Page 84 of The Ashes of Summer

He doesn't say anything. Neither do I. There's nothing worth saying, because we're both thinking about the same person.

In the mirror, the second truck holds its distance. Kurt sits in the back between Vance and Groves, head down, quiet.

Too quiet.

Something about him has felt off since we pulled him out of that bed. Not enough to stop. Not enough to throw away the only lead I've got. But enough that some part of me hasn't put it down.

Then again, maybe I'm seeing ghosts. God knows I've done enough of that lately.

Michael.

His name comes up out of nowhere, the way it's been doing all night, and every time it does it takes a piece of me with it.

Because I knew that man. Or I thought I did—which is the part I can't get past. Michael Miller sat across from me for years. Coffee at his kitchen table. His hand on my shoulder at Elaine's birthday. Him laughing at some shit joke Reyes made about his cologne while I laughed right along with him, and the whole time he'd been at that club, and Annalise Raynor had been upstairs, and he'd been building the thing that put her in the ground.

I looked at him and saw a friend. A good prosecutor. A man who cared about getting it right.

And I never once saw him.

That's what's under my ribs tonight, sitting there like a stone. Because if I could stand that close to a monster for that many years and miss it—if the man whose daughter I'd have died for was rotten the whole time, right in front of me, laughing at my jokes—then what the fuck is my judgment worth? What did I actually see, all those years, when I looked at any of them?

Summer trusted him too. Loved him. Sat on his lap and pressed her hand to that tattoo with his own name for her inked over his heart, and believed every word out of his mouth.

He did this to her. He built this. He aimed a man like Jackson Moore straight at his own daughter and then died before the bill came due, and left her to pay it.

And I helped. I stood in that station and I never looked up, and now she's in that house.

"Five out," Carter says.

Five minutes.

I should feel something like relief. Instead the knot in my gut pulls tighter, because the closer we get, the harder it is not to picture what's waiting.

I don't know what condition she's in. I don't know if she's hurt or terrified or furious or still fighting with every ounce of that stubbornness she's got.

Knowing Summer, all four.

The thought almost makes me smile. Almost. Then I remember where she is.

I kill the headlights and the darkness swallows the road.

The trucks roll another few yards and stop under thick tree cover. The engines tick as they cool. Then every door opens at once.

Cold mountain air. Wet earth and pine. The men move around me in the ritual that always comes before violence—weapons, gear, vests, suppressors. Nobody jokes. Nobody talks. Everybody here understands that once we start walking, there might not be a road back.

I pull the vest over my head and let the weight settle across my shoulders. Familiar. Not comforting exactly—just the feeling a man gets when he picks up something he knows how to use.

Carter tosses me the goggles. "You good?"

The question almost makes me laugh. I haven't been good since I watched a helicopter climb into the fog with her hands on the glass.

I fix the goggles and nod once. "Let's move."

The forest takes us. Branches drag at our gear, the night vision paints the world in shades of green, and somewhere off to the right water runs over rock. Otherwise the woods are silent in a way that makes the back of my neck crawl.

Nobody speaks. Nobody needs to. Every man here knows the job. We get in, we find Summer, we get her out. Everything else is second.

Just hold on, baby. I'm coming.