Stranded with My Stepbrother Chapter 88

\-Jacey-

“Did you really say you wouldn’t testify unless Ms. Jepsen gets Caleb out of jail?” Hansen asked, eyeing me as I sat in the back of the car on the way back from the disastrous deposition.

I folded my arms over my chest. “I did.”

“And didn’t I tell you that would be a bad idea?” he continued, frowning in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t care.” I hunched my shoulders like a mutinous teenager being called to task by her father. Well, I supposed, at nearly nineteen, I was a mutinous teenager. But Hansen was not my father. I actually respected him more.

Bea rubbed her temples in the passenger seat. “Jacey, Caleb did assault Masterson’s lawyer.”

“So? I wanted to assault him, too. But I also knew that was what he wanted. Which tells me he wanted Caleb to assault him. Which makes me think there’s something unpleasant waiting for Caleb in jail, so it’s very, very necessary to get him out ASAP.”

Hansen looked at Bea, and I realized they’d already come to that conclusion.

“You’ve got to get him out now,” I insisted.

“We don’t have the power to do that. Not now that he’s under the Attorney General’s purview,” Bea sighed.

“Then she’s got to get him out now. Or she’s down two witnesses, because I’m not rewarding her for screwing all this up. It was her job to keep Chalmers in check. She didn’t,” I argued.

“Jacey, the Attorney General can only do so much. Her hands are tied by the law,” Hansen began to lecture me. “Whereas Masterson and his attorneys, well, their whole motto is ‘as long as we don’t get caught.’ You hear what I’m saying?”

I glared at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t care if you have to go in there with a whole SWAT team, or whatever the FBI’s equivalent is. You all need to get your poop in a group and get him out.”

“I promise you the Attorney General is working as hard as she can—” Bea tried.

“She’s not working hard enough, or Caleb would be here with me,” I complained.

“Let’s just go back to the hotel and talk about this like adults,” Hansen sighed.

I shook my head. “We are talking about it like adults. You just don’t like what I’m saying. You can take me wherever you want—restaurant, hotel, whatever—but I’m not going to agree to do another deposition or testify in court until I know for sure Caleb is safe.”

“What if something happens to Caleb in jail?” he asked, broaching the subject head-on. “If you don’t testify, you could be charged as an accessory to Masterson’s dealings, or even the sheik’s.”

“Don’t threaten me.” I scowled at him. “Without my testimony, and Caleb’s, Ms. Jepsen and INTERPOL have no cases. None. Nothing. So what you could make me an accessory to, I have no idea.”

“Caleb would want you to save those human trafficking victims, if you can,” he said.

That was a low blow. Of course, I knew Caleb would want me to keep going and testify if something happened to him. But I was me, not just an extension of Caleb. And if these people failed to protect him after all their promises, I wasn’t going to feel particularly talkative anymore. I was tired. I was sick and tired of all of it.

“If something happens to Caleb, then I’ll just have Will. And Will is currently in Masterson’s care. Ergo, I will have to swallow my pride and go crawling back to that bastard in order to be with my son,” I replied.

Bea’s head whipped around. “You wouldn’t.”

“Try me,” I growled.

They looked at each other again.

“Well, Bea, I think we have ourselves a problem,” Hansen said.

“A loose cannon,” she agreed.

“Whatever. You tell Ms. Jepsen what’s at stake. Maybe she’ll feel more motivated,” I suggested.

Bea took out her phone. “Hi, Amanda. Is she in? Thanks.”

I waited, one eyebrow raised.

“Ms. Jepsen?” Bea said. “We have a serious problem.”

I listened hard. I wasn’t going to let them buffalo me. She could be talking to static, for all I knew.

But I could hear enough of the Attorney General’s response to recognize her voice, if not her words.

“Jocelyn Collins is refusing to testify in court, or give another deposition, unless Caleb gets sprung from jail.” Bea held the phone away from her ear as incoherent shouting filled the air. “Yes, ma’am. I know he punched Masterson’s lawyer. But we’re all pretty convinced that was a staged provocation in order to put Caleb somewhere Masterson can get to him. And I think you’re thinking the same thing.”

There was a long pause.

Bea pulled the phone back and held it out to me. “She wants to talk to you.”

I took the phone. “Yes, Ms. Jepsen?”

“You do know you’ve made a deal to testify, right? That the only way your own crimes go away is if you do testify?” the Attorney General reminded me.

“I was never charged with any crimes, but if you feel you have to, go ahead. All I hear is you dragging your feet over getting my Caleb home.” My tone was icy. I felt ice all the way to my soul. I doubted Ms. Jepsen had lifted a pinky to help Caleb. That made me suspicious of her.

“Ms. Collins, you have to understand how this works…” she started her own lecture.

“No,” I interrupted. “You have to understand how this works. I am not doing one goddamn thing for you until you get Caleb out of jail. End of conversation. I don’t care how you have to do it. I don’t care what favors you have to call in. I don’t care if you have to give out new favors, or if it looks bad for the trial, or if Chalmers has nude photos of you with the President of the United States. I don’t care. You’re trying to win a career make-or-break case. So all you have to ask yourself is if you’re willing to march out of that courtroom after making an embarrassment of yourself because you were unable to provide witnesses. Or maybe it won’t even go to trial at all, and you’ll have the humiliation of failure hanging over you that way. I don’t care. I only care about Caleb.”

“He landed himself in jail himself, Ms. Collins,” the Attorney General shot back.

“And that makes him an idiot. But he’s my idiot, and I want him back.” I was rather proud of myself. My voice didn’t waver one bit.

Ms. Jepsen made a sound of frustration. “You’re being unreasonable.”

“You’re wasting time. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.” I stabbed the ‘End’ button.

“You know, Jacey, you’re quite scary when Caleb isn’t around,” Hansen grunted as Bea took her phone back.

“Sometimes, I have to protect him, too,” I replied fiercely.

“I think I’d kill to have the kind of loyalty you two have,” Bea said, pocketing her phone.

Hansen frowned at her. “I’m right here.”

“No offense,” she told him, “but you’d leave me high and dry to save our country. Jacey’s willing to watch the world burn to get Caleb back.”

“That’s what being young and stupid is all about,” he grumbled.

“I prefer young and in love, but whatever you guys want to call it,” I said.

We turned into the hotel parking ramp. After parking, Hansen and Bea got out of the car and flanked me on either side to the elevator.

When we got to our suite, the door was ajar.

Bea halted me with a hand on my shoulder. Hansen drew his gun and approached the door slowly.

Then he kicked it open. “FBI! FREEZE!!!”

A loud shriek and a thud accompanied his order, and he stepped into the room, his gun pointed straight ahead. “Get up,” he said to someone I couldn’t see. “Tell me what happened here.”

The reply was a babble of terrified Spanish.

“Wait here,” Bea said. “I have to go translate. If you see anyone, anyone, you call for us, you got that?”

I nodded. My heart was pounding. After Bea entered the hotel room as well, I pressed myself to the hallway wall, looking up and down the corridor.

A flicker of movement at one end, then the loud bang of a gun inside the hotel room, had me running into the suite.

“Oh no,” I whispered, shaking as I saw the woman I knew was part of the Trinary standing over Hansen’s body. She was wearing a hotel maid’s uniform, but I recognized her just the same.

“Jacey, get out of here!” Bea yelled from her position behind the couch.

I looked at Bea, then at the woman, then back at Bea. Then back at the woman. I held up my hands. “You want me? Leave Bea alone,” I said, my voice shaking. “Obviously the money’s too good to pass up. Was it the sheik? Masterson?”

“Both.” The woman grinned at me. “And why would I ‘leave Bea alone’? I have you either way, and one less witness…” She turned and shot through the couch.

Bea grunted, then hit the floor, gripping her chest.

I did the only thing I could think of. I turned and ran.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Ja-a-cey,” the Trinary woman said. I heard another shot and then just knew that Bea was dead. But I couldn’t think about that now. “J-a-a-cey…” echoed down the hall.

I didn’t look back. I kept running, slamming through the door to the stairwell. I wasn’t getting trapped on an elevator. That would be a real rookie move.

Of course, TRI-nary meant there were another two of them around, and one of them smirked at me as I reached the level below. I yelped and turned on my heel, pelting up the stairs.

“You know, they did say it could be dead or alive,” he called from down the stairs. “You might as well stop running!”

“Fuck you!” I shouted back without so much as turning my head. I couldn’t get distracted. Not now.

I had to get away.

I took the stairs all the way to the roof, my lungs burning as I burst through the door. The third had to be around there somewhere. On the ground. On the roof. Somewhere.

Unfortunately for me, on the roof was where he was. He came out from behind an industrial air conditioning unit and pointed his gun at me.

“You need to give up now, Ms. Collins. It’s over,” he said.

The door behind me creaked open, and I knew the other two were at my back.

“Did they say dead or alive?” I asked, my words coming out in a wheeze.

“They did indeed,” the female Trinary member said.

I swallowed. Caleb, please be okay. “Then it’s going to have to be dead.”

As they closed in on me, I dashed to the edge of the roof.

And jumped.