The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (11 page)

Jill and her mother didn’t speak
for the entire drive back to Potomac. When they reached the house, Carolyn
jumped out of the car and ran inside, rushing up the stairs to her study and
slamming the door. Jill went upstairs at a more leisurely pace, her body so
drained that the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other was a
chore.

She opened the door to her room
and immediately the bed beckoned her to come enjoy its soft, plushy warmth. It
took all her will not to jump on the comforter and lose herself to some dream
world that wasn’t nearly as hard as her real life.

I choose to do what’s right.

The words kept her grounded,
quite literally. It was only those words, now plastered deep in her mind, that
held her feet on the floor and her body off the bed. It wouldn’t be right to
sleep right now. It would be reckless.

Reckless because it was already
five in the evening and Jill, having been awake for going on forty hours, would
crash so hard she might not open her eyes again until morning, and the last
place in the world she needed to be when darkness fell was this bedroom.

Reckless because there was so
much work to do and so little time to do it. The command that enslaved Jill’s
mother might be hidden in the data Jill stole from TPM. The sooner she
initiated a search for it, the sooner the data would turn up, and the sooner
the data turned up, the sooner she could bring her mother back to Gordon and
free her mind.

Reckless because her phone had
been buzzing all day long with texts from Zack. Texts she had ignored. She
couldn’t go to sleep until she responded to him. She couldn’t leave him
hanging. It wouldn’t be right.

She grabbed a handbag from the
back corner of her closet. Black with a pink floral pattern, she had purchased
this bag three years ago because Gia told her to. It was her very first
assignment as a Network agent.

It’s a rite of passage for an
agent about to go undercover
, Gia had told her.
You buy the bag you will
pack when you leave. Something big enough that it can carry all you need when
you escape, but small enough that you can throw it over your shoulder and act
like everything’s normal should you run into trouble on your way out.

Jill had sewn a flap of black
fabric into the bottom of the bag. Underneath that fabric was a passport and
credit card for a girl named Lenore Filkins. In the passport picture, Lenore
looked just like Jill.

Tonight, after Jill visited
Zack, she would check into a hotel as Lenore Filkins, get some work done on the
TPM data, and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, when the sun was up again and
she could be certain Renata wasn’t roaming, Jill would return to the house. Her
mother would never know she’d left.

A toothbrush, a change of
clothes, her laptop, the charger for her phone…she was ready. As she left her
bedroom, she looked up the staircase at the closed door to her mom’s study.

See you tomorrow, Mom
,
she thought.

The roads leading into Zack’s
neighborhood were crowded. There was no parking anywhere. Bumper to bumper
traffic and lots of people on foot. She turned left on 14
^th
Street
to find traffic at a standstill. There was a street fair going on. Tents and
RVs lined both sides of the road. Big banners hung across the neighborhood
announcing the
14
^th
Street Festival
. Up ahead, a police
officer was directing traffic. The route to Zack’s apartment was blocked.

The crowd was immense. People
walked around with hot drinks, balloons, cardboard baskets full of
food…children roamed with their faces painted, carnival games lined the
sidewalk. There were booths selling arts and crafts, others selling wine. Men
in suits, politicians probably, were working the crowd with smiles and
handshakes. There was a stage in the middle of the street where a rock band was
performing.

Thousands of people were
enjoying themselves, their days nothing at all like the one Jill was having.

She had to park three blocks
away. It took her twenty minutes to navigate the crowds and get to Zack’s front
door.

She rang his doorbell. Nobody
answered.

Jill stood there for a minute.
Her legs reminded her that she was exhausted. She took a seat on the steps.

A few weeks ago Zack was nobody
to her. Now he was the only one left. Gia was dead. Dante was dead. Nicky and
Ryan were missing. Phillip and Helena were gone.

When she was done here tonight,
Zack would be gone too.

Without expecting to, she
started to cry. A crazy block party going on all around her, pretzels and
cotton candy and beer and laughter and music, and she sat on the stoop in front
of Zack’s apartment, her face in her hands, weeping for what she was about to
do.

“Jill?”

She looked up. Her vision was
blurred from the tears. She wiped at her eyes.

“Zack, I’m..”

“You’re crying. What’s going
on?”

He was on the bottom step,
having just left the party on the street. He wore a white T-shirt and blue
jeans. He had colorful strands of plastic beads around his neck.

The sound of a rock band echoed
through the neighborhood, drums and guitars bouncing off the buildings. The
late afternoon sun had drifted beneath the cloud cover and was casting long,
cool shadows over the street.

“I’ve been trying to reach you
all day,” Zack said. “You wanna go inside and talk?”

God, yes. More than anything,
Jill thought
. Let’s go inside and never come out. Let’s lock ourselves
in your bedroom and pretend none of this is happening. Let’s change our names
and disappear.

“I can’t,” she said.

I’m not strong enough
,
she might have added. If she went inside, she wouldn’t be able to do this. She
wouldn’t be able to leave him.

“Oh. Okay,” said Zack. He sat on
the ground next to her, pushed her hair out of her face, and wiped her cheeks
with his thumb.

“Tell me what’s happening,” he
said.

“It’s…you see, Zack, I have
to…I’m here because I need to tell you--”

It was like there were two Jills
inside her. Calculating, analytical Jill, capable of intense feats of binary
thinking, had weighed the options and knew she had to say goodbye. Analytical
Jill took the new law of the land seriously.
I choose to do what’s right.
The
right thing to do was make sure the danger in her life didn’t spill into
Zack’s. Analytical Jill came here tonight end it with Zack, and get him as far
away from her as possible.

But Analytical Jill was fading
into the background, and another Jill, the one who kissed Zack on the Ferris
Wheel two weeks before, who felt ridiculous, extraordinary joy at spending time
with him, who loved to sit at the back of the bar and listen to his band play
their noisy music, who wanted nothing more than to hit the snooze button and
curl up in his arms all morning—that Jill was taking over. And with her
conquest came a wave of emotion too great to stop, or even contain, and before
she knew it, Jill had buried her face in Zack’s chest and was sobbing in great,
heaving shakes.

“Hey, hey, what’s going on?”
Zack said.

“They’re dead,” Jill whispered.
“My friends. So many of them. Last night. They’re dead.”

“Dead? What do you mean? Who’s
dead?”

“Gia and Dante and Kendall and
maybe Nicky and Ryan.” The names came out so fast she could barely make sense
of them. Apparently Zack couldn’t either.

“What are you saying, Jill?
Let’s go inside. Come with me.”

“No! No, Zack. It’s my fault,
don’t you understand? The mission happened because I was here. The Network
thought they could do it because they had me on the inside.”

“We really shouldn’t talk about
this out here, Jill. Someone might be listening.”

Yes. Yes, there were always
people listening, and for all she knew she might have led one of them here. She
was blowing it now. She was being weak instead of choosing to do what’s right.

“No,” she said. She took a deep
breath, then said it again. “No, Zack. This isn’t for you to bear. I’m sorry.”

She pulled away from him, wiped
at her cheeks, and steadied herself. “I didn’t come here to unload on you. I
came here to tell you goodbye.”

“Goodbye? Where are you going?”

“Zack, my friends--”

“Come on, we’re going inside
right now.”

“No! You will not make me stay.
I will not do this to you!”

She pushed against him, using
his body to help her stand.

“It’s over, Zack. Goodbye. Don’t
call me anymore. Don’t come to my house. Forget you ever knew me.”

“You know I can’t do that,
Jill.”

“You have to! They will kill you
just like they’ve killed everyone else! Don’t fight me on this anymore! You’re
just making it harder for me!”

Zack looked at her, his electric
blue eyes taking in what she had just said. She felt like he was about to make
another plea for her to stay so she turned to leave before he could say
anything.

“Goodbye Zack,” she said as she
went down the stairs.

She raced along the sidewalk,
imagining herself disappearing into the crowd. The tears were flowing now and
she broke into a run, as if the sadness was right behind her and she could
avoid it if only she moved fast enough. The rock band playing down the block,
the drums echoing off the buildings, the chatter of thousands of people
enjoying the evening, the ever-present rumble of traffic in the distance—the
sounds were blending in her mind as she ran. It felt like a hallucination, one
of those dreams where you have to run but your legs won’t carry you because
they’re too tired to move.
Push ahead, Jill. Keep running. Keep moving.

She wasn’t fast enough. The
sadness was overtaking her, from within and without. It was a weight pulling
her down to the ground, telling her to stop running, to lay on the sidewalk and
cry, to give up. It was also a hand reaching at her from behind. Fingers
reaching at her hair, at her shoulders, at her arm….

The hand grabbed hold of her
wrist with so much strength she lost her footing, and would have tumbled to the
pavement had the hand not held her up. She turned to look at it, saw that the
hand was real, that it belonged to him, to those blue eyes.

“Zack,” she whispered. “I can’t.
You have to let me go.”

“Yeah, fuck that, Jill. You’re
coming inside.”

He pulled her to her feet.

“No!” she cried, trying and
failing to pull free from his grip. “No, I won’t do this to you!”

With a strong tug he pulled her
close, then put one arm behind her knees, sweeping her off her feet. Her head
fell back into his other arm and he lifted her off the ground.

“Is everything alright here?”
someone asked him.

“We’re fine,” Zack snapped.

And then they were moving. The
voice inside reminded her that this wasn’t the plan, but her body had no energy
to care. Lying back in his arms, Jill allowed Zack to carry her back to his
apartment.

They came inside and he placed
her gently on his bed, where the creaky springs and musty smell took her back
to a different time, a time when she and Zack laid together under the covers,
drifting in and out of sleep as he hit the snooze button all morning long. The
blissful memory was too powerful to resist, and within seconds, she was asleep.

Beedledebeep
.

It was a glorious sound, made
doubly so because she didn’t think she’d ever hear it again. Zack’s alarm
clock, and his magnificent ritual of shutting it off only to allow it to come
on again fifteen minutes later—Jill felt like she was home.

Beedledebeep
.

Jill realized she was closest to
the alarm clock this time. Perhaps she should reach over and—

She was about to sit up and look
for the snooze button when Zack’s long, tattooed arm reached across her body.
His fingers came down like a hammer on the snooze button and it was quiet
again.

Zack left his arm draped over
Jill’s chest.

I choose to do what’s right
,
whispered a voice in Jill’s mind.

“Oh shut up,” she muttered.

“What was that?” Zack said, his
eyes still closed, his lips barely opening to form the words. Jill found
herself staring at those lips, imagining the teeth and tongue behind them. The
morning light pressing from behind the blinds, the feel of the sheets on her
body, the ever-present electrical hum that was as much a part of Zack’s
apartment as he was…all of it came together to make a moment, and in that
moment, she felt like she and Zack had floated into their own private space
where none of the anguish and danger that had been chasing Jill could find
them.

She kissed him. His lips were
slow to respond at first, but as she leaned into him, he woke up and pulled her
close, deepening the kiss. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into
the bed, kissing her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She arched her back and
pulled her shirt over her head, throwing it to the floor, then dove down to
take him in. She tasted his lips and remembered the cool autumn evening when he
kissed her atop the Ferris Wheel. She listened to his heart and felt safe, like
she did when he carried her to his apartment. She looked in his eyes, those
stunning blue eyes that had flirted with her at the coffee shop, and she
allowed them to see her. She wasn’t Jill the Network agent or Jill the computer
hacker or Jill the wealthy daughter of privilege. She was just….here. Jill and Zack.
In this moment. And the rest of the world went silent so they could be
together.

Later, as they lie in bed, their
eyes still connected, reality still far away, she told him everything. She
began with the story of a little girl whose curiosity led her to the most
dangerous, illegal spots on the Internet, where she not only made friends, but
admirers. She continued through her entire time at Thorndike, the genesis of
the mission, the idea of getting close enough to Sergio Alonzo to kill him,
Nicky Bloom…