She wanted him to be lying.
His father’s stare was assessing as it swept over Jax’s features. “He had your eyes and your jaw. Your face, but his hair was darker.” Her father seemed to consider things. “I think you have your mother’s hair.”
“You don’t know my parents.” Jax’s voice was ice cold.
“Of course I know them.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Knew them, rather.”
Sarah tried to pull Jax toward the door. Only he wasn’t moving.
“After all, I killed them, so I had to know them.”
SARAH AND JAX had vanished.
He’d been waiting for Jax to return home, but the guy hadn’t. Why? Had he decided to slip away with the doctor?
Sarah . . . Sarah Jacobs. Just like her father.
His little surprise for Jax could wait only so long.
With every moment that passed, he grew more and more impatient.
Hurry back, Sarah. Hurry the fuck back. And bring Jax!
If she didn’t show herself soon, he’d just start killing her friends. Maybe he’d start with the redhead. She hadn’t entered the game yet. What was her name . . . ?
Viki . . . Victoria.
She’d been the one in the news, the one who’d been taken on the last big case that LOST handled. Poor Victoria probably thought the danger was over. That she was safe now.
No one was ever really safe. Certainly not Victoria.
And not Sarah.
And sure as fuck not Jax Fontaine. That bastard was going to pay. Before this was over, he’d be the one to suffer the most.
I KILLED THEM.
Murphy’s words rang in Jax’s ears. He shook his head, denying them, because that sick bastard had to be lying. Just playing another one of his head games. Sarah had warned him about that. She’d told him that her father would try to get in his mind . . .
“Your father had a meth lab. He’d sell that shit to anyone he saw. Your mother . . . hell, he whored her out half the time.”
No, this wasn’t true.
“It’s time to leave, Jax,” Sarah said as she pulled on his arm. “Let’s go. Now.”
But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t take his eyes off Murphy Jacobs. “You don’t know them. You’re spouting bullshit.”
“It wasn’t until I took him that I realized . . . your father was a whole lot more than just a drug dealer.” He laughed. “He was running weapons, taking hits, doing anything, if the money was right. A real high opportunity player. He was wanted in four states.”
“Jax, Jax, look at me,” Sarah said. Her voice was shaking.
“Your mother had been with him since she was fourteen. I don’t think she loved him. I think she was too scared to leave him. I tried to get her to leave. She wasn’t the one I was after, but she wouldn’t go. She screamed and she fought. He’d hooked her on so many drugs, I don’t know if she even realized what was happening.”
A dull ringing was filling Jax’s ears. “Stop it.”
“You remember them, right? They had that little house on the edge of town near the South Carolina coast . . .”
“I live in New Orleans.” But he hadn’t, not always. He’d been in Atlanta when he was with Charlene. Charlene and . . .
“They put you in a closet when they did business. A damn closet. You were quiet as a mouse in there.”
It’s dark. Let me out! Daddy!
But his dad hadn’t come. No, no! Jax violently shook his head. Mitch Fontaine had been the one to put him in a closet. Not his real father.
Right?
“You didn’t make a sound, so I didn’t know you were in there. Not when I came to take them.”
“Please, Jax,” Sarah whispered. Her hold on him was fierce. “Just come with me.”
He couldn’t move.
“I killed him first. He was the fighter, but he didn’t last long. Once the pain started, they never do.” Murphy leaned forward even more. “Do you have one of those snake tats like he had? It used to wrap all the way around his forearm . . .”
Jax had a flash then. Of a man reaching out to him. A man with a green snake circling his arm. Stay quiet until I’m done. Then we’ll go out . . . we’ll go fishing . . .
He’d . . . liked to fish. But his father had never really taken him.
They never did anything.
“No,” Jax rasped as the ghosts of his past started to slip through his mind.
“Your mother . . . I tried to let her go. I didn’t think she’d tell anyone about me, and who would believe her? I mean, she was so strung out.”
Play with me, Mommy. Play!
But . . . she hadn’t. He fucking remembered that—now.
“I set that house on fire. Put your father’s body inside. She ran back in. Just ran in there . . . hell, I didn’t know why she was doing that. I left her.”
Sarah grabbed the table. “You left her to burn?”
Again, he shrugged. “She’s the one who went into the fire. Didn’t realize . . . not until I heard the screams . . . that the kid was in there, too.”
Jax’s skin felt ice cold.
“In the closet . . . that’s where they’d put you.”
“Stop talking, Dad!” Sarah yelled at him. “Just stop!”
Silence.
Jax stepped forward. Murphy tilted back his head as he gazed up at Jax.
“You really think . . .” Jax rasped, “I’ll believe your lies?”
“I think you need to get away from Sarah. I think Sarah now knows exactly what you are . . .”
“Sarah has always known what I am.” And she didn’t care.
Murphy gave a sad shake of his head. “Did he seek you out, Sarah? Start showing an interest after he learned just who you are?”
“Jax hasn’t—” she began, her voice furious.
“If the man after you has been using fire in his attacks, then you should certainly be looking at the fellow right beside you. Though perhaps he should be more grateful to me. I mean, I am the one who got him out of the fire. His mother didn’t make it, but I got him and—”
“No!” Jax roared, and he shoved Sarah out of the way as he leapt across that table. Because suddenly, he could feel flames against his skin. He could hear himself crying out.
Mommy! Mommy! And he could see smoke, coming beneath the closet door.
He tackled Murphy. They hit the ground and he put his hands around the bastard’s throat. He squeezed, his fingers tightening and cutting off Murphy’s air supply, and Murphy was just smiling, smiling—
“Stop!” Sarah’s scream. She was yanking on Jax. So were the guards. It took three guards to pull Jax off Murphy.
Then Murphy growled out, “She sees you now . . .”
Jax’s breath heaved out. His head whipped up and he saw Sarah—staring at him with horror in her eyes.
“Come on, buddy,” one of the guards said as he pulled Jax to the door. “Don’t let him fuck with you any longer.”
Jax glared at Murphy. “Bastard, I will be seeing you again.”
“Stay away from Sarah,” Murphy fired back. Two guards were pulling him toward the other exit. “She’s not for you!”
A red-haired guard had Jax in the hall. “Calm down, man,” he said. “Hell, we probably should have let you kill him. Would have saved us all some pain . . .”
He killed my parents. That bastard just confessed—
“He’s a sick sonofabitch,” the guard muttered.
Jax stared down at his hands.
And he wanted to kill.
“STOP,” SARAH WHISPERED.
The guards didn’t hear her.
“Stop!” she yelled.
Her father looked back at her. The guards stilled, but they didn’t loosen their grip on him.
“You . . . you never killed two people at once.”
He shrugged. “Didn’t mean to kill the mother. Charlene shouldn’t have run back to the fire.”
Charlene.
“You’re a liar, Dad.”
/> “No, sweetheart. He is. That man out there . . . he’s as dark and twisted on the inside as I am. You need to stay away from him.”
“How’d you know his last name was Fontaine?”
“Figured . . . had to be . . . I got the kid out and I left him with Mitch Fontaine. The guy was a mechanic—worked with the boy’s father—I figured leaving the kid with him would be better than nothing.”
“He hurt him, Dad. That man abused Jax.”
His eyes hardened.
Sarah swallowed to ease the lump in her throat. “And I don’t think Charlene died that night.” Jax had told her that a woman named Charlene raised him. That she’d even been there to help him get rid of the body years later.
Jax’s mother had never gone looking for him because she’d been there with him, the whole time.
“Why would you lie and tell him that?” Sarah asked.
The guards were staring at Murphy and Sarah with a kind of sick curiosity. She got that. She felt rather sick herself.
“I watched,” Murphy said simply. “I watched her. The woman she’d been died that night. She became someone new. I killed what she’d been.”
Sarah was trying to make sense of this madness. Trying to look through her father’s lies and riddles and understand the truth. “She ran away with Jax because she was scared of you. You didn’t give Jax to that man—Mitch. She took Jax and went to him, didn’t she?”
His eyes crinkled at the corners, as if he were fighting a smile. Was he proud because she’d caught his lie? His twist on the truth? “I guess she thought the mechanic would keep her safe from me,” he murmured.
“But you were never going after her.”
“Maybe, maybe not . . .”
She walked closer to him. The guards stiffened.
“Why?” Sarah asked him, hurt and desperate. “Why did you tell Jax all of this?” He’d destroyed Jax in that room, and she’d been helpless to stop Jax’s pain.
“A man with blond hair . . . a man with blue eyes . . . a man who wants vengeance . . . sweetheart, didn’t you see he was right in front of you? And he used fire . . . fire.” He shook his head. “I was pushing him because you needed to see past the mask he was showing you. He’s the one messing with your head. He’s the one trying to kill you.”
“No, he was there with me when Molly Guthrie vanished. He was—”
“He knew I didn’t kill his mother. He knew it. Think about it. He lived with her his whole life. She told him about me. And he found out about you. Now he’s trying to get his payback. He wants to hurt you, he wants to wreck you because of what I did.” His shackled hands lifted, as if he’d touch her. “But you’re my one good thing. Even I . . . I couldn’t destroy you. I couldn’t make you . . . like me.”
He was still lying about Jax. He had to be lying.
“Run from him. Get away fast. Because that man out there, he will shatter you. And when you’re gone, he knows that I’ll be . . .” His words trailed away. “There will be nothing for me then.”
His hands were between then. Once, she’d always linked her fingers with his. He’d tucked her in. He’d hugged her when she was scared.
“Nobody hurts my baby girl,” he said, his expression hard. “I knew when I saw him . . . he’s the one . . . I have to protect you from him.”
Sarah backed away from him.
His hands fell.
And Sarah became very, very cold.
“I need a name,” Sarah told him. “If you really killed Jax’s biological father, then tell me his name.” So she could check out this story. Find out if it was bullshit or the truth.
Her father’s head cocked to the right as he studied her. “Carl Winston.”
The guards led him away. The clang of that door shutting behind her father seemed incredibly loud. Sarah reached down for her phone, but then she remembered it was gone. She’d had to turn in her phone and keys and everything else she carried when she entered the prison. She couldn’t call Gabe or Victoria right then, but, God, she needed them.
Because for the first time in years, Sarah was lost.
Chapter 15
HE WAS WAITING FOR SARAH OUTSIDE THE prison. Jax had been pacing, anger pumping through his blood, but when he saw Sarah, he stopped.
She hesitated, just for an instant, then she came toward him. Her steps were slow, almost hesitant.
“Did you know?” Jax demanded. Everywhere he looked, Jax could have sworn that he saw red. He couldn’t breathe because the rage was choking him. For so long, he’d thought he hadn’t been wanted, but now . . .
They couldn’t come for me because that bastard in there killed them! He wrecked my life. Took away everything from me!
“No,” Sarah said softly. “He . . . I still don’t know all of his victims. That’s why I have to keep coming back. If I come back, he tells me a little more.” Sarah was standing a few feet away from him and her gaze as it slid over him—was that fear in her eyes?
For an instant, he didn’t care that she was afraid. “Your father killed my family.”
“Jax . . .”
He stalked toward her. Grabbed her shoulders. Held her tight. “He killed them!” And his head seemed to be about to burst. His temples were pounding. The memories were erupting from the recesses of his mind, like Murphy had unlocked some sick, twisted door in his head. “I was in the closet—I could smell the smoke! The fucking smoke!” His hold tightened on her. “Your father! He did this! He—”
He let her go. Stared at Sarah in shock. He’d been about to shake her. What if he’d hurt her? Sarah?
“I don’t know what’s true,” Sarah said. His voice had been sharp with fury. Hers was soft with sadness. “Not yet. I have to call my team. We’ll find out what’s really happening.”
Jax rubbed his head. The pounding felt as if his head were exploding then. And he kept hearing a voice, a voice saying . . .
If I’m dead, he won’t search for us. You have to forget who we were. Do you understand? Forget! Forget for Mommy . . .
He drove the balls of his hands into his eyes. “No.”
Forget . . . Mommy . . .
“No!” Jax roared as his hands jerked down.
Sarah backed up.
Fear was on her face. Guards were running up behind her. “Is there a problem here?” one of them demanded.
Jax glared at them. “Let’s go, Sarah.” They needed to be alone. He had to figure out what was happening. He needed to know—
“You go, Jax.” She tossed the rental keys to him. “I’ll find my own way back.”
His fingers fisted around the key. “Sarah?”
“Go,” she said again, sounding sad and so very . . . certain.
The fog of fury began to clear from his mind.
She sees you for what you are.
Sarah was edging closer to the guards.
And staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. Not until that moment. But, no, Sarah understood him. Sarah had always understood.
That was before you nearly choked a man in front of her. A man who’s her father.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“So am I,” Sarah said. It sounded as if she was fighting tears. “Please . . . go.”
Because she was afraid of him? Right then, he was almost afraid of himself. Jax turned and he . . . left her.
I’m sorry, Sarah. Every step that he took away from her seemed to rip into his heart.
GABE HAD POWERFUL friends. When Sarah called him and dropped her cluster-fuck bombshell on him, he reached out to one of those friends and got her a ride back to New Orleans on a private jet.
Sarah’s stomach had knotted by the time she landed. And she kept seeing Jax’s face in her mind . . . a face that had been twisted with so much rage and hatred.
When she left the plane, Wade and Victoria were waiting for her. One look at their expressions, and she knew that Gabe had briefed them.
Victoria stared at her a moment. There was sympathy on Victori
a’s face. Sympathy, not pity. Sarah knew the difference.
Wade took her bag.
“Jax may be trying to kill me,” Sarah said. He certainly had the power to do it. To stage everything so that she’d fall right into his web, like a lost, desperate fly. “And I think . . . I think I was falling in love with him.”
“Oh, Sarah.” Victoria wrapped her arms around Sarah and pulled her close in a tight hug. “We’re going to figure this out. You’ll see.”
“I knew I should have decked the guy,” Wade muttered. “Sarah, don’t you worry. Viki’s right. We’re going to take care of this. LOST sticks together, you know that. You mess with one of us . . .”
Sarah’s head lifted. She stared at her friends.
“Then you are damn well going to battle us all,” Wade finished, his eyes and voice grim.
But Sarah didn’t want a battle. She wanted . . .
Jax.
A man who may have lied to her. Played her.
And tried to kill her.
“IT FITS,” WADE said, pacing around the hotel room. Sarah’s room. “I mean, think about it . . . if Murphy’s story is actually true . . .” Wade tapped his chin. “Then Jax would sure have one strong motive for vengeance.”
“But is Murphy’s story true?” Victoria asked. She was sitting on the couch beside Sarah. “It’s not like that guy is the most reliable source.” Her worried stare darted to Sarah. “We all know just what a great liar your father truly is.”
Yes, they did. “We’ve got people digging into the records in South Carolina.” Assistants from LOST who were checking on old arsons and fire-related deaths. If her father had killed Carl Winston, then they’d find a record of the man’s life . . . and death.
“I know Jax.” It was Emma who spoke up now. Emma who was glaring at them all as she stood next to Dean. “He wouldn’t do this.” She pointed at Sarah. “And you should know better.”
Dean turned toward her. “You always defend him. Look, I get that he helped you when you were alone, but do you even know all of his secrets?”
Her gaze fell. “No one knows all of his secrets,” Emma murmured.
Sarah had thought that she was close. She’d thought that she knew him.
She still did. That was the part that hurt. She still thought she knew . . . “He could be innocent.”