Chapter Thirteen
When Jaci was a child imprisoned in hell, she used to dream about spending Christmas in New York City.
Her father didn’t celebrate the holiday itself, but he loved telling her about the lights, about the tourists ice-skating beneath the tree in Rockefeller Center, about how the entire city seemed to turn into a magical snow-globe village all at once. If you turned your head and squinted just a certain way, he’d said, you could almost believe it was all make-believe. Magic.
He’d painted such vivid pictures that Jaci almost felt like she’d grown up here, too.
“We’ll go one day,” he’d said. “Soon as we get out of here, I’ll take you to see the tree.”
In the seven years she’d been in New York, Jaci still hadn’t gone. She was never more than a subway ride away, but she jus
