was the life he’d been forced into, and I didn’t think it was a stretch to guess that he’d been regretting it ever since. To think that he’d maybe even been searching for a way out—and finding that it wasn’t as easy as people believed. Because once you were a criminal, it was awfully hard to get anyone to give you a chance at a legal job.
“Well, it’s easier, that’s for sure,” he said with a laugh. “First of all, I never graduated high school, so it’s not like I’ve got an education. And this is less work, if you think about it. One job a month, maybe two, and then I can take time off. It’s safer. I’m breaking fewer laws, less frequently. That’s not a bad thing.”
“But you’re also kidnapping people,” I pointed out. “Stealing them from their homes, handing them over to strangers…”
He shot me a quick glance. “The people I turn over always get to go home,” he said quickly. “They never come to harm. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I wouldn’t turn you over if I didn’t know you were going to be okay. Your company just has to pay that money and you’ll get to go back to your little girl.”
I bit my lip, torn at that. Because I knew he thought it was the truth. Or at least, he hoped it was. But I also know that the moment he turned me over, he lost control of the situation.
And that was starting to bother me more and more. Because I felt safe with him—even if I shouldn’t have. I felt secure, somehow. The moment he let go of me, that was at an end. And he couldn’t tell me that the next guy would play by the same rules Jack was playing by, because he wouldn’t have any control over that.
“But you can’t guarantee that, can you?” I asked softly. “And I think that bothers you more than you’re letting on.”
Chapter 15
Alice
Two hours later—two hours of solid conversation later, I might add—I started seeing the signs for Reno.
And I’m not even a little bit ashamed to say that I really started panicking.
Look, I don’t want you thinking that I’d forgotten what we were doing. What my situation was, and who Jack himself was. What he’d done. What he meant to do with me at the end of the day.
But knowing that and matching it with the man I’d been driving with for the last four hours—the man who had fed me my cheeseburger before eating his own—was starting to get really tough. Because the man sitting next to me and driving this van? The kidnapper, and the one who had started all of this?
The guy he was on the inside wasn’t the guy he was playing in real life. The gentle, hidden, inside parts—the parts I’d been getting to know as we drove—didn’t match that hard exterior.
Hell, they didn’t even seem like they belonged to the same freaking person.
The more we’d talked, the more I’d come to realize that I was in a van with a man who had been so damaged as a child, so unwanted by his own parents, that he’d had to create his own version of life—and do it far too young, before he even knew what life was all about. He’d been left on his own from the age of about five, cursed with a mother who didn’t care and a father who beat him more often than anything else.
And so he’d learned to defend himself. Make of life what he could. Figure it out according to the only rules he knew then: violence and fear.
And the moment he’d been big enough to think he could handle it, he’d run.
He’d been running ever since, in one way or another. Running from one gang to the next, and then from one illegal job to the next. Now he ran from kidnapping job to kidnapping job—and rarely stayed in the same city for any amount of time. His whole story about having been in San Jose for as long as he’d said? Yeah, it was just a story. The truth was that it wasn’t safe for him to stay in the same place for long.
The truth was that as soon as he finished a job and handed the victim over to the people who had paid for them, he went to wherever his next victim was. Wherever the next contract said he should