Chapter Nine

Present Day...

Ruby

“Jessica”, I shout, my skin dripping with sweat. A hand on my shoulder tries to calm me, but my natural reaction is to lash out anyway. I’m out of the bed and half way to the door, my assailant knocked onto his back, by the time the second one catches me, traps my arms against my chest and tries to calm me.

“Ruby”, he’s saying, “calm the fuck down, it’s me.”

That voice, that smell, those tattoos on his arms. It all comes hurtling back to me like hailstones out of a clear blue sky. It can’t be him, it just can’t be.

I try and fight my way free, but he’s far too strong for me and all I can feel coursing through my body is searing pain.

“Fuck, Ruby”, he says, turning me around so I can see him. “It’s Jaxon.”

***

Jaxon rubs the side of his jaw where my closed fist has made his skin red.

“You still know how to punch”, he says, checking I haven’t broken it. “A kiss would have been more normal.”

I ignore him. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I say, pissed that out of all of the people in the world, it had to be Jaxon to come rushing in to save me.

“Saving your life”, he says defiantly, as though nothing else were more obvious. “It’s good to see you too.”

I scowl at him. As much as I’d like to stay here and play catch up, I’ve got way more important things on my mind. They know where Jessica is, and I have to find her. The possibility that they may have got to her already doesn’t even bear thinking about.

I go to the window to check where I am, while Jaxon and Carlos look at me like I’m sleepwalking through a fever dream. They’ve got the nightmare part right, but I’m about as conscious and switched on as I ever have been right now.

“How long?” I say, while I move towards Jaxon’s bag of guns.

“They’re all dead already”, he says, missing the point entirely.

“How long?” I ask again, my voice raised.

“Since they took you, eighty hours. You’ve been asleep for ten.”

I take his gun and his knife. “You should have woken me.”

“What are you going to do with those?” Jaxon asks.

“Find my daughter”, I say, before I shoulder barge my way past Jaxon and head for the door.

My face hurts like hell, and every time I breath it feels like someone is stabbing me in the chest with a hot poker. I’m almost at the end of the corridor when Jaxon catches up with me.

“You have a daughter”, he asks, falling in step with me.

“You better hope I still have”, I say, desperate not to lose my temper. With a ten hour start they could be absolutely anywhere.

Outside, the sharp sun makes my head throb. I pause to catch my breath, before bending double and puking into the grass.

“Let me go”, Jaxon says chivalrously, “you need to rest.”

Sweat clings to my skin like condensation. I push him away and stumble out into the street. I want to cry but I’m not going to show Jaxon how weak I am right now, how much I need him, how much I wish he’d always been there.

“I didn’t need you to rescue me”, I say spitefully, “I was doing just fine on my own.”

“I could see that”, he says. “You looked like you were just about to escape when I turned up.”

I make my way across the street in search of a cab, or a car, or anything to take me to Jessica.

“Whatever you are planning on doing”, Jaxon says, “let me help you. If you need to find your daughter, let’s go to her together. If someone else has her, I promise you I’ll do all I can to get her out, but you’ve got to let me help you. I get that you’re an independent woman and you don’t need anyone else helping you do the things you need to do, but look at you Ruby, you’ve got a broken rib, a swollen jaw and a you can hardly stand up straight. You’ve not eaten anything for the best part of three days, and you don’t even know where you are.”

I sigh, almost beaten. “She’s my daughter”, I say, feeling ridiculous that I can’t stop the tears coming.

“I know”, Jaxon says, coming towards me.

I wrap my arms around his neck and let the weight of the situation consume me. In the middle of this broken neighborhood, in the middle of the road outside the dive of a hotel I’ve just sweated out the last ten hours in, with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, I cry waterfalls of tears against Jaxon’s back, losing myself in an embrace I hadn’t realised I’d missed so much until now.

“I don’t know what to do”, I say finally admitting I’m broken.

“Where is Jessica?” Jaxon asks, wiping the tears from my cheek with the thick swell of his thumb. I catch his hand because the flash of memory it produces in me I’ve spent the last five years compartmentalizing, and having him here, bringing up everything from the past, on top of everything else going on right now, is far too hard to process.

“The night I was taken, I took her to a friend on the other side of the city, as far away from me as I could. We need to go there now.”

I break away from him again as reality dawns on me, the urgency to find Jessica returning with a sharp stab of gut pain.

There are things I want to tell Jaxon, things I’ve wanted to tell him every day for the last five years but now is not the right time. I know I’m being ungrateful, and demanding, and he doesn’t deserve it after saving my life, but I’d long since come to terms with never seeing him ever again, and right now the last thing I want to do is open that sealed shut box of emotion because I’m scared of where it’s going to lead.

Jaxon and I have been over a long time, and no matter what he’s doing here, no matter how swept up I am in emotional overload, no matter how impossible it is for me to think straight and deal with any of this until I at least know that Jessica is safe, I can’t allow myself to forget that.

Jaxon may be back in my life right now, but he’s definitely not here to stay.