21. She Deserved Better
She Deserved Better
Jacob
He's trying to look at me through swollen eyes. ‘Trying’ being the important fucking word.
The left one's sealed almost shut, the skin stretched tight and shining over bruising that's already gone purple. The right isn't much better—blood vessels burst red across the white, weeping at the corner while he fights to hold me in focus.
Good. He deserves worse.
I needed him conscious. Less than an hour ago the fucker was flat in a coma, and dragging him back out of it cost me a favor I'll be a long time repaying. Now he's awake, propped against the pillows, watching me the way prey watches a thing that's already decided to eat it.
He's dragged himself half upright despite what it's costing him—every breath snagging deep in his chest where the ribs give, sweat darkening the collar of the gown hanging open across bruised skin.
Tamara hovers by the monitors, her eyes flicking between the numbers and me like she's waiting for me to finish what I started.
She should be. The only reason Kurt Moore is still taking up space in this room is that he's useful to me.
"I said," I repeat, quiet, "start fucking talking."
The room stills around my words. Adelaide stands at the window with her arms wrapped around herself, eyes swollen from crying. Constance leans against the wall beside her, arms folded hard across her chest, her jaw tight enough that I know she's one wrong word from losing it.
Kurt drags a breath in. "She can't..." His throat works. "She can't be there."
I crouch until we're level and make him look at me.
"She is." Soft. The softness is deliberate. "And you are going to tell me exactly how to get her back."
That’s when I realize, the fear that moves behind his eyes isn't for himself. It's for her.
"And the longer you sit here repeating the same bullshit," I say, "the longer she's trapped with him."
His face tightens. "He won't hurt her." There's a certainty in it that drives something ugly through my chest. "As long as she gives him what he wants."
The club. The girls. The auction list. Heat goes through me so fast I feel it behind my eyes.
Kurt catches whatever moves across my face and forces himself higher against the bed, wincing at the cost of it. "You don't understand. I tried. I went to get her. I was trying to take her away before Jackson—"
"You tried taking her from me." My words are primal. They’re out before I can stop it.
The monitors jump. Adelaide flinches. Behind me Tamara mutters something I don't catch. But all I can see is Summer vanishing into the dark with another man's hands on her while I ran across the gravel but was too fucking late.
Kurt shakes his head and pays for it with a wince. "You hurt her, Jacob."
It lands exactly where he aims it. Because he isn't wrong. Summer crying in my kitchen. Summer begging me to take her back to her parents. Every time the fear surfaced in her eyes and I looked straight past it, because looking cost me something I wasn't willing to pay.
"She deserved better than both of you." He tries to laugh, but the effort drags a wince across his face.
Constance is the one who looks away, because everyone in here knows there's truth in it.
I drag a hand down my mouth and straighten.
"I'd carve out my own fucking soul for her," I say. "Without question."
And I mean it. I still mean it.
"Now tell me about Rivers Ridge."
His face changes. Pure fear.
"That's not where they are." It comes out fast. "How do you—"
"He took her to Sebastian Vale's. I chased him down. They escaped on a bird."
His eyes closed like it confirmed something he'd been praying against. "Fuck." Quiet. Honest. And every instinct I've got sharpens, because that reaction means something.
"What?"
He opens his eyes slowly. "If he took her to the Ridge..." His throat tightens. "He’s already started his plan."
Cold crawls down my spine. "What the fuck does that mean."
He holds my stare a long moment before he answers.
"There was a girl before Summer."
"What girl?" Adelaide asks, quiet, stepping closer.
Kurt drags a hand down his ruined face. "Her name was Annalise."
The name settles into the room and stays there, heavy, like it already means something terrible before any of us understand why.
"She worked at the club. Jackson noticed her, and after that..." He swallows. "Nothing was normal again."
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—
Watching her.
Not in passing. Not for a second.
Watching her.
The cold settles all the way into my gut, because I finally see the whole shape of it. Summer was never collateral. She was a piece on his board from the day he first laid eyes on her.