“I guess that makes sense.”
I swipe the mascara from beneath my eyes with the clean edge of the tissue crumpled in my free hand as Jack guides the needle through the other side of the wound and pulls the thread taut. His short, dark hair is swept away from his forehead but somehow looks more disheveled than usual. A faint crease lingers between his brows as he focuses on tying the knots of the first stitch. When he glances up from where he kneels before me, something darkens in his gaze. He looks across the desk and nods toward my bottle of water.
“Drink,” Jack commands, and though my expression sours a little, I realize at that moment how thirsty I really am and I do as he says. He waits for me to finish a long sip before he pierces my skin for the second stitch, his interest flickering between the needle and my reaction. When he receives only defiant silence in reply, his brow furrows, and I can’t tell if he’s relieved or annoyed.
“Where did you learn to do this? Stitching wounds isn’t really in the practical labs for forensic anthropologists,” I ask as Jack pulls the thread through the raw edge of the cut and pierces the other side with the curved needle. He could be rough with it, or sloppy. But he’s not. He’s precise. He’s quick, but in a way that lessens the pain, not exacerbates it.
“No, I didn’t learn it in labs,” Jack replies as he keeps his focus down on my hand. “Let’s just say I didn’t have your childhood. I picked up some necessary skills along the way.”
Oh, I know all about his childhood. Or at least, I know enough to understand how he became the killer he is now. I think about that in silence as he ties the knots of the stitch, looping the black thread around the needle puller and closing the severed skin tight. He takes a fresh tissue and wipes the blood away with gentle strokes.
“Dreams?” Jack asks when the silence seems to stretch too long, even for him. His voice is deep and quiet. It’s like shadows in a pine forest, somewhere safe to hide beneath the boughs. I tilt my head as I watch him, though I already know he won’t meet my eyes. “Nightmares?” he adds when I don’t respond.
Jack starts the third stitch in a mangled section of my wound. Pain slides down my throat as I swallow my surprise at his unexpected interest in me. I try to hold on to all the things he’s done over the past three years to make me feel inferior. Unwanted. But when he holds my sticky, stained hand in his cool, steady one and he stitches me back together, I find it hard to recall all but the very worst moments with him. And I find I don’t want to.
“Glass breaking,” I say, my voice little more than a whisper. Jack says nothing, just continues drawing the thread through the tiny hole he’s made in my flesh. “Red blinking lights. The smell of a hospital. Hammers. I really hate hammers. Cream-colored carpet. That one is inconvenient. It seems like such a simple thing. It’s so common you’d think I’d become desensitized, but it’s one of the worst…for me…”
The motion of Jack’s hand slows to a stop and he meets my eyes. It feels like the whole world could crumble away and we would still be stitched together with an invisible thread, one hewn from secrets shared, from vulnerability, from the things we fear will weaken us unless we hold on, until the moment we let them go. And I know Jack could take these secrets of mine and forge them into the deadliest blade to cut me down. But the way he leans back just a little, the way his gaze drifts over my features with a crease between his brows, I know he won’t.
“The lives you’ve taken, do they ever bother you?” he finally asks, his eyes latching on to mine.
“You mean, in this way? Where the past infiltrates the present?” Jack gives a single nod and I shake my head. “Never. I guess because the power is in my grasp. The control is mine. And the things that happened to me, maybe I’ll keep them from happening to someone else. I feel… I feel many things about the lives I take. But never regret. You?”
“No,” he says, and it’s a long moment before he drops his attention back to my wound. “I can’t feel regret, Kyrie.”
We say nothing more to one another as Jack finishes my stitches, twelve in total, dousing the cut with another splash of iodine before he bandages my hand. When he’s done, he leans back, his attention shifting to my shirt. I look down and notice for the first time a smear of blood across the champagne silk right above where my scars lay hidden.
“I guess this one is destined for the trash,” I say with a sigh as I take in the speckled dots and long slashes of blood and marks of drying sweat. When I look up, Jack’s focus is on the window of my office that looks toward the labs. A muscle tics in his jaw as he frowns at Brad’s workspace. We both know Brad keeps a few changes of clothes there for the days when he cycles into work.
“Wait here,” Jack says, and I watch him rise and walk away.
But the lights don’t turn on in Brad’s lab. No lights turn on at all, in fact. It’s just the dim emergency signs in the hallway, casting dark shadows beyond my door. And a few silent minutes later, Jack emerges from their depths, a bag of ice in one hand, a folded black shirt held aloft on his other palm. One of his shirts.
“Try not to shred it, would you? I like that one,” Jack says as he nods to the shirt he lays on my desk. He bends to kneel before me once more, checking the bandage one final time before he places the ice against my hand.
“I won’t shred it. No promises I won’t bury someone in it though. If you’d like to leave your business card in the front pocket, that would be most convenient.”
I give Jack a faint smile that he meets with a dark look, but he’s not fast enough to hide his grin when he glances away toward the door. When he finally meets my eyes, the levity in both our faces fades away, until we’re simply watching another.
Jack reaches forward. His thumb brushes my cheek in a caress as light as a whisper across my skin. Those slate gray eyes follow the movement of his hand as it passes toward my lips before it drifts away.
And time is yet again so cruel, because Jack’s touch is gone before I can sear it into memory, before I can be sure it was even real.
I watch as Jack strides away. But I call to him before he reaches the door.
“Jack.”
He stops, his head bent. It angles toward the sound of my voice, but he doesn’t turn around.
“Thank you.”
He nods once, but he doesn’t move, as though he’s torn with the direction he should take. One of his hands folds into a fist and squeezes. It feels like it chokes my heart in its grip. And I know there’s one thing I can give him in return, a repayment. Something I know he would want.
“Thunderdome. This doesn’t change anything. As soon as you leave my office, it’s back on.”
The tension leaves Jack’s fist. I can almost see it loosening from his shoulders, spiriting away like gas.
Jack nods once more, and then he’s gone.
I leave him enough time to disappear from the building, and then I clean up the mess of glass and blood before I go home.
When I arrive at my office on Monday morning, a replacement for my broken Brentwood award waits on my desk.
There’s no card, no note.
But this one is made of brass.
OceanofPDF.com
TEN
OceanofPDF.com
COLD KISS
OceanofPDF.com
JACK
Had I known how pleasant the department would be without Brad, I’d have gotten rid of him a while ago.
Gossip floats through the air Thursday morning, the rumor mill still churning with news of an arrested coworker. Not only could Brad be implicated in several disappearances around the trinity college towns, but also murder. Arson might be tacked on to his charges too, since investigating authorities are speculating that Brad set fire to his home in order to destroy evidence of bodily remains.
