Page 101 of The Ashes of Summer

"Motherfucker."

I can barely get the words out. "Where—where did you get that?"

She glances back at me. "Carter."

Something tightens in my chest. Of course.

"He knew we'd come." She shrugs. "He knew neither of us were ever going to listen."

Adelaide finally drags her eyes off the bodies. "Wait—" Her voice trembles. "We've got Summer. Do we call the station? Do we have, like, a direct line to the FBI or something?"

Constance's hands move automatically, checking the chamber before her attention shifts to me.

"Oh, sweet girl." A low laugh. "Right now, we are the motherfucking FBI."

Then she looks at me.

"Let's go get your man."

Chapter 33

He Deserved Hours

Jacob

Groves' body is still strapped to the chair.

Head hanging forward. Blood dried dark down the front of his vest. The overhead light stutters every few seconds and each flash makes it gleam wet all over again.

The smell in here has gone thick. Copper and sweat and death, and it crawls into my lungs every time I breathe.

Jackson wanted this. Not just the killing—the display. He wants me sitting three feet from one of my own men with a hole in his head, and he wants me to understand that I couldn't stop it. That I can't stop a fucking thing. That he can reach out and take anyone I've got, any time he likes, and all I get to do is sit here and watch.

And here's the thing I'd never say out loud.

Part of me understands him.

Not the trafficking. Not the warehouse. Not the women—never that. But the grief? The kind that hollows a man out until there's nothing left in him but the violence? Yeah. I've been standing on the lip of that fucking hole since the night a helicopter took her out of my hands.

Except I never fell in. And I know exactly why.

Because she was taken. Taken means there's a road. Taken means somewhere out there in the dark she's still breathing, still fighting, still waiting for me to come and get her—and a man can survive almost anything as long as there's a road back to the person he loves.

Jackson didn't get a road. He got a body on a floor.

If I'd come up this mountain tonight and found her dead—if somebody had put Summer in the ground and left me standing over the hole with nothing in front of me but the rest of my life—I wouldn't be sitting in this chair thinking about rescue. Whatever's left of a man after that isn't a man. It's a machine with one fucking setting.

So yeah. I understand the hole.

But here's where it stops.

I'd have gone after the man who did it, and I'd have taken my fucking time, and then I'd have put the last round through my own skull—and that would have been the end of it. It starts and finishes with me and him.

I would never have gone looking for somebody else's daughter to pour into the shape of her. Never have dragged a girl out of her own fucking life, dyed her hair, put a dead woman's scent on her skin and called it love.

And I'd sure as hell never have taken a building full of women who trusted me enough to work there and moved them into a warehouse to be sold off to men who'd do God knows what to them. Sold their whole lives. Sold their fucking souls, one at a time, and told myself I was owed it.

That's the fucking difference. Not the grief. Grief I understand.