Page 47 of The Ashes of Summer

My hands flatten against the desk. I should already be up there. I should be walking that ground, learning every inch of it with my own eyes instead of staring at pixels on a fucking screen hoping one of them suddenly gives me the answer I've missed ninety-nine times already.

Sitting here feels like a mistake. Every muscle in my body is wound so tight I can feel the adrenaline looking for somewhere to go, my leg bouncing once before I force it still.

I thought about drones. Thermal imaging. Hell, I even caught myself wondering whether I could get a helicopter over the area without anyone asking questions. Anything to give me an advantage before I walked into whatever Jackson's built out there.

But the second one of his men spots something that doesn't belong… He’ll move her again. Bury her somewhere I'll never find. Or he could decide to make an example out of her before I ever get close enough to stop him.

Fuck.

The thought drives itself beneath my ribs and stays there. Every time I close my eyes, she's still there, looking straight out of the helicopter window, begging me to get to her.

My stomach rolls violently.

I should've protected her better. The thought has rooted itself somewhere beneath my ribs, festering every hour she's gone. No matter how many times I replay it, it always ends the same way. The helicopter lifting into the sky. Me standing there, powerless, while she disappeared. One mistake. One fucking mistake, and she's paying for it.

My hand drags slowly over my face as another thought forces its way in.

Sarah.

The butler told me she'd been there. I'd seen the devastation in his face before he'd even said the words. Rivers Ridge hadn't been the end of her nightmare—it had been one stop along the way. Somewhere women were stripped down until whatever made them them barely existed anymore before they were moved somewhere else. A sorting facility. A training ground. A place built to erase people. I don't know what the fuck to call it anymore, only that Sarah survived it, and judging by the look in her father's eyes, surviving didn't mean she'd escaped it.

The questions keep coming whether I want them to or not. Should I have gone looking for her instead? Should I have found the women who'd already made it out? Followed the trail forward instead of backward? Because if Rivers Ridge is only the beginning—if Summer survives that place only to disappear somewhere deeper inside whatever Jackson has built—then every second I spend chasing the wrong lead gives him another chance to bury her somewhere I'll never find.

No.

I refuse to let my mind finish that thought.

I'll tear every fucking property he owns apart. Every warehouse. Every house. Every business. Every bastard connected to him. I don't care how long it takes or how many bodies I leave behind. If Jackson thinks he can build an empire big enough to hide her from me, then he's forgotten the one thing men like him always forget. Everything burns if you keep the fire going long enough.

The quiet click of the door breaks the thought before it can spiral any further.

Tamara steps inside carrying two coffees, a patient file tucked beneath one arm. She looks worse than she did a few hours ago, the exhaustion obvious now—dark shadows beneath her eyes, her ponytail half-fallen loose, the kind of fatigue no amount of caffeine is going to fix. She eases the door shut with her foot before holding one of the coffees out to me.

I take it automatically.

"Any change?"

"No."

The word comes out rough enough that I barely recognize my own voice.

She glances at the man lying motionless in the bed before lowering herself into the chair opposite with a tired sigh. For a while neither of us says anything. The rain continues its slow assault against the windows while the monitors keep their relentless rhythm, measuring out the seconds I'm losing one heartbeat at a time.

"So..." she says eventually, wrapping both hands around her coffee. "Your girl."

My shoulders tense before I can stop them.

"I'd heard there was someone younger living with you. People talked, but I figured it was some kind of protection arrangement that got complicated. I didn't realize..."

"Yeah," I interrupt, my voice flat. "She's younger than me."

Tamara studies me, reading the warning in my tone exactly the way I'd intended it. She knows where the line is, but instead of backing away from it, she carefully steps around it.

"And she's Michael Miller's daughter."

I'm already sick to death of hearing his name attached to hers, but something in the way she says it makes me lift my eyes from the coffee and really look at her.

“Yes,” I snap. “What about it?”