Page 133 of The Ashes of Summer

Perfect place to hide people.

Eventually Summer slows. "There."

The single word drags my attention forward.

The warehouse sits alone at the far end of an old freight yard, ringed by chain-link fence and stacks of rusted shipping containers. Security lights throw hard pools across cracked pavement, and whole sections of the property stay black between them.

No movement. No patrols. No vehicles going in or coming out.

Nothing at all.

Which is worse, not better. Because places like this are never empty. And if Summer's right about Vince, it isn't empty now—it's just quiet, in the way a house goes quiet when somebody inside doesn't want to be found.

Summer kills the headlights without being told.

"Good girl," I mutter. "We don't get any closer than we have to."

She doesn't even look at me. "Obviously."

Despite everything, the corner of my mouth twitches. A year ago she'd have argued with me about it. Now she's thinking tactically before I've finished the sentence.

We roll another quarter mile and pull in behind an abandoned loading structure that blocks the line of sight to the warehouse. Two dark trucks are already waiting.

Black's out before we've fully stopped, and the second he sees me climbing out of the SUV he goes still. Then his eyes narrow.

"What the fuck happened to you?"

I glance down at the bloodstained bandages under my shirt. "Long night."

"You got shot."

"Observant."

He stares at me a moment, then shakes his head slowly. "You should be in a hospital."

"I was."

His expression somehow gets worse.

Behind him, three men come out of the shadows. Older. Harder-faced. The military comes off them in the way they move, the way they scan the ground, the way not one of them leaves his back exposed for more than a couple of seconds at a time.

One steps forward—broad through the shoulders, gray threaded through his beard. "Black said there are women held inside."

"There are."

His jaw sets. No questions. No hesitation. No speech about doing the right thing.

Just anger. The kind that comes from knowing exactly what men like Jackson do, and exactly what happens when nobody stops them.

"You remember anything about the layout?" Black asks.

The question hangs there a second before Summer answers, and I watch her throat work as she swallows. Not because she's frightened of going back in. Because she's remembering. I know that look. I've seen it on her every hour since I got her back—the memories always land first. The smell. The sound. The feeling of being somewhere you don't belong. The kind of thing that stays a long time after the bruises fade.

"It's one big open space," she says. "Concrete floor. Mattresses everywhere. They use curtains to separate some of the women."

The words settle over the group and nobody touches them. Mattresses. Not beds. Not rooms. Mattresses thrown down on concrete, like they're housing animals.

"There's a staircase at the far end," she goes on, her eyes fixed on the building through the gaps in the structure. "It leads up to a maisonette built over the floor." Her voice catches. "That's where they took me."