Chapter Two
I HAVE NO IDEA WHYhe's speaking Italian and I don't want to know.
All I care about is ending this nightmare right now.
My phone's already in my hand even though I don't remember pulling it out, and all it will take is just one little slide on the screen. Just one wrong move, one wrong word, and I don’t care if I’m overreacting.
"If you're not out of my apartment in five minutes I'm going to call the police."
"You can try, but it won't work."
I don't even bother answering him.
I just want to scare him a bit, show him I'm calling 911, but...
It's not working.
I don't have a signal.
Any kind of signal.
The bars at the top of my screen—four bars at their strongest, even in the bathroom—are gone. Not one bar. Not the flickering one I sometimes get during storms. Nothing. The little airplane icon isn't on. The wifi's connected to my router. The data's on. None of it's doing anything.
And when my incredulous gaze flies to him—
"Signal jammer,” Nate says simply.
“Excuse me?”
Why would someone start jamming signals in this building, and how does he even know that’s happening?
"Sit down,per favore."
Oh, the gall of this man to bark out orders at me!
“No, I won’t sit down,” I retort, “and anyway, why do you keep speaking in Italian—”
"I have always been Italian, Juniper—”
Aha!
“Is that where you’ve been hiding all these years then? Are you some kind of fugitive—”
“I’ll start explaining if you sit down.”
I open my mouth to argue.
“Please sit down.”
His voice is gentle, and he’s even used the magic word.
Those are reasons enough for me to be reasonable, and so I do it.
I sit down.
Not because his words, when softly spoken like that, somehow feel like a threat.
I’m just sitting down because I want to prove that I’ve grown up, and I’m, you know,reasonable.