about him. But… he killed somebody, and he was so calm about it.
That’s cause it wasn’t his first…
A shiver ran down my spine.
But what happened to standing by him no matter what?
In a way, my life flashed before my eyes. All the people who had put me down over the years, all the people who didn’t think I was worth loving. And then Jace. He was like an explosion of color in the timeline of my life.
He held me up so high that I almost forgot how sharp and hard the ground was. It was the first time I dared to harbor the hope that I might be special to somebody.
I remembered in the car yesterday, when it seemed like every gun in the world must surely be firing on us, and Jace was lying on top of me. He had been ready to die defending me.
A lump formed in my throat and my eyes watered anew. I held my fist to my mouth to stifle a sob and no matter what I did, I couldn’t hold a train of thought together. It was like my brain looked over everything and pressed a ‘nope’ button, shutting off.
This was too much for me to handle. How was I supposed to explain this to my mom and dad?
“Hi Mom, hi Dad, I’m home just like you said I’d be, but guess what? There’s a murderer who’ll probably be looking for me and we can’t go to the police yet until I can explain why I left a crime scene to go fuck him. Is my room still the way I left it? What’s that you say? Nope, bareback.”