Mr. Rockstar is Sold

Ch-40 ★Lullaby

Jake is Xavier's elder brother. Xavier is Melody's husband.        

Ch-40 ★Lullaby     

         I made sure the car was locked from inside. From the first few rays of dawn, I could make out the group of four men approaching from both sides.  My hands reached for the glove compartment and pulled out the gun and pocket knife. I quickly tucked the gun and knife under my jacket.

                Ignoring the trembling of my hands and the palpitations in my heart, I called Cassidy. Inside my head, I carefully went over the plan we had made. It wasn’t a plan that guaranteed my safety but it had a small flowers of hope for Jay’s escape and I’m willing to take that risk.

                “They’re here,” I whispered. My eyes widen as I take in the first loud knock on my window.

“Excuse me?” I could hear the familiar tall man with the vivid, scornful smile yell outside. “Could you please tell us the way to Thomason Bridge?”

I gulped, knowing that this was a trap.

I turned my face away from the window so they couldn’t read my lips. “You know who to call,”

[Yesterday]

Before I went to Jay’s apartment, I stopped by Cassidy’s place. There were things we needed to discuss and solutions that needed to be found. When Jay had told me about Jake and his crime, it all seemed so strange to me that I had asked Cassidy to get to the bottom of this. I called her when I was packing my bags to head back home. We agreed on hiring a PI to spy on Jake.

 She sat beside the fireplace. A red hue from the flames, flickering on her face.

“Does your private investigator have any new information on Jake?” I shifted in the sofa, intently watching her while I waited for the answer.  She quickly went through images on her tablet, the ones her PI had sent.

“Some pictures of Jake and the people he met with. Nothing important. Here, take a look at Jake,” She held out the tablet for me to take.

The plastic felt cold in my warm fingers. Fire was crackling as it ate the wood logs away. The ancient grandfather clock in the far corner of the seating room noisily made me aware of every second that passed by but I could not force my eyes away from Jake. He looked everything other than what I had imagined him to be.

                Handsome and coy. Those were two adjectives that perfectly described him. He was dressed in a long coat, button up trousers, and a white crisp shirt and was ballroom dancing with an elegant women in a flowing black gown. They stood in La Bourtie’s lounge area. It was a formal dining establishment in north London.

My fingers glided on the screen. The next image devastatingly juxtaposed with the earlier image.

The handsome and coy man had transformed into a vicious beast. Jake was smiling an intoxicating smile as he held out a knife and had it pointed towards another man. They stood in a rundown bar. The neon lights glowed behind Jake, giving the knife’s metal a strange glow.

Image after image, I was simply fascinated by Jake. It was a kind of fascination that horrified me. How could one person have so many faces? He was a perfect gentleman in one picture and in the next he was a rowdy gangster. It was like he was living two lives at the same time. What a clever man? One personality was for the world to see so he would never fall in shades of doubt and the other one was the real Jake, the one who killed in a blink of an eye.

“I think he has a hint about us keeping tabs on him.” Cassidy’s shattered the trance I had been set in. “There’s has been less suspicious activity. The only law breaking thing he’s done so far is threatening his friend with a knife. We have no proof that he runs an assassination business. That kind of information had only be provided to us because Jay knew him personally,”