in Jack Thane’s eyes. She just hadn’t know
He was a hired gun.
And now she knew.
“And number two is that you must never tell any one.” The gaze hardened, his tone dropped an octave. “If you do, number one is forfeit.”
Killer smile, indeed.
This time, she nodded right away. Emphatically.
Two minutes later, when they were once more alone, Jack peered down at Annabelle. Then he ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He closed his eyes.
His conscious mind combed through the events of the last several hours. Images and emotions criss-crossed his perception, like flashing scenes cast by a broken movie projector. Clara closed the door of the manor behind her. Reese pressed a green button on his cell phone. A massive portrait of Hamlet’s Ophelia floated in a blackness. The Colonel took out a whale-bone pipe and tamped down the tobacco. Annabelle leapt over a couch.
But running through every image, like a warping fold in the video tape, was his overwhelming fear for his daughter. It was a fear to end all fears, like a culmination of things you prepare for, try to prevent, hope never happen. You teach your child to look both ways before they cross the road. To hold someone’s hand. You teach her not to talk to strangers. To use the buddy system. To buckle her seat belt, get home before dark, not walk at night, alone.
Every day, a father faces fear. Every day, a new one presents itself as an old one takes a back seat – still there, but not as pressing as the new one. Every day, a father does his best to protect the ones he loves. He has no choice. It’s a requisite to his sanity.
And in the end, in a single moment, in an unforeseen happenstance or an act of incredible evil, all a father does becomes obsolete.
He had asked himself so many pointless, painful questions, as he’d stood there, chained to the wall in the Colonel’s hidey-hole. He’d asked, Did she get out? Did she know enough? Had he taught her well enough? Had she caught the look he’d given her? Did she understand?
Questions to kill what was left of a man’s reason. Questions more torturous than anything the Colonel’s men could have done to him.
Only time would have given him the answers he so desperately needed. And each passing second had been agony.
Jack’s gaze rested on Annabelle again.
The rest of his fear had been for her.
The minutes that he’d spent fearing that something horrible had happened to Clara and would happen to Annabelle next had been the longest, most hellish minutes of his existence.
He closed his eyes again, once more resting his face in his hands. The only thing he’d come to know for certain in the time since that fear was that he never wanted to feel that fear again. Never.
He’d made a decision. He was taking Clara back home to England and Annabelle was coming as well. He could protect them there in a way he never could here.
“Jack, I need some Excedrin.”
Jack’s eyes flew open and settled on Annabelle, who had just placed her right hand to the bridge of her nose. She pinched it there, her brow furrowed, her eyes shut tight against what must have been some pretty bad pain. “I’m getting a migraine.”
“Try a little food first,” he told her as he helped her to sit up. She winced when the movement sent more agony playing about behind her closed lids.
“No doing,” she said, coming to a comfortable position. Her head was hammering. She was a little queasy. And she felt frustrated. Just beneath her consciousness, something important slipped from her grasp, fading away with her waking awareness. “I want what all good torture victims want. Morphine. And if I can’t have that, then any pain killer will do.”
“Drink a little, then,” Jack suggested, holding out the glass of water for her.
“I always drink when I swallow pills,” she replied, giving him a pointed look and ignoring the water.
He blew out a small laugh, replacing the glass. “You’ve a very hard head.”
“Lucky for me.” Annabelle blinked against the cabin’s overhead light and then went back to rubbing the bridge of her nose and her temples, alternating between the two. She couldn’t decide which helped more. But she was positive that neither helped enough. She was also positive that Jack wasn’t going to give her any pain killers at that moment. Protocol for concussions. Still, it felt better to complain about it.
“Where are the others?” She asked as she rubbed.
Jack gestured toward the doorway and the deck beyond. “Either on deck or in the other rooms. I’ve warned them to try to stay below as much as possible.”
“Where’s Reese?”
“Bound and gagged in the ship’s hold.” A bit of an exaggeration, since the boat had no real “hold”. Reese was actually bound and gagged in a trunk in the captain’s cabin.
Annabelle digested the information. She’d woken up at one point to see Sam tying Reese up in the corner of the room, so she knew they’d brought him along. “Where are we going?” she asked then.
Jack didn’t reply. There were two answers to that question, and he just realized that he only knew one of them. Where they were going eventually – as soon as humanly possible, given the circumstances – was Britain. But where they were going right now, on the other hand, he had no idea. He’d been so concerned over Annabelle’s well-being that he’d forgotten to ask.
And their immediate destination was most likely the one that Annabelle was actually interested in. Besides, telling her about her upcoming UK trip and the eight hour flight it would require was something better left to another time and place. Like, when she was drunk, maybe. And handcuffed to a sturdy chair.
He stood up slowly, giving Annabelle a very gentle kiss on the forehead as he did so. “I’ll be back, luv. Sit tight.”
Annabelle watched him go. Her brow was furrowed. Something ate at her consciousness. There was some knowledge skirting the boundaries of her awareness, teasing her senses, slipping just out of reach like a phantom itch. Elusive.
She sighed.
She knew, on the one hand, that the events that had transpired over the last few days were more than your average human being were really meant to handle. She knew that trying to wrap her head around the realization that Max was murdered and that she’d watched Jack get tortured and that she’d suffered a concussion and that Clara and Dylan were presumed dead and then suddenly
But she also knew that she wasn’t normal. She never had been. If she’d been normal, Jack’s profession would have bothered her a lot more than it did. She would have run, screaming, from Jack Thane and everything that he represented. If she were normal, she would eat meat and drive a gas-guzzling SUV. She would go to church on Sundays, or something like that, and she wouldn’t listen to Tenacious D or ride motorcycles or write-in Scooby Doo at the polls during election time.
She wouldn’t be able to accept everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours, concussion included, and still be capable of utterly rational and coherent thought.
Luckily, she wasn’t normal. She was a “D”-loving, Scooby-Doo happy, tree-hugging, vegetarian motorcycle enthusiast who was in love with a professional killer.
Annabelle blinked.
Like figuring out what Craig Brandt had to do with MediSign before the bad guys figured it out first. She
