31. From Both of You
From Both of You
Jacob
The silence after Jackson's last words sits heavy in the room.
Debt. From both of you.
Across from me Groves is breathing like an animal—fast, ragged, rage and grief and years of buried shit all clawing for the door at once.
Jackson watches us. Calm. Like a man who enjoys seeing what happens when people finally come apart.
The steel door opens again behind him.
Kurt stumbles in. Actually stumbles. One of the guards reaches to steady him and Kurt jerks away with a grunt, and he still looks half dead—gray skin, bruising gone yellow, one eye swollen almost shut.
Weak. Barely upright.
But his eyes find me instantly, and what's burning in them is hatred.
"You really thought I'd help you take her back?" he rasps.
Then he lunges.
It isn't graceful and it isn't strong. It's just pure feeling dragging a wrecked body across a room. His fist catches the side of my jaw. Then again, weaker, off my cheekbone, while his breathing saws like something's collapsing inside his chest.
"You'll die here," he spits.
I laugh. Actually laugh—because that's the thing about pain. Past a certain point it just stops mattering.
"You hit like a fucking child."
He swings again anyway.
Beside me, Carter hasn't reacted once. Not to any of it. Which tells me exactly what he's doing under there.
Good.
And Groves sees it too—sees Carter's wrists working—and understands he has to give him something. Time. Noise. Anything.
So Groves gives him everything he's got left.
"FOUR YEARS AGO."
The sound tears through the room. Every head turns.
"Four years ago, you dated my daughter,” he manages, quieter.
Chair rattling under him, tears streaming down his face and no attempt to hide a single one of them.
"WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?"
Jackson's expression doesn't move.
"You dated her!" Groves surges against the straps. "You sick fucking bastard, you dated her and then she vanished!"
My stomach turns over.
Beth Groves.
And here's the thing—I didn't forget her. I never forgot her. I worked that case myself. Nineteen years old, gone off the face of the earth between a Tuesday and a Wednesday. No body. No leads. Nothing.
I sat in Groves' kitchen with a notebook and asked him if she'd been seeing anyone, and he said some guy, older, she wouldn't say who, and I wrote it down and I chased it exactly as far as it went, which was nowhere.
I never once connected her to Jackson Moore.
Not until the cell records showed messages to a burner that was eventually connected to Jackson. But even then, there was no evidence. No messages that we could use against him.
She simply vanished. And we had nothing to go on.
Groves' voice breaks apart completely.
"Is she dead?" It comes out choked. "Please… please just tell me if she's fucking dead."
The room stills. Even the guards look uncomfortable now.
He sobs hard enough that his whole body shakes with it.
"You tell me where my little girl is…"
Jackson walks toward him. Slow. Nothing on his face at all.
He takes hold of the back of Groves' tipped chair and hauls it upright. Metal slams against concrete hard enough that Groves gasps.
Then he crouches down in front of him.
"You want the truth?"
Groves nods frantically. "Yes—YES—"
"Your daughter hated you."
Jackson's voice doesn't rise at all. "She wanted to run because all you cared about was chasing pussy and pretending you were twenty-five again."
"No—"
"You barely saw her." He tilts his head. "Too busy dragging different women through your house every week while your daughter raised herself."
"That's not true!"
"It is." Something in his eyes hardens. "She used to cry after your dates left."
The sound Groves makes then isn't one I've heard out of a grown man before. "You're lying."
"She told me she wished her mother had taken her when she left."
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
He throws himself against the restraints, screaming, sobbing, the chair scraping across the floor—and Jackson just watches him unravel like it's something he put on for himself.
"She wanted out of Rosefield," he says quietly. "Out of your house. Out from under you."
And I understand what he's doing, because it's the same thing he did to me twenty minutes ago. He isn't taunting Groves. He's taking the last thing the man owns—the belief that his girl loved him—and he's peeling it off him while he's tied to a chair and can't cover himself.
Jackson doesn't kill people first. He empties them out.
"You fucking killed her!"
Something tightens in Jackson's face. Not anger.
Annoyance.
"YOU TELL ME WHERE MY BABY IS!"
Jackson sighs. Soft. Almost tired. Then he reaches beneath his jacket.
Every muscle in my body locks.
A gun.
Groves sees it. And he doesn't stop. Doesn't even slow.
"YOU FUCKING COWARD!"
The gun comes up.
Beside me Carter's head lifts for the first time, tips a fraction—and the watch strap presses into my palm.
Then—
BANG.
The sound detonates off the concrete.
Groves' head snaps back. Blood hits the wall behind him.
And then he's still. Completely still, sitting strapped upright in that chair with a hole punched between his eyes, gone before the sound finished leaving the barrel.
The room rings.
Jesus Christ.
Hayes swears violently somewhere behind me. Kurt looks like he's going to be sick.
Jackson lowers the gun the way you'd set down a cup.
Then his eyes come back to me. Cold. Empty.
"You see what grief does to people, Sheriff?"
My pulse slams against my ribs. Because beside me—under all that ringing—I hear it. A sound so small it's almost nothing.
Rope, loosening.
Carter's free.