25. Ninety Minutes
Ninety Minutes
Jacob
Kurt's finally run out of things to give me.
He's slumped back against the pillows, wrung dry, everything I dragged out of him spent and lying between us—his brother, Annalise, what Miller did, where he's keeping her.
My knuckles ache from being fisted so tight and I don't uncurl them.
Constance is white against the far wall.
Adelaide hasn't moved from the window. Tamara hovers like she can hold him together with her eyes.
And under all of it, one fact sits in my chest like a stone: ninety minutes of black mountain road between me and Summer, and every one of those minutes is one I'm not there.
Then my phone goes off in my hand, and Carter's name lights the screen.
I answer before the first ring finishes. "Talk."
"They’re live-streaming." Carter's voice comes clipped and tight, road noise running behind it—a man driving too fast. " I'm looking at it right now."
Everything in me goes still. "You've got eyes inside."
"Yeah." A beat too long. The engine fills it. "Jacob—"
"Send it to me."
Silence. Just the line humming.
"Carter. Send me the fucking link."
"I'm ten minutes out." His voice drops, careful, the tone you'd use on a man standing on a ledge. "Let me get to you first. You shouldn't watch this on your own."
And that's the thing that tells me. The hesitation. The handling. Carter doesn't flinch and Carter doesn't soften—he's stood beside me over things that would bury most men, and not once has he tried to stop me looking at something.
Which means it's bad.
"Send it. Now."
“Boss—” I disconnect the call.
A long breath. Then the phone buzzes against my ear—a message, a link sitting under it like a live wire.
I pull it up.
The screen resolves into gray and shadow. A room. A bed.
Her.
Summer.
And for one second everything in me lifts—because she isn't curled in a corner and she isn't broken. She's on top of Jackson Moore with something looped around his throat, hauling back on it with everything she has, and his fucking hands are tearing at his own neck and his face is going dark.
That's my girl. Do it. Finish him. End the sick fuck.
The door on the screen slams open.
A man crosses the room in two strides—Donnie, it has to be fucking Donnie—and buries a fist in her hair and rips her backward.
Metal flashes in the gray. A knife saws through whatever she's holding, and then he's dragging her off him by the roots of her hair and throwing her down on the bed hard enough that I feel it land in my own chest.
I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing.
On the screen Jackson climbs the wall to get upright—alive, coughing, one hand clamped to his throat.
Then two more men come through that door, and they take hold of her, and they start tying her down while she fights them—and there's no sound, no way in, nothing but gray pixels and the roar of my own blood while the whole of my life gets pinned to a mattress ninety fucking minutes out of my reach.
And my mind does the thing I can't stop doing—it runs ahead of me, up that mountain and through that door, into every hour I won't be there to fill.
Men don't strap a woman to a bed to leave her the fuck alone.
I've spent a career walking into rooms after the fact, seeing what gets done to a woman who can't get her hands free, and now my head takes every one of those rooms and sets her down in the middle of it—no hands, no wall at her back, no me—and I have to grind my teeth against the images to stop them finishing, because if even one of them completes I'm no fucking use to her at all.
Something tears loose inside me.
I don't throw the phone. I need the phone. But my hand crushes down on it until the case groans, and every careful fucking word I've said tonight—move quiet, go slow, don't give him a reason—burns off at once and leaves one thing standing in the ash.
Now.
I cross to the bed and haul Kurt up out of it by the front of his gown.
He chokes on a sound, face folding around his ribs. "What—"
"We're leaving." My voice comes out flat and wrong. "You're walking me through that fucking house, or I drag you through it in pieces."
"Jacob—" Tamara's already moving.
"Now."
Kurt's swollen eyes drop to the phone still burning in my fist. He sees enough. Whatever color was left in his face goes with it.
"Okay." It scrapes out of him. "Okay. But you go in there like this—blind, out of your mind, no plan—and you'll get her killed. You'll trip every alarm on that mountain, and he'll put a bullet in her before you're through the second door."
I want to hit him. I want to hit something. I want to put my fist through this whole fucking hospital.
Because he's right.
"So slow down." His breath drags over something broken in his chest. "Give me a pen and a minute. Let me draw you the way in. Then you can drive as fast as you want."
For one long, murderous beat I just look at him.
Then I let go of his gown, drop him back into the pillows, and pull a pen off the tray.
"One minute," I say. "Draw."
And in my other hand, on the screen I can't make myself put down, they finish strapping her to the bed—wrists, then ankles, one of them testing the tension like he's got all the time in the world.
And I know exactly what they’re going to do.