Christian fucking Grey! Of all the people in the world, that bitch had been dating the man who took everything that should have been mine! I hated her, but nowhere near as much as I hated him. I couldn't believe it when his hired goons showed up seconds after Ana ran from me. Like the others, I meant her to be mine. And now, between her and Grey, they'd cost me everything I'd worked so hard to achieve.
Ana's kick between my legs ruptured one of my nuts. Combined with the beating from Grey's thugs, I was in a bad way by the time the police relented and took me to a hospital. There they announced I would be charged, outright refusing to consider my claims of assault, declaring Ana's attack on me as justifiable self-defense and claiming there was no evidence Grey's security staff did anything beyond restrain me while waiting for the police to arrive. Looks like even New York's finest weren't immune to Grey's influence, or more likely his abundant cash!
An hour of surgery, and one testicle later, I'd woken up handcuffed to the hospital bed with a summons to appear in court in several weeks' time. Not long after, Roach rang to terminate my employment with Seattle Independent Publishing, telling me Grey was putting the word out any company employing me could expect to make his shit-list. No one would risk the megalomaniac's wrath; I'd never work in publishing again. Between Grey, and his cock-teasing bitch, they'd done a real number on me. They'd ruined me.
There was no point returning to Seattle. Other than my car, and a few bits of cheap IKEA furniture in my apartment, there was nothing for me there. When I was discharged from hospital, with a substantial bill my now defunct SIP corporate health insurance plan would not cover, I left my phone in the trash can, drained my bank account, and disappeared.
From here on in, Jack Hyde would cease to exist. I'd built my way from the ground up once - I could sure as hell do it again. But this time, I had a mission. Grey would get a taste of how it felt to think everything he ever wanted was within reach to then have it ripped away from him.
Payback is a bitch. I didn't yet know how, or when, but Grey and his bitch would suffer and regret the day they fucked with Jack Hyde!
I stole a car and took off with no immediate destination in mind. While it was easy to lose yourself in New York, it was an expensive city, and I didn't doubt Grey would have people looking for me. Far easier to go somewhere smaller. So that's why I headed to Detroit. A shit hole I'd hoped never to set foot in again, it hadn't improved with the economic downturn yet that made it the ideal place to hide. Since I would not risk returning to Seattle, it wasn't like I had any other home to return to. It was a city full of broken people and promises.
It would be marginally quicker to cross into Canada and cut across to Detroit that way, however I didn't want to risk a border crossing. Everything I knew about Christian Grey suggested he would exhaust every avenue looking for me - and crossing the border would leave a record. So I elected to drive to the south of Lake Erie, approaching Detroit via Toledo.
I'd been in Detroit a few weeks weighing up my options. Burning through my money, I needed to find a cheap or free place to bide my time. I had no family, no real friends, and I'd spent my youth bouncing from one disreputable foster home to another. The closest I'd ever been to finding a permanent place was with the Ilyards, but like everything good that ever happened in my life that, too, ended.
In a rural area outside Detroit, they'd sent me to the Ilyards' when I was thirteen. Honest farming people, they needed a young man to help out on the farm. I hated the mindless manual labor I did before and after school and on weekends. That said, the Ilyards treated me with a kindness lacking at my other foster placements. They understood I loved to read and did everything they could to keep me supplied with books.
The local library possessing little other than the classics, there I'd first escaped my life. Through books, I imagined a life I wanted to live. A life with more.
Wyatt, the dad, had been the silent type. Old school but not uncaring. Like Wyatt, his wife, Valma, was from a third-generation farming family. She was also the best cook I'd ever encountered. She'd cooked and cooked, never complaining about the amount of food I put away. After numerous foster homes, some where I hadn't received enough to fill my stomach, for the first six months at the Ilyards all I did was eat. And then there'd been Millie, their daughter. Eleven years old, and pretty enough in a girl-next-door sort of way, a difficult delivery and a lack of oxygen at birth caused Millie to be a little slow.
At first, I'd avoided her, going about my tasks ignoring the new 'little sister' who dogged my every footstep. She'd been quiet, rarely saying a word, just watching me work and giving me shy smiles. After a while she'd started asking questions. Mostly questioning me about where I'd lived before, and what life was like outside the sleepy rural area where she'd grown up. Unused to anyone showing an interest in me, other than for their own benefit, eventually I opened up, telling Millie everything.
She'd been my first true friend. After a while, we went everywhere and did everything on the farm together, me working with Millie as my little shadow. Her kind and simple nature was a balm to my tortured soul, helping me come to terms with all the cruelty and apathy inflicted on me over the years. Something about her made me trust her. Pretty much everyone I'd ever encountered fucked me over, but I'd trusted Millie, and she'd trusted me, too. I'd do anything she asked, just to earn her smile. Sure, Millie was a little simple, but she cared about me. And that was the first time I'd genuinely encountered that.
Life had been as good as it got, for me, until just after Millie turned thirteen. We'd been in the barn one day, talking as I mucked out the stalls. I could still remember it like yesterday. Millie sitting on a hay bale, telling me how some kids at school were teasing her because she wasn't able to keep up with them, academically. I'd been furious, resolved to make those kids' lives a living hell when we got to school the next day. Sweet and innocent, with a heart of gold, Millie Ilyard was an easy target, but people quickly learned that messing with Jack Hyde earned them an educative session with my fists. The assholes at school would learn if they had something to say to Millie, they'd answer to me!
Millie was crying, so I walked over to embrace her. A brotherly hug turned into something else, and before I knew it, we were rolling in the hay, me lying on top of Millie kissing her passionately. It was my first real kiss. Hers, too. And for the first time I could remember, I knew happiness. I didn't want to take it any further. I don't think she did, either. But when Wyatt walked in to see me on top of his daughter, tears still on her face, before I had a chance to explain how special she was to me, he'd pulled me from Millie and beaten me senseless before packing my meager belongings and unceremoniously dumping me back out into the foster system.
With my card marked as 'a danger to other children', the polite euphemism for a violent child or a potential sex offender, fostering with another family was out of the question. So the department sent me to live in one of the group homes for older children of a similar disposition. Little better than juvie, my final years of high school were spent doing my best to fend off genuine sex predators, studying, and doing anything I could to spend every hour possible out of the hellhole where the State paid the absolute minimum to raise me. The day I graduated I left the home, and Detroit, vowing to never return.
Still, as I lay in my roach-infested hotel room in the city I'd once fled, I couldn't help be a little curious how Millie Ilyard had turned out. The only person growing up who'd genuinely cared for me, maybe it was time for me to look her up?
I needed to move on, so with my destination in mind, I bought an old junker and left Detroit, heading up to Lapeer to a tiny area called Elba where I'd drive north to the Ilyard's farm. Wyatt and Valma had been older parents; Millie an unexpected but very much wanted change of life baby. It was seventeen years since I'd left - Wyatt and Valma might be dead or in a nursing home, now, and Millie long gone. But I had to go somewhere, and their farm seemed as good a place as any. As my only real friend, I could only hope that Millie remembered me.
I drove through Lapeer, surprised at how little had changed in the decade and a half since I'd last been there. The Ilyard's property lay to the north, equidistant between the Lapeer and Davison townships. Millie and I had attended school in Lapeer, so I was familiar with the township of some 8,000 people. Cruising through it now, it was so much lesser than I remembered it. Always small, it had still been infinitely bigger than the Ilyard's isolated farm. I could still remember the excitement of our fortnightly visits to the Marguerite de Angeli Library, where I'd borrow as much as allowed, each book so precious, opening my mind and imagination to more than my circumscribed life with the Ilyard's afforded me.
Now all I could see was a shitty country town where everyone knew everyone. I was glad to be traveling through at night. I wanted minimal chance of observation. Sure Brian's, Leo's, Wendy's and McDonald's each boasted a few cars out front, and there was now a Chinese restaurant that hadn't been there when I'd lived nearby, along with a KFC, but the roads were quiet as I slipped through town onto the familiar route the school bus once traveled out to the Ilyard's farm.
Toward the end of the unmade road I pulled up to regard the property, creeping along with my lights off as memories swept over me. A full moon, it was light enough outside to see the place. The once neat farmhouse was now slightly unkempt, the gardens were likewise untidy, and the barn, once pristine and painted every second year, now looked dilapidated, even from the distance in darkness.
But the house showed signs of life. The window in the upstairs room I'd known as Millie's was illuminated. Gazing at the place, now, I remembered Valma's biscuits and the way she'd fondly brush the hair out of my eyes before serving me my meal. I'd always complimented her on the food, grateful to have plenty to eat after so long never quite replete. It hadn't been something I'd recognized, then – but with the benefit of hindsight, the woman had loved me in the only way I could tolerate. If she'd been there when Wyatt assumed I'd assaulted their daughter, maybe she would have stuck up for me?
The clock on the dashboard declared it 8:30. Not too late to call by, although certainly unusual for an unexpected visit. I briefly considered sleeping in the car at the side of the road and going to the house in the morning, but with harvest on and I couldn't risk anyone chancing along the road at crack of dawn and seeing my car. So I crept my car up to the house, resigned to rolling with the punches.
I parked out of sight of the road behind the barn, checking my reflection in the car mirror before straightening my clothes and heading up to the farmhouse. Even before I reached the top step, the front door opened and there stood Millie with a shotgun. Used to the silence of country living, she'd no doubt heard my car from miles away.
In a flimsy nightgown, her knees quaking, I understood not to spook Millie. Wyatt taught that girl to shoot from an early age. Even at thirteen, she'd been a crack shot.
"Easy," I drawled, trying not to let my fear project into my voice. "Millie? It's Jack. Jack Hyde. I used to live here with you and your family? It's late, but I was literally in the area. I hope it's ok for me to drop by?"
Millie's eyes widened, and the shotgun dipped immediately. Her eyes raked over me, taking in my hair, eyes and physique. Half a lifetime since I'd been here, yet Millie seemed to remember me.
"I still have the scar," I declared with a rueful grin, pointing out a long-healed gash on my forearm I'd received when climbing an apple tree to get the topmost fruit she'd desired. The wound and bruises when I'd fallen had hurt, but earning her smile when presenting her the bright red fruit had been worth it.
"Jackie?" she gasped, fully lowering the rifle in astonishment.
"Millie," I crooned, my gut knowing somehow, this woman would help me exact my revenge on the Greys.
Three quarters of a year! I'd wasted almost nine months of my life in Michigan waiting and making my plans. It had taken time, but Millie had been surprisingly willing to assist me. Her father buried years ago, Valma in a nursing home in Davison a victim of dementia, the farmland worked by her neighbors, Millie lived a solitary life in the old farmhouse, venturing into town only once a week to buy necessary supplies. No one ever visited her, Millie had excitedly explained when she'd welcomed me into the house on the first night.
The first few nights I'd slept in my old room. Untouched since I left, the same quilt lay across the end of the bed and the same furniture, old even when I was a teenager, were in the same positions. On the third night Millie invited me to join her in her parents' old room, offering herself on the dusty, saggy mattress. Her willingness off-putting, at first, I taught her how I liked it, and having no basis for comparison, she was willing, even eager, to take it rough.
Over weeks, then months, I persuaded Millie I'd never forgotten her, and that I'd always known she was it for me. Once she believed us to be soulmates, I told her all about Christian Grey; the man who'd stolen my chance at having a loving home growing up. Once she hated him, I told Millie about Ana; the workmate who would not take no for an answer. I explained how Ana had thrown herself at me on a work trip, claiming I'd attacked her when I refused to betray Millie - my one true love. By the time I explained the connection between Ana, who'd cost me my job, and Christian, Millie was more than ready to help me take vengeance.
A simple Google alert, set up under Millie's account, proved enough to keep me in the loop regarding Steele and Grey. Or the Greys as they went by now. Not only had the slut married Grey, and honeymooned in Europe, she was now pregnant, too! By my calculations, she must have fallen pregnant not long after the fateful weekend in New York. In my mind, I fantasized about Ana's body ripe and swollen with my seed. I loved the idea of taking her, forcing her to bear my children. Because even with one testicle if I took her often enough, eventually she'd fall pregnant to me. There's no way the control freak Christian Grey would want Ana once she was soiled by birthing another man's child. Even though this child was no doubt his, Ana's next one would be mine.
"Where are we?" Millie asked, waking as I drove her nondescript older sedan along the highway. With thirty-six hours' drive time between the farm and Seattle, I'd been driving two shifts a day, each five to six hours long. The only time I'd let Millie drive was when we needed to fill up. While the chances of Grey checking security cameras at gas stations was slim, it didn't hurt to be careful. The rest of the time I drove, stopping at small stores along the way, paying cash for our supplies so we'd be undetected.
We stopped at cheap hotels, changing the number plates for ones I'd 'appropriated' along the way to avoid detection. By the time we neared Spokane, I was almost thrumming with excitement.
"Just outside Spokane. We'll stop there for the night, and by tomorrow we'll be in Seattle."
"And we're staying at your friend's cabin out of town?" Millie asked, her mind unsuspicious, her eyes guilelessly trusting.
"That's right," I agreed, hoping Roach kept his fishing cabin outside Seattle, and that he wouldn't be visiting outside the peak August to January season. A weekend guest on a couple of occasions, Roach had shown me where he hid the key. Pleasant enough, the place did not have an alarm, and was miles from neighbors. Perfect for what I had in mind!
Settled in the seediest hotel in Spokane, registered under a fake name, I went through my notebook checking everything I'd learned about Ana and Christian Grey over the last few months. With the rough outline of a plan in mind, it was now a matter of reaching Seattle, settling in and waiting.