Pa raised his hand and the man stopped his lashing and switched off the electricity.
A crude, hard, evil smile filled Pa’s face as he looked at me. “Anything come to your mind yet, Jia?”
I shook my head. “No. Nothing. I told you I don’t know anything.”
He snarled and raised his hand again to give the man the go ahead to switch the electricity on.
Xander’s screams tore through me once more.
I couldn’t look. I just couldn’t look.
“I’ll make it stop if you tell me.” Pa nodded. “I’ll make it stop and take him down from there. You said you loved him. How could you let this happen to someone you love?”
What a thing to say to me.
What a question to ask.
As if that was really it, like I was the problem here. It wasn’t me at all.
It was Pa again…
This wasn’t about me. It was him.
All of it was him.
The tears running down my cheeks blurred my vision. I could barely see him, but really did I want to see him? Him with his lies.
He had no intention whatsoever of letting Xander go or making anything stop. He didn’t.
And, how I hated lies.
The irony in that was I was the biggest liar here. The biggest liar. The actress who could have gotten an Oscar for her award-winning performance.
Me. That was my role here.
Xander continued to scream and my soul quivered.
This was the moment of reckoning. It was as he’d said, he would do what he had to do.
I would too.
I looked to him and knew he knew what I was doing. I knew he appreciated it.
“I don’t know anything,” I shouted, screaming at the top of my lungs. My voice rose above him, high into the black ceiling that covered us. “I don’t know anything.”
I kept saying it over and over again.
Pa grabbed me up again.
“Jia, you seriously don’t know who sent him? Who is he working for? Fucking tell me, tell me now, tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know anything.” It felt like a mantra now. I repeated it five more times. Pa released me and I staggered backwards.
He held a hand up to stop the man below and the switch went off again.
Pa pointed at me one more time.
“His death will be on your head girl. You say you don’t know anything. I feel you do. I feel you do! But it’s okay, you’ve done your part.” He looked to Armand. “Armand take her!”
Armand came for me and took hold of my arm. I tried to wrench free because of the tightness in his grasp but he held on tighter.
“Jia, you will do as you are told. I mean that,” Pa reminded.
“You evil bastard!” I whimpered. “You tell me you love me but you do this. How do you expect me to love you after this?”
Pa got up close in my face. “My dear I no longer care. I do what I have to, to keep our family safe. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not. It’s shit to me. I have no place for emotion, not from you or from me.”
I shook as he dealt me his words. “Papa what happened to you? I can’t believe this is really you. I can’t believe you could be so wicked. Just let him go. Doesn’t the fact that I love him mean anything to you? You saw him yesterday. You saw us. Can’t you find it in your heart to stop this?” I don’t know why I bothered.
It must have been desperation talking. One last attempt.
Pa held up his hand in answer to my question, signaling the man to switch on the electricity again. Xander screamed.
I shook my head in pure disbelief. Pa really was going to kill him.
Yesterday wasn’t goodbye.
This was it.
I wrenched my arm free of Armand’s hold and rushed to the barrier.
“I love you,” I shouted out to Xander.
Armand got me though. Pulling me away from the balcony barrier at the same time Xander looked at me.
His eyes. Even past the blood that washed over his face. I saw his answer.
I saw it and felt it.
Saw his lips moving mouthing the words back.
He loved me too.
That was the last thing I saw before Armand pulled me away.
Chapter Forty-Three
Xander
I couldn’t talk.
I’d just managed that last time, when I shouted to leave Jia alone.
That was my strength gone.
All night they’d tortured me.
All damn night.
So the fact that I could speak was nothing short of a miracle.
As she’d looked back to me with so much love in her eyes, I had to say it back in some way. I had to find the strength for my lips to move.
She had to know that I loved her too and it was with my last breath.
She chose me.
There was the answer to the question of whether or not I could trust her. She chose me. She did as she promised and kept her silence. The woman was strong because she’d seen them torturing me and didn’t cave. She kept my secret even when she knew it could kill me.
Jia had to truly love me to know what I would have wanted her to do in a situation like this.
She did it.
I just saw the trace of her going through the door with Armand.
He was taking her.
She would be his now.
So much for that plan of mine. That sketchy plan of mine. I didn’t even know what the fuck I was really going to do, but it involved taking her, that was part A.
The next part would be figuring out what to do to keep everyone off my back.
I would take her though.
I didn’t truly allow myself to think of the intricacies of how I’d actually do it but my heart held the plan and the way. It gave me the spark of hope and I hung on to it.
I hung on to having happy moments like what we had at the diner again with no secrets.
But…
It wasn’t meant to be.
Just like that vision of Claire faded from me, all of that faded from me last night as I got captured.
The Chameleon had hit me with a tranquilizer.
It would have been foolish of him to kill me and not find out more about me or who sent me.
That was what happened.
Now it was only a matter of time before death came for me.
The asshole controlling the switch turned it off again. The prick was the sort who loved torture. I hadn’t seen him before but it was evident that he enjoyed watching and administering it.
Like he got off on it.
I hadn’t seen but I assumed it was Giovanni who told him to switch it off.
A moment of nothingness passed. I wasn’t sure if I’d fainted from the pain or if the time had truly passed.
Honestly it did feel like I’d slipped into some kind of unconscious state.
My eyes were open, then I closed them and when I opened them again, Giovanni was standing before me in that all-knowing presence and authority he had.
It seemed to happen in a split second. Like he’d just appeared.
What an evil son of a bitch he was indeed.
He really was that.
He stood before me with a deck of cards.
Instantly I recalled the recruitment session. I was supposed to find the three red queens.
The four men who’d gone before me fell prey to his game of death and met their fate. Part of me knew then that I was dealing with a real bastard. A real nasty bastard, sick. As sick as some of the men I’d come across in my career.