Page 130 of The Ashes of Summer

Carter's expression darkens. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Jackson drags his swollen face up again. "There are men making millions off my inventory." His eye flicks to Summer. "Men considerably more dangerous than me."

Silence crashes through the room. Then Summer says, quietly, "The warehouse."

Jackson smiles again. "I'd bet it's already empty."

My stomach drops. Carter swears under his breath.

Summer turns to me. "We need the location."

Jackson eases back in the chair as far as the chains let him. "And what do I get in return?"

I step forward, and the pain tears through my shoulder, and I don't care.

"You're confusing this for a negotiation."

He laughs, weak and wet. "You still don't understand, Sheriff." His good eye locks onto mine. "I've already won."

Chapter 40

The Third Fingernail

Jacob

Jackson talked after the third fingernail.

Fucking coward.

The first one came off easy enough. Carter held his hand flat against the table while I worked the pliers under the nail and pulled up, and the scream that followed went round that concrete room and came back at us off the walls. Not the controlled kind either—not the kind a man forces through his teeth to save face. Real screaming. The kind that tears out of somebody when pain strips away every layer of bullshit he's spent his life wrapping around himself.

By the second nail he was crying. Actually crying, tears cutting tracks through the blood on his face while more of it ran off his ruined fingertips onto the floor.

By the third he was begging.

Turns out Jackson Moore wasn't half the man he'd spent years pretending to be.

The address came out between sobs and ragged breaths. South side of Blackwater Ridge—an old freight depot converted into a storage facility a couple of decades back.

Only it isn't storing freight.

The thought puts something ugly under my skin, and it brings all of them with it. Every girl they've taken. Every family still sitting up wondering where their daughter went. Every body we've pulled out of the ground with no name to put on it.

Every father like Groves.

Jackson's chained back into the chair while Carter wraps gauze around his hand—not because either of us cares whether he suffers, but because dead men stop talking and I'm not convinced he's given us everything yet.

He looks terrible.

Good.

His face has gone gray beneath the blood smeared across it. One eye's swollen shut now and sweat beads along his hairline despite the cold coming through this house. Every breath catches somewhere around the hole Summer put through his thigh.

I hope it hurts. I hope every single inhale feels like a blade going in.

Across the room, Summer watches him from beside the doorway, and she's gone quiet.

Not scared. Not anymore.