30. That’s My Girl
That’s My Girl
Jacob
Pain drags me back first.
It splits my skull from the inside, thick and heavy behind my eyes, and the nausea rolls in right behind it. For one disorientated second all I've got is darkness and the chemical burn still coating the back of my throat.
Gas.
Fuck.
My eyes force open. Concrete walls. Low light. Cold air thick with damp and bleach.
And restraints biting into my wrists.
I jerk on instinct and metal rattles under me.
A chair. I'm strapped to a fucking chair.
The rage comes up so fast it clears my head better than air would.
The room sharpens. Carter's tied beside me. Hayes is slumped forward a few feet away, blood drying under his nose. Groves is already awake and losing his mind.
"I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" His chair screeches across the concrete as he throws himself against it hard enough to nearly go over sideways. "YOU HEAR ME? WHEN I GET OUT OF THESE I'LL RIP YOUR THROAT OUT!"
"Groves," Carter says. Calm. Too calm.
Groves doesn't hear him. "COME TAKE THESE FUCKING ROPES OFF ME AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN!"
Two armed men stand at the far wall watching us like we're the entertainment. Tactical gear. Faces covered. Not club muscle, not the usual half-trained idiots Jackson keeps around to look dangerous.
He prepared for this.
One of them laughs, quiet.
That's enough. I surge against the restraints hard enough to shift the chair. "Take these off me," I say, "and I'll kill both of you with one hand."
The second one smirks. "Big words from a tied-up sheriff."
I smile back at him. Cold. Mean. "Untie me and find out how big."
It lands. I watch his weight shift half a step back before he catches himself.
Good.
Beside me, Carter hasn't said a word since Groves started screaming, and that's when I realize what he's actually doing. His wrists are flexing—small, patient movements, testing, working. And on one of them, catching the low light, is that watch.
That stupid fucking watch.
Three years ago some officer-safety instructor spent an afternoon telling us we were all one bad traffic stop from ending up bound in the back of a van, then laid a table of escape tools out and started taking orders.
Cutters in belt buckles. Blades in bootlaces.
Watch straps that go through rope and tape and zip ties.
I called it gimmick shit. Carter bought one of each anyway, and told me I'd thank him one day.
Three years I've mocked him for that watch.
Something that isn't quite hope moves through my chest.
"You good?" I mutter, not looking at him.
"Been better."
"Because Summer is somewhere above me in this house, and every second I sit in this chair is a second she spends with him.” The thought tears through me so hard I nearly rip my own wrists open fighting the straps again.
The steel door creaks open and every muscle in my body locks.
Jackson Moore walks in smiling.
And I clock the damage before he's taken two steps.
Blood soaking the shoulder of his shirt, running down over his chest, still wet.
The right side of his head is a mess—there's a piece of his ear gone, torn away, the edge of it ragged.
And when he turns his head to say something to one of his men, I see the bruising: dark bands wrapped right around his throat, the unmistakable shape of something pulled tight.
That's my girl.
She got her hands on him. She got her teeth on him. Some savage thing in me sits up at the sight of it, and for one second the pride is so big it crowds out everything else.
It doesn't touch the rage. It just gives it somewhere to stand.
Then his eyes find mine.
"Well, well, well." He strolls further in, unhurried, like he owns the oxygen in the room. Right now maybe he does. "I thought you'd have got here sooner, Sheriff."
I don't give him the reaction he's waiting for. "Where is she?"
He ignores it completely. "You know, I expected more from you."
Groves throws himself against his restraints again. "YOU TOUCH HER AND I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD—"
"Oh, I touched her."
The room goes dead silent. Every drop of blood in my body turns to acid.
Jackson smiles slowly. Deliberately. Letting it sit.
"She tastes incredible, Sheriff. No wonder you wanted to keep her all to yourself."
Something in me snaps clean through. I throw myself against the straps so hard the chair legs scrape across the concrete. "YOU SON OF A BITCH—"
He laughs. Actually laughs.
"And the noises she makes." His eyes lock onto mine and hold them. "Christ. She's the ultimate aphrodisiac."
Carter swears under his breath beside me, low, because he knows exactly what's happening in my head right now. He knows every scrap of control I own is already gone.
"Where's Vance?" Hayes asks, and his voice comes out strained.
Jackson's jaw ticks. Then his lips twitch, and it turns into a smile, and every man in this room understands what that means.
"Russell." He doesn't look away from me. "Bring in their friend, would you?"
One of them—scar running from the corner of his mouth to his ear—steps out, and the door hangs cracked behind him.
And I hear her.
Somewhere above us, far off and thin through concrete: my name. Screamed.
I go rigid. It could be the gas. It could be my own head giving me what I want to hear.
"She moans like a fucking goddess, Sheriff," Jackson says—and just like that I know it isn't in my head. Because he heard it too. He timed it. He said it over her voice on purpose.
I yank against the restraints until the skin tears across my wrists. Don't care. I'd take my own hands off at the joint to get to him.
He sees the blood run and smiles wider.
"There he is. The monster everyone calls Sheriff Jacob Darnell," he says, my name mocking in his mouth.
"Undo the restraints, Moore, and I'll show you."
Russell comes back in carrying an industrial bucket. Blood is running down the outside of it.
He reaches in and lifts out an arm.
I know it before I've finished looking. We all mocked him for that tattoo. Told him it was a bad idea putting a woman's name on your skin like that, permanent, no take-backs.
Charlotte.
He was talking last month about how he was going to ask her to marry him.
Someone behind me is throwing up—Hayes, by the sound of it.
"Boss." Carter's voice, low and urgent. "Don't let him win. Boss—"
I barely hear him. All I can hear is Jackson's laugh.
I throw my whole weight sideways, trying to snap the frame, and all I do is put myself on the floor in a heap with the chair still bolted to me, in a worse position than I started in.
Jackson looks down at me and it's almost gentle.
"She's mine now. All of her belongs to me."
Hayes hits the floor beside me, his own chair going over as he lunges. "YOU FUCKING CUNT!"
Jackson doesn't even glance at him. His eyes stay on me.
"I think tomorrow I'll bring her down here." Cold slides straight through my chest. "Maybe I'll let you watch while I fuck her."
Groves loses whatever was left of him—roaring, thrashing hard enough that both guards bring their rifles up.
But Carter goes still.
Frighteningly still. Because Carter sees it. Jackson isn't wasting his time on the men who are screaming.
He's breaking me first.
And the worst part is that it's fucking working.
Jackson crouches until his face is inches from mine.
And the amusement is gone. What's underneath it isn't anger.
It's hatred. Real, patient, load-bearing hatred, the kind a man has to feed every day for years to keep it that size.
"You know what the funny thing is, Sheriff?" His voice drops. "You spent years obsessing over Michael Miller's daughter."
His eyes go dead.
"While he was destroying my life."
I already know what he's talking about. Kurt gave me all of it in that hospital room—the club, Annalise, the arrest, the frame. I've had the whole ugly shape of it sitting in my chest for ninety minutes of mountain road.
Hearing it in his mouth is a different thing entirely.
"And where the fuck were you?" He tilts his head. "Where was the justice then?"
The question lands somewhere I can't defend.
Because I know the answer. Immediately. Without having to look for it.
I wasn’t doing the one thing the badge on my belt was supposed to mean.
I was upstairs in my office with my feet on the desk, thinking about Michael Miller's daughter, thinking about Michael Miller's perfect fucking family—while a girl none of us bothered to name was being processed by a man who'd already decided how her story ended.
Jackson watches it hit me. And he smiles. Not happy. Bitter. Cruel.
"You didn't even know her name." He says it quietly, and that's what makes it worse. "Just another case file. Handled by a corrupt DA. No questions asked."
That one goes deepest of all.
Because he's right. I never saw her. Not once. Not one single time.
I have spent my whole career telling myself I'm the thing that stands between the people in that town and the men who'd eat them, and Annalise Raynor walked through my station, under my roof, and I never lifted my eyes.
"She died at the hands of Michael Miller," Jackson says. "And his daughter is the closest I'll ever get to her."
His eyes lock onto mine.
"So no, Sheriff. Taking Summer wasn't revenge for what her father did."
Every trace of expression drains out of his face.
"She's a debt I collected."
The cold goes all the way down.
"From both of you."