Jack In The Box novel Chapter 28

Riley

I waited to see if there was a punch line, some clue to see if he’d made a crack but Jack’s expressions remained the same. He wasn’t laughing; in fact his face remained stoic. With a lot of people, I could easily figure out what they were thinking but with Jack I always encountered a brick wall. I could only see what he decided to show me.

“I can’t decide if that’s a joke or if you’re serious.” I said.

“I’m not really in a mood for jokes lately. So far I’ve been telling you the truth.”

“You’re telling me you killed three people and enjoyed doing it.” I waited, my blood was turning to ice.

A few second passed, he was still holding me and staring intently at me. I pulled away and started to scramble off the bed when Jack caught my hand and pulled me back into his arms. My bare front rubbed against his chest. His other hand went into my hair; his mouth was hot on my neck. “Stop it.” I pushed my palms against his chest, but he was so strong and didn’t even budge. “Stop touching me!”

I knew that if Jack decided that he wanted to kill me, it would be a piece of cake. A swipe of his Herculean arm would be enough to silence me for good.

In a silky desperate voice, he said. “Shhhh...Don’t be scared of me, love. I will never hurt you. Believe me.” Tenderly, he swiped at a tear on my cheek with his thumb. “I love you. I’ll kill myself before I let anything happen to you.”

“I don’t want to be with a killer!”

“You say that now, but you can’t deny this attraction between us. Be honest with me, Cotton-Candy, would it matter to you even if I’d killed people ruthlessly? If I told you that I hadn’t killed three but the dozen that they accuse me of, would you stop loving me?”

I didn’t answer. A sob was on the verge of erupting from my throat because he knew that he was my weakness. He whispered something sweetly into my ears and tried to calm me down. I felt the swipe of his wet tongue against my collar bone, and then he pulled my lips down to his in a desperate, hard kiss. I whimpered and tried to pull away but his hold on me was solid. Apart from being a master manipulator, he was also an excellent seducer. I didn’t fight back, instead I thought fuck it and relaxed into his strong hold. My arms went around his back as I held him in place, kissing him back with the same amount of fierce longing. The thought of losing him forever pained me.

He pulled back a little, our foreheads touching, “Whatever I tell you, promise me you won’t leave me, Riley.” Jack said in a low voice.

“I can’t promise you anything until you explain yourself. And you didn’t answer my question.”

His dark eyes softened.

“Why did you kill those people, Jack?” I asked. “No matter how much you try to portray yourself as the bad guy, I know you wouldn’t kill anyone just because you enjoy killing.”

“Do you want to hear the rest of the story?”

I gave him a nod.

Jack glanced at the clock hanging against the wall. It was three a.m.

“How long do we have until Ken comes back home?”

“We have a lot of time. He won’t be here until ten a.m.”

“That’s more than enough I guess, because this story is long.”

“I want to listen.” I said.

And so he began. “At one point in my life, I was having a really hard time, getting into brawls at clubs, beating up thugs who landed up in hospitals, getting wasted doing drugs and finding myself in company of strange women. Well, I was never home most of the time because I was sick and tired of my parents constantly fighting. Ezra was doing his thing, he was the golden boy after all. I already knew Ezra would be the next successor to the Wolfe Enterprise and I was fucking jealous.”

“My father cut off my resources and that’s when I got myself into a shit load of other things. As if I hadn’t already done enough. I had no money and Ezra was tired of covering up for me. He told me to ′get my shit together or leave’ and that irked me. I was the older brother here, but he was acting like one.” He said, curling and uncurling my hair.

“Wait. You guys are twins.”

“Yeah, but I’m still twenty minutes older than him. I saw the world twenty-minutes before he did so that makes me his older brother.”

I suppressed an eye-roll. “What happened then?”

“A friend suggested me an easy way to earn money.” Jack continued, this time avoiding eye-contact like he was ashamed of the information he was going to reveal next.

“You did not just...”

“I just needed to drive the goods from one place to another. I thought that was going to be fairly easy. I did that like twice, before I got arrested for possession of cocaine. They found it stashed in a hidden compartment of my car.”

“It’s during the same time that I began seeing things that didn’t exist. An influence of the drug abuse.” He laughed. “I was a lost case. Dad got me admitted into a psychiatric institution. Only, it wasn’t private. This was the worst kind and I was probably one of the sanest people living there. The patients were neglected, treated badly and not provided with proper food. I don’t think the doctors were even qualified to do what they were doing.”

I touched his face, trying to fight the pity and the sympathy I was feeling for him. “What did they do to you, Jack?”

“I’ll spare you the details, Cotton-Candy. I thought it was the best punishment my father could think of for what I’d been doing. I stayed there for six months until I had enough.” Jack’s hand began shaking. I turned in his arms and lay my head on his chest, snuggling close. I took his shaking hand in mine and interlocked our fingers.

“They’d diagnosed me with anti-social personality disorder. An obviously wrong diagnoses. They’d done it on purpose. My dad told my family that I wasn’t fit to be free in the world, and that if I was let out of an institution, I’d be posing as a threat to society.”

“Mom didn’t believe it at first, but dad always found a way to manipulate her. There was a nurse there who was better than the rest of the staff and knew I didn’t belong there. Aline. She visited me one night and told me something shocking.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She’d heard the head doctor talk to one of his staff about me. They were speaking in some code language, but Aline knew what the doctors meant.” Jack paused. “My father had paid one of the doctors to kill me and make it seem accidental.”

“How could your father do something like that?”

Jack gave a sarcastic laugh. “We weren’t his, remember? I was proving to be more of a liability than an heir. A waste of space. Ezra was all he needed and for personal gain only. I wish my brother saw through all the lies. Brady had torn our family apart.”

“I tried calling Ezra but he refused to speak with me. He said I was making excuses to get out of the asylum. He didn’t believe what I was telling him about our father.

Anyway, Aline came to my room one night with keys to get me out of chains. It appeared another ward boy had followed her.

He tried to stop me from escaping and I knew if I was caught by any doctor that night, I wouldn’t survive. I wound the chain around the man’s neck and bit a chunk out of his shoulder. I acted on impulse, it was an act of self-defense. Aline helped me get out of the institution gates.”

“News got out pretty fast. I was a mess and on the run. I managed to come home and tried to look for Mom because I wanted to talk to her, apologize for my wrongdoings.”

“What happened?”

“You know the story, Riley. I found her in the shed. Brutally murdered, and cut into pieces.” Jack sighed. “When the authorities arrived, I was right there, sitting with a suitcase, matted in her blood. It was easy for them to assume I’d killed her. Broken out of the institution and then taken my mother’s life out of revenge for putting me there. My law record wasn’t glorifying to say the least.”