33. He Deserved Hours
He Deserved Hours
Jacob
Groves' body is still strapped to the chair.
Head hanging forward. Blood dried dark down the front of his vest. The overhead light stutters every few seconds and each flash makes it gleam wet all over again.
The smell in here has gone thick. Copper and sweat and death, and it crawls into my lungs every time I breathe.
Jackson wanted this. Not just the killing—the display.
He wants me sitting three feet from one of my own men with a hole in his head, and he wants me to understand that I couldn't stop it.
That I can't stop a fucking thing. That he can reach out and take anyone I've got, any time he likes, and all I get to do is sit here and watch.
And here's the thing I'd never say out loud.
Part of me understands him.
Not the trafficking. Not the warehouse. Not the women—never that. But the grief? The kind that hollows a man out until there's nothing left in him but the violence? Yeah. I've been standing on the lip of that fucking hole since the night a helicopter took her out of my hands.
Except I never fell in. And I know exactly why.
Because she was taken. Taken means there's a road. Taken means somewhere out there in the dark she's still breathing, still fighting, still waiting for me to come and get her—and a man can survive almost anything as long as there's a road back to the person he loves.
Jackson didn't get a road. He got a body on a floor.
If I'd come up this mountain tonight and found her dead—if somebody had put Summer in the ground and left me standing over the hole with nothing in front of me but the rest of my life—I wouldn't be sitting in this chair thinking about rescue.
Whatever's left of a man after that isn't a man.
It's a machine with one fucking setting.
So yeah. I understand the hole.
But here's where it stops.
I'd have gone after the man who did it, and I'd have taken my fucking time, and then I'd have put the last round through my own skull—and that would have been the end of it. It starts and finishes with me and him.
I would never have gone looking for somebody else's daughter to pour into the shape of her. Never have dragged a girl out of her own fucking life, dyed her hair, put a dead woman's scent on her skin and called it love.
And I'd sure as hell never have taken a building full of women who trusted me enough to work there and moved them into a warehouse to be sold off to men who'd do God knows what to them. Sold their whole lives. Sold their fucking souls, one at a time, and told myself I was owed it.
That's the fucking difference. Not the grief. Grief I understand.
It's what a man decides to do with it.
"Boss." Carter, low beside me. "You good?"
Jackson laughs softly from across the room. He's leaning against the desk, blood dried down his jaw and over his shoulder—and I can see exactly where it came from. The ear. She took half of it off with her teeth.
That's my girl.
Then he sighs and shifts his weight, and for a second I think he's coming for me himself.
Instead Kurt steps forward. Of course he fucking does. The little rat always did like feeling important.
He crouches in front of me with that same smug look he used to wear around my station like he belonged in it.
"There's a certain little redhead around here missing her Benny." He grins. "Maybe if I sing her another song she'll let me between her legs."
I'm going to kill him. Not eventually. Tonight.
"She's not a redhead," Jackson says.
Something in his voice makes me look at him.
"Not anymore." He drags the barrel of his gun idly across the hem of his shirt. "Dark suits her better. It's closer."
Closer. The word snags. He put his hands in her hair. He changed her.
Kurt closes his eyes and breathes out slowly through his nose. Not amused. Tired. Like this conversation has worn a groove in him.
Under my sleeve, the first fiber gives.
"You're really still doing this, Jax?"
Something shifts low in my gut. Still doing what?
Jackson's eyes flick to me and he smiles, and it's almost pleasant.
"Oh," he says. "The sheriff doesn't know."
"Doesn't know what."
He pushes off the desk and crosses to me, unhurried, and crouches down until we're level. And he's smiling. Not the cold one. The one he's been saving.
"Your girl's a fighter." He says it like a compliment. "I gave her every chance to make this easy."
The bruising round his throat says exactly how she took it.
Good girl.
"She put a cord around my neck instead." He leans in. "So I let her be Summer Miller for a while."
I don't understand him. And then I do.
"She wanted to be Michael Miller's daughter." His voice doesn't change at all. "So I let my men treat her like Michael Miller's daughter."
I can't hear anything.
There's a sound in my skull like a road going under a car and everything else is behind it.
My men. He said my men.
He's had her up there in this fucking house tonight and he handed her to them and stood there while it happened, and he did it to teach her that her own name has a price.
Everything I've done tonight—the door, the gas, the chair, Groves' blood drying eighteen inches from my boot—all of it happened while that was happening to her upstairs.
I'm going to kill every fucking man in this house. And then I'm going to burn what's left of it into the mountain.
"Jax." Kurt's voice cuts through it, careful now, the way you'd talk to something with its teeth out. "It doesn't matter what you do to her."
Jackson goes still.
"She'll never be Anna."
"DON'T FUCKING SAY HER NAME!"
The scream tears through the room so hard even Carter goes rigid beside me.
And there it is. There it is. The truth of him, stripped bare.
Because Kurt didn't tell him anything new. Kurt said out loud the thing Jackson's been screaming at himself—the thing he already knows, the thing he'd have felt every single time she opened her mouth and Summer came out of it.
Which makes him worse than I fucking thought. A man with a project has patience.
A man whose project has already failed has nothing left to protect.
"You're a fucking idiot," I say. And I laugh at him. Cold. "You think she'll ever stop thinking about me long enough for any of that to happen?"
His smile comes back slow. "Everyone breaks, Sheriff."
Not her.
That's the mistake the stupid fuck made the second he took her. He saw softness and thought it was weakness. He's had her for days, he's done things to her I can't let myself look at yet, and she still got a cord around his throat and half his ear in her mouth.
He's not going to break her. He's going to run out of fucking time.
"She'll come around eventually," he says softly. "And if she doesn't, I'll—"
The alarm goes off.
It rips through the whole house, and his mouth snaps shut on whatever he was about to promise me. He curses and strides to the door, hauling it open on a corridor full of shouting.
"Sir—" Someone breathless. "She's out. Donnie's dead on the drive. Harris is gone too."
Everything in me sharpens to a single point.
She's out.
She got out.
And what comes up isn't triumph—it's a prayer, aimed at a God I've never once believed in. Be gone. Be miles down that mountain already. Don't stop, don't look back, don't you dare come back here for me.
Jackson turns from the door with fury reshaping his whole face.
"Watch them," he snaps at Kurt, and he's gone, both men with him.
Kurt sways on his feet the second the door shuts.
Still half dead. And still arrogant enough to set his pistol down on the desk beside him—to make a point of it. Because I'm strapped to a chair, and he wants me to see how little of a threat I am.
Then, somewhere outside, a gunshot cracks.
And in that exact second the restraint around my wrist finally lets go.
"You think you've won, don't you?" I keep my voice quiet. "Still think you'd ever have a chance after she saw me drop you like a sack of shit on my driveway?"
Kurt smirks and steps closer.
That's it. Come on.
Closer.
The smug fucking smile stretches wider as he leans down to whisper something clever—
And I move.
I get both arms around his skull and take him down onto the concrete with my whole weight behind it. Something in his chest goes on impact—a wet crunch under his ribs—and the scream that comes out of him is the best sound I've heard all night.
And I want to take my time.
God, I want to take my time with him. I want hours. I want to work through this piece of shit slow enough that he understands every single thing he handed her, and I want him conscious for all of it.
But she's out there in the dark and Jackson's already gone looking, and every second I spend on this floor is a second he's closer to her.
So Kurt Moore gets off light.
The first one breaks his nose flat. The second opens his cheek to the bone. He gets a hand up between us, some useless flapping thing, and I catch it by the wrist and pin it to the concrete—
And I know these hands.
I've seen them before. On her. In the Dogwood, on the dancefloor, one on her waist and one in her hair while she swayed against him and smiled like the world was a safe place.
I stood in that bar and hated these hands for wanting her, and I never once understood what they'd already fucking done to her.
He was in this house tonight. He knew exactly what Jackson was going to do to her and he stood in the fucking corridor and let it happen.
"These the hands you put on her?"
He makes a noise. It isn't a word.
I take the wrist in both hands and break it across the edge of the concrete, and whatever's in there gives all at once, and the sound he makes goes up into a register I've never heard out of a grown man.
That's for the dancefloor.
"You sang to her." I've got his jaw now, hauling his face up so he has to look at me out of the one eye still working. "You let her believe there was one safe thing left in that whole town. And then you went back to him and told him what she was wearing."
He's trying to say something. Blood keeps getting in the way of it.
"Don't. You don't get to."
My fist comes down on his mouth and his teeth go.
I feel them break under my knuckles, feel two of them open my hand on the way through, and I don't stop.
I hit him until the sounds stop being anything at all, until his ruined hands quit trying to come up, until there's nothing under me doing anything but bleeding.
He's still breathing. Shallow. Wet. Bubbling through what's left of his face.
Not enough.
I get up—my legs don't feel like mine—and bring my boot down on his throat.
Once. The cartilage goes like a bundle of dry sticks.
Twice.
"Boss." Carter's hand lands on my shoulder. "He's dead."
"Not dead enough."
I bring it down on his skull. Something splits—a sound like a fence post driven into wet ground—and I do it again, and I'd keep going, I'd stand here all fucking night—
"Boss." Carter's grip tightens. "Let’s go find your girl."
And that's the only thing in this world that could have stopped my foot.
I step back, breathing hard.
There's nothing on that floor that looks like a man. Nothing left of the boy with the guitar who called himself Benny.
Blood on my boots. My hands. Up my forearms. Across my face, dripping off my jaw.
Carter looks down at it for half a second. "Christ." Not judging. Just noting it.
I drag my wrist across my mouth and make it worse, and I'm already moving for the door, and I don't look back at him.
He deserved hours.
He got ninety seconds.
And she's still out there.
Find her before Jackson does.