Page 105 of The Ashes of Summer

"Not dead enough."

I bring it down on his skull. Something splits—a sound like a fence post driven into wet ground—and I do it again, and I'd keep going, I'd stand here all fucking night⁠—

"Boss." Carter's grip tightens. "Let’s go find your girl."

And that's the only thing in this world that could have stopped my foot.

I step back, breathing hard.

There's nothing on that floor that looks like a man. Nothing left of the boy with the guitar who called himself Benny.

Blood on my boots. My hands. Up my forearms. Across my face, dripping off my jaw.

Carter looks down at it for half a second. "Christ." Not judging. Just noting it.

I drag my wrist across my mouth and make it worse, and I'm already moving for the door, and I don't look back at him.

He deserved hours.

He got ninety seconds.

And she's still out there.

Find her before Jackson does.

Chapter 34

The Bullet Between Us

Jacob

Blood drips off my boots onto what's left of the thing on the floor.

Carter's already got Hayes free. They come up with rifles that were propped against the wall and I take the handgun from beside Kurt's body. My knuckles are screaming and I don't feel any of it.

Summer. Alive. She has to be. I'm not letting my head go anywhere else.

The alarms are deafening now. Red light strobes down the corridors, turning the whole place into a fever dream. Somewhere below us men are shouting over the top of each other.

Then gunfire. Fast. Panicked. Badly aimed.

None of it is ours. There isn't a badge left standing in this house except the two men beside me.

Which means Jackson's men are shooting at something.

I tell myself it's each other. Shadows. Their own reflections in all that expensive fucking glass. Frightened men in a dark house firing at anything that moves.

But she's loose in here somewhere.

And every one of those rounds is going somewhere.

"East corridor," Carter says.

We move.

The first guard comes round the corner almost into my chest. His eyes go wide. Too slow. I take him by the vest and put him skull-first into the wall hard enough that the sound cracks down the hallway, and he's out before he lands. Carter puts a round through his forehead anyway.

Another one steps out behind him with a shotgun already up and, before we can react, empties it into Hayes.