Page 148 of The Ashes of Summer

Jackson sits in the middle of it, chained to the chair exactly as we left him, head hanging forward.

When we walk further in, he lifts it.

His face is barely recognizable. The swelling has darkened, one eye completely closed now, the other reduced to a narrow glittering slit. Blood has dried in long tracks down his chin and throat.

He looks like something close to finished, but he smiles anyway. Of course he does.

"Well, well, well." His voice comes out wet and ruined, barely the same voice that used to move through me like ice water. "The big bad sheriff came back. You got the balls to finish it this time, you fucking coward?"

Jacob laughs.

It isn't a pleasant sound. Not amused. Not cruel, exactly, either. Just the sound of a man who has moved completely past the point where Jackson Moore can reach him.

"I came to wish you every misery you've got coming," he says. "Right up until you rot."

Jackson's ruined mouth pulls wider. "Then do it. Shoot me. Stab me. Beat me to a fucking pulp if that's what gets you off." Spit gathers at the corner of his mouth. "Stop with the theatrics and finish it."

I step forward.

His one working eye slides toward me, and the smile stays but something underneath it shifts. Something uncertain. Because I'm not looking at him the way I used to. Not with fear, not with hatred, not with the involuntary flinch my body learned inside these walls.

I'm looking at him the way you look at something that used to be dangerous and isn't anymore.

"My fiancé and I have somewhere to be," I say. "But we brought some people to see you."

I swing the door open without taking my eyes off his face.

They come in one at a time.

Thirteen women, moving quietly, filing into the room until they've formed a loose ring around the chair. Jackson's eye tracks each of them as they come. I watch his face work through it—confusion first, then a flicker of something that might be fear, put away fast, replaced by a performance of contempt that doesn't quite arrive in time to be convincing.

He knows most of these faces. I can see it in the way his jaw sets as the room fills. In the change in his breathing.

Constance pushes off the wall and steps in to close the circle, arms still folded, expression giving away nothing. She doesn't look at him with hatred. She looks at him with the particular blankness of a woman who has already decided he doesn't warrant the energy of an emotion.

"What the fuck is this." Flat. Like he's trying very hard to make it sound like a statement.

Nobody answers him.

Carter wheels a cart to the side of the room. I don't look at what's on it. I don't need to.

From the corner of my eye I see one of the women lean toward another and murmur something. The other one nods. Both of them look at Jackson with expressions so completely without mercy that I feel it move through the room like a current.

Then Mason steps through the circle.

He walks slowly, deliberately, like a man who has waited an extremely long time for this exact moment and intends to be present for every second of it. He reaches the cart and his hand closes around the handle of the mallet without him having to look for it.

He turns it once in his grip. Twice. His eyes stay on Jackson the whole time.

"Sophia Jerome," he says.

His voice is completely steady.

"My little girl."

I look at Jacob without meaning to, and he's already looking at the floor. Not away. Down. The way a man looks when he's carrying something he's been carrying a long while and has just been reminded of the exact weight of it. He made that call knowing what he was calling this man into. He drove up here knowing the name was going to be said out loud in this room.

He knew. He's always known. And Mason has stood beside him through every hour of the last three days with that name locked in his mouth.