“Are you smelling me?” he asks.
“No...what? No.”
He smirks as I round the table and sit next to Gwen, putting space between us.
Jackal waves his hand between the two of us. “Okay. Start from the beginning.”
“Too much to tell,” I tell him and Gwen nods.
“Oh no. No, no. You’re not getting out of talking,” he says, pointing at me.
Gwen’s eyebrow quirks up just as Jewel comes into the room. Jackal goes completely still, eyes bugging when he sees her, and I look at Jewel to see her reaction. She smirks and stares him down.
“You two know each other?” I ask, dread filling my chest at the thought of him sleeping with her.
“Who do I ask for when I come back,” he says, monotone.
“Why would I tell you now,” she says, laughing. “See you around, End Man.” She does a pageant wave and backs out of the room.
He levels her back with a glare and turns to me. “You’re enough to deal with on your own; I don’t know if I can handle three of you together in the same room.”
“There are a few more,” I tell him.
“A few?” He looks at Gwen. “The news is reporting that you walked out of that prison with a hundred women.”
Gwen nods solemnly. “Jackal, they lock women away for trying to feed their families. That’s what they’re not telling the public. Women who are caught trading on the black market and those who are writing articles about the conditions in the lower end. Cardi was serving a ten-year sentence for buying a sewing machine so she could make cheaper dresses for factory workers rather than buying from the companies owned by the upper end!”
“Where did they all go, when they left with you?”
“Some went back to their families, who will hide them; others chose to try to cross the border themselves. We spread the more serious cases out and we’ll sneak them across slowly.”
“And the guards, they just let you out?”
“Some were bribed, others supported our cause.”
“Bribed by who?” Jackal asks.
“The Revolution.”
“I suppose that’s where you come in,” he says, looking at me.
“I provide some of the funding, yes,” I say. “What can’t be siphoned out of bank accounts is stolen.”
“You really are Robin Hood. That was no stretch.” He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes, shaking his head.
“This is not just about the End Men anymore, Jackal. This is about all of the Regions,” Gwen says. “The power the upper end holds over the lower. The fact that they could just take my baby from me. I—I didn’t even have a trial…”
We both look at Gwen with horror and don’t know what to say. There are no words for what she’s been through.
“Jackal,” I say. “You have no choice in what you do,” I say it gently enough that he looks at me in surprise.
“I had a choice. I signed the contract.”
“And if you hadn’t signed it? The Society would have just...let you walk away?”
His face clouds over. Gwen and I exchange a glance. She walks over to where Jackal is standing and places a hand on his arm.
“Where’s Marcus, Jackal?”