Page 147 of The Ashes of Summer

Just when I think I understand him, he does something like this.

I watch the women climb out of the trucks one by one in the gray morning light and I think about what Jacob said in that parking lot—standing on the hood with blood soaking through his bandages, offering them a choice. Not demanding. Not deciding for them. Offering. Like their agency was the one thing left in this whole nightmare that still belonged entirely to them.

Maybe that's what this is. His way of making sure Jackson Moore ends the way he lived: completely surrounded by the consequences of what he chose to do with his life.

Jacob made one call before we left that parking lot. He stepped a few feet from the trucks with his back to the group, his voice too low for me to catch any of it. But I watched his face while he talked—the way it tightened, then steadied, then did something I didn't have a clean word for—and when he came back he didn't say a word about it.

Twenty minutes into the drive, headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. A single truck keeping pace with us through the mountain roads, steady and unhurried.

I didn't ask. I already knew.

Mason meets us at the gate.

He must have driven fast to get here first, but he doesn't look rushed. He looks exactly like a man who's been waiting a long time for this and didn't want to be late for it. He's standing outside his truck with his hands in his jacket pockets when we pull in, and when Jacob gets out the two of them exchange a look that doesn't need anything attached to it. Mason nods once. Jacob nods back.

That's all.

He falls into step with us as we move toward the entrance and nobody questions it. Some things don't need explaining.

The driveway of Rivers Ridge looks different in daylight.

I don't know what I expected. Something uglier, maybe. Something that matched the version of this place that lives in my chest—cold marble and red camera lights and the smell of chemicals and fear. But the morning has softened it, if you can look beyond the bodies on the ground. The lawn catches the early sun. The stone facade is almost beautiful, all clean lines and tall windows throwing back a pale sky.

I feel everything.

Jacob's hand finds the small of my back as we walk, and I lean into it without thinking, the way I do now. The way my body has learned to move toward him like it's the most natural thing in the world. He grunts low as his boots hit the gravel steps and I feel the tension move through him even through his jacket—the careful way he's holding that shoulder, the catch in his breathing he doesn't bother hiding from me anymore.

He doesn't say anything.

Neither do I.

There's a guard still slumped against the low wall near the entrance, half collapsed sideways with one arm at an angle arms don't go. One of the women walks past him without looking. Another slows, stares at him for a long moment, then keeps moving. Her face doesn't change at all.

They all have that look. Whatever they felt the first time they were brought to this house—the fear, the disorientation, the terrible dawning understanding—it's been replaced by something quieter and far more settled. Women who have already decided something and don't feel the need to announce it.

The marble inside is ruined.

Dark footprints track across the white floor in overlapping arcs, ours from last night, dried to a deep reddish brown. Broken glass from one of the corridor lights lies scattered near the base of the stairs. A painting has come off the wall and leans crooked against the baseboard, gold frame split at one corner.

The Ridge's performance of wealth and control has been pulled apart at every seam, and what's underneath it turns out to be a building. Stone and glass and empty rooms.

I'm not afraid walking through it this time. I'm not sure I feel much of anything at all, right up until we reach the doorway at the top of the basement stairs and one of the women behind me stops walking.

"I can't." Her voice comes out small. Not weak—honest. Like someone who has done an enormous number of hard things and has finally found the exact edge of what she can carry. "I'm sorry. I just—I can't go back down there."

Sarah steps beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touch. "It's closure, Bethany," she says gently. "He can't reach us anymore. That's all this is."

Bethany shakes her head once and presses her lips together. Then she turns and walks back toward the entrance without another word, and I watch her go and I understand it completely. If Jacob weren't beside me right now, if his hand weren't warm against my back, I don't think I could go down those stairs either.

But he is.

So I do.

Carter doesn't look surprised when we push through the heavy door at the bottom—Jacob called ahead—and he just nods once toward him with something unreadable in his face and steps aside.

Adelaide leans against the far wall with her arms folded. She looks up when I come in and something passes between us that isn't words and isn't quite an expression. Just the particular understanding of two people who survived the same thing from different angles. She straightens and comes to stand beside me without saying anything at all.

The room smells like blood and concrete and something faintly chemical underneath. The single overhead light throws everything into a hard shadow.