Page 125 of Waiting For A Girl Like You
In the air? She blinked double time, making Bruce heave out a sigh. “You can’t see it, but we’re on a private airstrip. Decoys will drive this car while we fly north.”
She didn’t stop blinking, and his enormous shoulders slumped. Bruce might have served with Michael, but he was older, not by much, but enough to make it noticeable.
“Mike will be at the house,” Bruce told her as the sound of voices outside the car came closer again. “No one is going to hurtyou once we’re with him, not even Taylor. She’s a dangerous idiot, but she’s smart enough not to do anything stupid when he’s around.”
Whether it be from the blinking or the finite terror, a tear gathered in the corner of her eye. Spilling over, it landed on Bruce’s hand, and he finally lowered his gaze to meet hers. “I want you to listen to me. Mike Sinclair is a good man—one of the best. He finishes what he starts, and before he goes down, he will end the game for good. That family—your family—has a shadow hanging over it. A challenge between Destiny and the Grim Reaper. A never-ending battle for the fate of the Fairweathers. It’s all there if you’re paying attention.”
Bruce’s eyes softened a fraction. “I don’t say all that with an outsider’s perspective. I’m not some asshole who makes judgments about people over what he sees on television. Well, not totally. I watched some of the movies. I find your dad to be the most interesting. The empire and the emotional crash. The balance he’ll never know.”
The blonde woman laid a hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and the drugs in her system made Jamison think that a shimmering glow came from the touch. She began to whisper in his ear, her face completely obscured by the light.
“I bet he really did love her. Your dad. I bet he really loved your mom. I don’t think she was a homewrecker. I heard she was actually very nice,” Bruce said, his gaze returning to the activity happening outside the car. “But ol’ Grim won that round. He always wins eventually. Destiny might have saved you and those girls in the graveyard when Toby came calling, but Grim doesn’t take losing well, and honey, I’m afraid he’s going to make it hurt when you’re back on the playing table.”
The darker woman’s whispering picked up in Bruce's free ear while the blonde continued doing the same. Their lips moved in a blur, and Jamison wished she could reach out and touch one of them, if only to reassure herself that what she was seeing wasn’t a hallucination.
“And I don’t like that graveyard. I don’t know what your people did, but that place isn’t right. Never has been. Something is out there. Watching and waiting like a damn animal, ready to pounce and drag you to hell. It was there the night we tried to take you. What was that? What was that…thing?” Bruce went pale as the women’s whispers grew louder. “She didn’t deserve to be tied to that place. She needed her own home, her own family. Destiny. She needed her destiny, and he was it.”
The dark-haired woman seized Bruce by the face, squeezing his cheeks with her long, spindly fingers. She held him still as she hissed into his ear with a fevered frenzy. “No, don’t say that. We won’t let this go too far. He loves you,” Bruce said in a hushed voice, as if talking to himself. “He loves you more than any man has ever loved a woman. It’ll be over soon. I promise.”
The voices outside the car grew louder, the groups sounding like old friends as they approached the vehicle. Feeling a tingling sensation in her limbs, Jamison attempted to wiggle her fingers and nearly cried with relief when she found that she could.
“Mike has blamed himself for so long,” Bruce continued to speak to the darker woman as a sheen of sweat popped out across his brow. “Oh, sweet girl, you know what he’s going to do.”
The darker woman released Bruce’s face to slink back into her seat while the lighter one did the same, their whispers halting.
“It’s done. Grim will win the round.” Bruce swiped a hand down his face as he panted. “Death will win big, and every last one of them will pay for their sins.”
Chapter 29
He couldn’t listen to them.
The chatter. The noise. Annabeth’s crying. Ben’s rage. Rowan couldn’t listen to them. He needed to be in his own head, deciphering the information on his screen.
They’d let their guard down. Caught up in the excitement, they had let their guard down, and now they were paying the price. He should have stayed at the house to track Madison. That should’ve been his top priority, but he stupidly believed the feds could handle it for a few hours.
There would be time to hate himself later. Right now, they had to find Jamison.
“We have a visual on the van,” Klausen was telling Ben. “It’s heading west and into Louisiana.”
West.
No.
That’s not what the data said. He’d traced the call. He wasn’t wrong. Arkansas. Sinclair had been in northern Arkansas. A red herring, maybe, but Rowan trusted the information.
Setting his laptop aside, he moved to the corner of the waiting room to call Liam. “They’re saying the van is headed west.”
“Tell them about the airstrip.”
Rowan had given Jamison and the others five minutes to reach the bathroom, use it, and return. He watched them on the security feed as they crossed through the double doors. The cameras in that particularhall had been dead and not in use, so by the time he hacked into the system and activated them, it was too late.
And it was his fault.
Once the camera feed powered up to reveal Carter face down on the floor, it took less than a second for the image to register, but when it did, Rowan sounded the alarm, running as fast as he could while shouting for Liam.
After that, it was a blur of insanity. Trusting someone else would help Carter, he and Liam had searched for Jamison on the abandoned hospital floor and, in the process, caught sight of her through a long panel of exterior windows as she was being hauled into a van with three other people.
One of which was a laughing Taylor.
