Page 67 of The Ashes of Summer

I set my shoulder against the cracked wall, my split knuckles folded into my palm. "How?"

He huffs something with no humor in it. "You really need me to explain obsession to you?"

Fair. Doesn't make the thing turning over in my chest any easier to hold.

"He moved her upstairs eventually. Kept her away from clients. Bought her clothes. Jewelry. Changed things for her."

Changed things. The phrase catches on something in my head. "What kind of things?"

He hesitates. Then: "The club. Girls started getting a bigger cut. There was talk about proper medical care. Jackson didn't want Annalise working there anymore." His eyes drop. "But she wouldn't leave the other girls."

And there's Summer at the front of my mind before I can stop her—the stubborn lift of her chin every time she squared up to me, every time she decided someone weaker deserved better. The fire in her I could never argue her out of.

That's when I understand exactly why his face went gray the second I said Jackson had taken her to the Ridge.

"What does this have to do with Summer?" Constance asks, sharp.

Kurt's expression darkens, his mouth twisting into something with no humor anywhere near it. "Michael Miller." A beat. "He used the club."

That hits like a fist to the sternum.

No. District Attorney Michael Miller. Rosefield's golden fucking man. The one who stood behind podiums talking about protecting women while he paid to use them in the dark.

Absolutely fucking not.

Except the memories are already surfacing, and I can't shut them off. Miller drifted through the station one afternoon, distracted, Reyes grinning after him—"Trying to impress Elaine tonight, sir?"—and the whole room laughing, me with them. Miller said he was heading home on the nights I'd swing by to see Summer and find the house dark and him nowhere in it; I'd figured an affair and told myself it wasn't my business. Some other day, a deputy mentioned a prostitution arrest tied to Moore's club—a young woman, processing downstairs—and me not caring enough to lift my head off my paperwork. Too busy with more important things. Too busy watching Miller's daughter.

Jesus Christ.

"He used the club… a lot," Kurt goes on quietly. "And when he saw Annalise, he wanted a taste."

"Jackson wouldn’t let him…." It leaves me on its own.

Kurt nods. "He told him no. Repeatedly."

"What happened?"

He stares somewhere past me. "Miller had her arrested."

Adelaide looks horrified. "For what?"

"Prostitution."

Of course he did.

"He represented her afterward too. Said he knew her father. Said he wanted to help her."

Manipulative fucking snake.

"What happened to the charges?" Constance asks.

"There wasn't enough evidence."

No. There wouldn't have been.

And the last piece drops in—the one I walked past a hundred times and never once looked at straight. Jackson, out front of the station beside a black SUV, a cigarette burning down to his knuckles, came to collect one of his girls himself. I remember the wrongness of it, the way he stood there looking like a man deciding who to bury. And behind the glass that same morning, Summer coming through the doors with coffees balanced up her arm, laughing at something Hayes said, too bright for a place like that, every man in the room turning to watch her the way they always did—my head coming up off the paperwork because my body clocked her before my brain ever did.

And when she left, Jackson was standing by the elevators⁠—