Page 8 of Jayson
4
JAYSON
Fuck! Fuck fuck fuckity fuck!If Ghost doesn’t kill me, Mason probably will.
I don’t know how I managed to fuck this up so much, but it’s not like I had any choice. I wasn’t about to kill the girl, regardless of what she saw. Despite who her father was. So I took her instead, and now I’m second guessing that decision, because there’s going to be hell to pay once the sun is up and shit gets real.
Ghost did a number on her.
Dude didn’t have to lay a hand on her. He grilled her with that dead-eyed precision he’s perfected. Spoke low, sharp. Sliced her open without raising his voice. Just questions—too many, too fast—and that stare like a scalpel carving through flesh and lies until she broke.
Keira Bishop.
Of course.
The good mayor’s daughter. The golden girl of City Hall. Soft-spoken. Untouchable. The kind of name that headlines would trip over themselves to feature.
She wasn’t supposed to be home. She wasn’t supposed to be anywherenearthat house.
She was supposed to be away at university—drinking overpriced coffee, bitching about midterms, living the kind of life people like me don’t have anything to do with.
So what the fuck was she doing there? Why now? Why tonight? It doesn’t add up. None of it does. Her presence raises more questions than it answers.
I drag a hand down my face, the weight of it all settling like lead in my bones. My ribs ache from the tension. My head’s splitting from the possibilities.
She shouldn’t exist in this equation, because she was never meant to be there. But now she’s the variable everything hinges on.
I didn't just take a girl. I took Mayor Bishop’s daughter, for fuck’s sake.
And that means every cop, every suit, every fuckingvulturein the city is going to start circling the moment they figure out she’s missing.
Jesus fucking Christ, what have I done?
I drop Ghost off at his place and head to the one place I know I can go and sort my head out. The one place I know it’s safe. The drive takes longer than it should, but it’s so dark and it’s been so long, I took a couple of wrong turns.
The tires crunch over gravel roads swallowed by pine and fog, the car slicing through the damp hush of the forest like a shadow that doesn’t belong. The girl hasn’t said a word since the door closed behind her. I don’t blame her. Ghost’s outburst shook her. It shook me too, though I’d rather chew glass than admit that out loud.
She sits curled against the door, spine pressed tight to the leather, eyes locked on the trees flashing past the window like they might offer her an escape. They won’t. This far out, thereare no neighbors. No cell signal. No help. Only the ghosts of bygone eras.
The mansion rises up from the trees like it was carved from the forest itself—gray stone, towering windows, and an iron gate that hasn’t groaned open for me in a decade. But she kept it. My grandmother. She kept it like she kept everything else that belonged to me. Waiting.
I kill the engine. Cold air pours in the second I shove the door open. The girl sits statue-still beside me, hands folded in her lap like a girl waiting for Mass to start. There’s dirt on her sleeve from when she fell to the ground back at her house. I should cuff her before she bolts.
I blink, and the passenger seat is empty.
Shit.
She’s a blur of red flannel and terror, sprinting down the gravel drive. Then she’s gone, swallowed by the black timberland behind the estate.
Ghost was right when he said I screwed this six ways to Sunday.
I jump out of the truck and follow her into the woods. Branches whine, shoes slap mud. Heartbeat thunders in my ears, matching hers, like we’re wired together.
The forest is all knife-edges: scratching briars, jagged trunks, moonlight carving silver bones through the leaves. The girl crashes into something ahead, loud enough the dead could track her. What would a girl like her know about running through the woods? In the dead of night. Where wolves prowl. It looks she’s never run for her life before, because she aims for distance, not direction.
You can’t lose her,a voice hisses in my head.You lose her, you lose the only thing tethering you to sanity.
I shove faster. Wet earth sucks at my boots. Pine needlesspear my jacket. There—movement. She darts left, heading toward the ravine that splits the property.
