26. She’s Not A Ghost
She’s Not A Ghost
Jacob
Ihear them before I see them.
Boots on polished hospital floor. Low voices carrying down the corridor. Then one of the security guards says Carter's name, and something darkly amused shifts through my chest despite the hell sitting inside it.
Of course they know him. Everybody knows Carter. He's been at my side for years—my right hand, the man people go to when something needs handling without the fucking theatrics. He doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't bare his teeth. Men just move when Carter tells them to.
The door opens.
He comes in first, dark civilian clothes instead of uniform. Hayes behind him, then Groves and Vance. No badges. No department markings.
Good. Because tonight we aren't cops. Tonight there are two outcomes and no others: I bring Summer home, or Rivers Ridge burns to the fucking ground with all of us inside it.
Carter's gaze moves over the room in one clean sweep. Tamara beside the bed. Adelaide at the window, holding herself together with nothing but skin and stubbornness. Constance pacing like something trapped. Kurt half-dead against the pillows with guilt written across every bruise on his face.
Then he looks at my hand. The blood dried over my knuckles. The split skin. The wall behind me that looks like it lost a fight.
He doesn't ask. He doesn't need to.
"That him?" Hayes asks, nodding at Kurt.
"Yeah."
Kurt doesn't look up. He's gone pale again—the kind of pale that says the drugs and the blood loss are catching up with him, sweat at his hairline, every breath dragging over something broken.
Too bad. Summer doesn't get to rest. Neither does he.
Carter's eyes come back to mine. "Cars are loaded. Weapons, ammo, night vision." He doesn't quite smile. "Enough shit out there to win a fucking war."
"Good."
It comes out flat, because it still doesn't feel like enough. Nothing in the back of those trucks changes the ninety minutes of road.
I spread Kurt's map across the rolling tray table and the men close in around it. The room changes the second they step inside—less panic, more purpose. That's what trained men do when violence stops being a question. They stop wasting breath and start counting exits.
White paper. Black ink. A nightmare drawn in trembling lines while I stood over him with a phone burning in my fist.
Rivers Ridge sprawls across the page like something alive. Main house in the center. East wing, west wing. Service roads cutting through dense tree cover. Outer cameras. Guard posts. Delivery route. North ridge access. Maintenance tunnels running under part of the house.
Bigger than Vale's. Worse than Vale's. A place built by a man who always knew someone might come looking one day.
Kurt lifts a shaking hand and taps the eastern edge. "Service access." His voice is barely holding.
Groves leans in, eyes narrowing. "That's a lot of ground."
"Twelve guards minimum," Kurt says.
"Armed?" Vance asks.
Kurt gives him a look through swollen eyes. "Always."
Carter traces the east side with two fingers. "Tree line gives cover?"
"Some," Kurt says. "Enough if you move slowly."
Slowly. The word gets under my skin and stays there.
Every instinct I've got wants fast—fast means her in my arms sooner, fast means my hands closing around Jackson Moore's throat, fast means the sound his neck makes when it gives.
But fast gets her moved. Fast gives him time to hear us coming, and I've already watched what this man does when he has time.
I force it down and keep my voice level. "We don't go in loud. No sirens. No lights once we're close. We don't approach from the main road, and we don't give Jackson a single fucking reason to know we're there."
Hayes nods slowly. "No aerial sweep?"
"No." It comes out harder than I mean it to, because the image arrives with it—a bird crossing those woods in the dark, rotor noise rolling down the mountain ahead of us, Jackson stepping to a window with his head tipped to the sound.
Then running. With her.
No fucking way. Not twice. Not while I'm breathing.
Carter watches my face and says nothing. He already understands. That's why he's Carter.
"We get to Summer before he knows we're on the property," I say. "That's the plan."
Constance's face twists. "Then why the fuck are we still standing here?"
"Because running in without a plan gets her taken again," I snap.
She flinches. She doesn't back down. Not Constance.
"She's my best friend." Her voice breaks on it.
"She's my fucking life." My hand comes down on the table hard enough to send blood flecking off my knuckles onto Kurt's map.
Silence drops. Adelaide's eyes fill instantly. Constance's mouth opens and nothing comes out.
I drag a breath through my nose and force the rage back into the shape of something useful.
"And because she's my life, I'm not charging in there like an idiot and handing him the time to put her in another helicopter."
Constance swallows. The fight doesn't leave her face, but understanding starts to break through it.
"I'm coming," she says.
"No."
"Jacob—"
"No."
Adelaide steps forward. "We can wait in the truck. We can—"
"No." It cuts harder than I want, and I hate the way her face folds around it, but I don't soften. I can't. "I already lost Calder. Reyes is still in a bed down the hall. I'm not adding either of you to that list."
Constance's eyes shine with fury and fear together. "You don't get to treat us like we're fragile."
"I'm not." I look between them both. "I'm treating you like the women Summer loves."
That one lands. Adelaide looks away first, covering her mouth with trembling fingers.
I keep going, because they need to hear all of it. "If anything happens to you because of me, she'll never forgive herself. And she'll never forgive me."
Constance blinks hard, her jaw working like she wants to fight and knows she's already lost.
"Bring her back," she says finally. Low. Broken.
I nod once. Because if I open my mouth, I don't trust what comes out of it.
Carter turns to the bed. "And this son of a bitch is coming?"
Kurt huffs a rough, humorless laugh. "Apparently."
Tamara moves instantly. "Absolutely not. He cannot leave this hospital."
Kurt turns his ruined face toward her. "I'm self-discharging."
"You can hardly breathe!"
"And she's at Rivers Ridge."
Tamara's mouth closes. For a second there's nothing in her face but helpless anger. Then she looks at me. "If he collapses out there, he becomes dead weight."
"He already is."
Kurt laughs and regrets it immediately, folding around whatever's broken in his chest. Carter catches his arm before he goes too far forward.
"I'm putting the cuffs in front," Carter says to me. "He'll move better."
"He runs, shoot him."
Kurt looks at me then, through the one eye that still opens. "I'm not running."
"No," I say, cocking a brow. "You're not."
Carter cuffs him in front, the metal sitting ugly against hospital-pale skin over bruises that were already there. Kurt sways when he stands, knees threatening to fold, and Hayes steps in and takes his other side.
Nobody makes a joke. Not now.
We move.
The corridor's too bright and too clean.
Nurses glance up from the desk and look away just as fast when they see what's coming.
Carter in front. Hayes beside Kurt. Vance behind.
Kurt between them like a prisoner being marched somewhere final—which, depending on how tonight goes, might be exactly what he is.
Security watches us pass. Nobody stops us.
Outside, the night air hits cold enough to bite. Two black trucks sit waiting under the lights—civilian, unmarked, nothing on them that ties back to the Rosefield Sheriff's Office. Exactly what I asked for.
Groves is already behind the wheel of the second. He dips his chin when he sees me. Vance opens the rear door and puts Kurt in the middle, between him and Groves. Kurt grunts and doesn't complain.
Good.
Carter opens the trunk of the first truck and shows me what he brought. Rifle cases. Sidearms. Ammunition. Night vision. Plates and gear stacked square, because Carter doesn't do sloppiness. Weapons for a war we can't afford to announce.
He closes it quietly. "We move clean."
I nod. Clean. Quiet. Invisible until it's too late for anyone up there to do a thing about it.
Then I get behind the wheel. Carter takes the passenger seat, Hayes the back. The engine turns over and the dash lights come up faint across Carter's face, and for one second I don't move.
My hands close on the wheel.
She's ninety minutes north of me, inside a house built for secrets, tied to a bed by a man who wants to keep her badly enough to rewrite her whole life. And the last look she gave me is still sitting behind my eyes—the fear in it, the trust buried underneath, the fucking heartbreak.
I put the truck in drive.
The hospital falls away behind us. Town thins out fast. The roads narrow, the trees crowd in, and the further we climb the darker the world gets, until the headlights are carving a tunnel through black mountain road and everything past them looks like it goes on forever.
Ninety minutes.
Every mile of it feels like punishment. Every second feels stolen out of my hands.
Carter lets the silence sit a while. He knows better than to fill it too early. Hayes stays quiet in the back, checking gear by touch more than sight. The radio between the trucks crackles once and goes still.
I picture her running at me when I find her. It isn't gentle and it isn't pretty—it hits so hard my chest nearly splits with it. Her body slamming into mine. My arms locking around her. My face in her neck, breathing in proof she's alive.
Then the image turns without warning.
Summer not running. Summer curled somewhere silent. Summer looking at me like she can't find the way back into herself.
My grip tightens until my knuckles ache.
Carter notices. "What's the story with Kurt?" His voice is quiet, level—like he's asking about a suspect and not the brother of the man I'm going up there to butcher.
"He's Jackson's brother."
Carter turns his head slowly. "You're kidding."
"No."
Hayes leans forward between the seats. "And you brought him with us?"
"He knows the Ridge."
"And?"
"And Jackson might care whether he breathes."
Carter says nothing for a beat. Then: "Collateral."
He exhales through his nose and looks out at the road. "You think he'll hesitate?"
"I think if there's anything human left in Jackson Moore, it's sitting in that truck behind us."
"And if there isn't?"
"Then Kurt dies with the rest of them."
Nobody talks after that.
The road bends hard left and climbs, trees pressing close on both sides, branches black against the windshield. Behind us the second truck holds its distance, headlights low.
Carter looks over at me. I don't look back. If I do, I might pull over and put my fist through a tree just to feel something break.
Instead I press down harder, and the engine growls under us.
Ninety minutes is too fucking long.
But I'll get there. And when I do, Jackson Moore is going to learn exactly what happens when a man mistakes my girl for a ghost.