28. I’ll Walk Into Hell
I’ll Walk Into Hell
Jacob
The closer we get to Rivers Ridge, the harder it is to sit still.
Not physically. Physically I'm exactly where I need to be—both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, speed steady, breathing even.
Underneath it I'm a fucking disaster. My jaw aches from how long I've been grinding it.
My fingers close on the leather until it creaks and I have to make myself let go before I tear the wheel off the column.
It's the waiting. It's always the waiting.
I can fight. I can shoot. I can bleed. I've buried men and cleaned up after worse and never lost an hour's sleep over any of it. But sitting in a truck while she's out there in the dark with him—that's a different animal. That's the one thing I've never learned how to do.
The road narrows as we climb, trees crowding in on both sides until the headlights are the only thing holding the dark back. My leg's been going against the floor for half an hour. I don't notice until Carter reaches over and sets a hand on my knee. It stops. For a second. Then it starts again.
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.
The trees thin. I drop low and raise a fist, and the others go still behind me without a sound.
Then I see it.
Rivers Ridge comes up out of the dark like something dragged out of a nightmare. White stone climbing through the trees. Glass throwing the moon back at us. Wings spread out across the property, each one bigger than the last. It ought to look impressive.
It looks like a threat.
I drop beside Carter as he brings his scope up.
"What've you got?"
He doesn't answer straight away. His eyebrows pull together. Then he lowers it.
"Nothing."
My gut turns over, cold. "What do you mean, nothing?"
"No guards."
I look back at the house. Front entrance lit up like a hotel. Driveway curving round. Vehicles parked at the top of it.
And nobody. No patrols. No movement. Not one man walking that perimeter.
"Maybe they're inside," Hayes murmurs.
Maybe. But I don't buy it, and neither does he.
Because Jackson Moore doesn't spend years building a place like this and then leave the door hanging open. He trusts nobody. He controls everything. He plans for every version of tonight that exists.
Which means there should be men out here. There should be something.
"We pull back?" Carter asks quietly.
I stare at the windows. At the dark behind them. Then I think about Summer in there for another hour. Another thirty minutes. Another ten seconds.
"No. We move."
And as we come up off the forest floor and start toward that house, every instinct I've got is screaming the same thing.
This is a trap.
I don't care. If she's in there, I'll walk into hell with my eyes open.
The service entrance is exactly where it sits on Kurt's map—behind a wall of ivy and stone, a steel door set so flush into the side of the building you'd walk past it a hundred times and never see it.
Hayes crouches at the panel. The rest of us spread out, covering angles, watching windows, waiting for the moment it all goes to shit.
"Got it," Hayes breathes.
The lock disengages with a soft click.
Nobody moves. Because that click was too easy. All of it's been too easy—the entrance, the empty perimeter, the security folding over like it was tired of standing.
This isn't breaking in. This is being invited.
"Let's go."
The door opens and cold air spills out at us. Not fresh—conditioned. Concrete and machinery and expensive ventilation. The hidden part of the house. The part the guests never see.
I go through first.
The corridor runs ahead under dim emergency lighting, concrete underfoot, pipes overhead. And the further in we go, the more the quiet stops feeling like quiet and starts feeling like something holding its breath. A house this size should hum. Should creak. This one is a held breath.
Every footstep echoes. Every movement is too loud.
Left turn, then another passage. No guards. No cameras. No staff. Nothing.
I catch Carter's eye. He feels it too—shoulders tight, gaze never settling.
We go deeper. One hallway becomes another, then another. Too many turns. Too many empty rooms. A maze built under a mansion, laid out by a man who wanted anyone who got in here to get lost.
She's somewhere above us. Maybe a floor. Maybe two. Close enough that I have to fight the urge to start kicking doors, and the only thing stopping me is knowing exactly what that costs her.
Ahead, a heavy steel door stands half open. Hayes lifts a hand. Everyone stops.
And I hear it.
A metallic sound. Small. Insignificant. The kind you'd miss.
My stomach drops before my brain catches up. Because that sound shouldn't exist in an empty corridor.
My eyes snap to the floor just as something silver comes rolling out of the dark ahead of us.
"MOVE—"
The canister blows before half of them have turned.
White floods the corridor in seconds. I drag in a breath and it's fire—straight down my throat and into my lungs like I've swallowed a lit match. Shouting. Somebody hits a wall. Somebody else is coughing hard enough to bring up blood.
The corridor's gone. One second I can see my men. The next they're shapes in a white sea.
And through all of it, one of them is moving.
Not staggering. Not blind. Moving.
Kurt.
"KURT!"
My voice goes nowhere. My eyes are streaming, every breath is broken glass, and all I can see is that shape crossing the smoke like a man who knows exactly where the walls are.
The rage that comes up cuts clean through the gas.
Every conversation. Every warning. Every fucking line he drew on that map with my phone burning in my fist.
Not a man helping me get her back.
A man using me to get himself back inside.
He wants her first.
I've sat across a table from a hundred men like him—men who dress obsession up in prettier clothes so they can sleep at night, who tell themselves they're the ones protecting her. The difference between him and his brother is presentation. Not intent.
"KURT!"
The shape turns. Long enough for me to see his face through the white—
—and he doesn't look proud. He looks guilty.
Somehow that's worse. As though feeling bad about it changes a single thing. As though Summer's supposed to care about his conscience while she's tied to a bed in this house.
He backs toward a steel door set into the wall. A door he never mentioned. A door that wasn't on any map he drew.
Of course it wasn't.
My legs are moving before I decide anything. The floor tilts under me. Every step lands heavier than the last, the gas dragging at my arms, my lungs, my thoughts—but the anger keeps me upright.
The gap narrows. The door starts to slide.
"NO—"
He freezes. Half a second. Something cracks across his face—pain, regret, I don't fucking know.
Then the gap disappears. The steel slams. Locks engage somewhere inside the mechanism, and the sound of it goes through me like a round to the chest.
I hit the door with everything I have. It doesn't move. I hit it again. Again. Nothing. It doesn't even rattle in the frame.
Behind me somebody's shouting my name. Carter, maybe. It reaches me like it's coming through water.
The corridor tips. I plant a hand on the wall and force myself up.
Summer. Find Summer. Everything else comes later.
The edges of my vision go dark. My arms are too heavy. My lungs are too heavy. Even the thoughts are going.
And the last thing that surfaces isn't the map or the door or Kurt's face. It's her, in my kitchen, bare feet on the tile, hair everywhere, rolling her eyes at me because I forgot whatever it was she asked me to get.
An ordinary morning. A stupid, ordinary morning.
I'd give every year I have left to have it back.
My knees hit the concrete.
She's here. She's finally here—one floor away, maybe two—and I'm going out before I can reach her.
The last thing I see is that steel door.
I am going to burn this fucking place to the ground.