38. It Ends Tonight
It Ends Tonight
Summer
The adrenaline is wearing off.
That's the first thing I realize when they come back in to work on him and I have to peel myself off the bed to give them room.
Standing up costs me more than it should.
My legs have gone strange and distant, like they belong to somebody else, and the second I'm upright the room tilts gently sideways before settling.
That's when I notice the quiet.
Not real silence—machines beep steadily beside the bed, footsteps echo somewhere down the corridor, voices drift through the walls in muffled bursts. But compared to the Ridge? Compared to alarms screaming through blood-soaked hallways while men died around us?
This is hauntingly quiet. And the quiet is worse, because there's nothing left to drown out my own head.
The bruising has spread since I last looked. That's the part I can't get past—that it's still getting worse, hour by hour.
He doesn't complain once. But I notice every tiny reaction anyway—the jaw clenching, the tension pulling across his stomach, the catch in his breathing every time the nurse presses too close.
He's in agony and still acting like he isn't, and I don't know whether that's for my benefit or because he genuinely doesn't know how to be any other way.
The nurse cleaning his shoulder glances at him nervously. "You need to stop moving."
"Then hurry up about it."
I almost laugh.
Almost.
But my chest is still too tight to breathe properly. So I stand close enough that my thigh brushes his knee every few seconds, needing the contact more than I need oxygen, because every time I look away from him I see it again. Jacob dropping. The blood. That terrible sound.
I keep reliving the half-second where I thought I'd watched him die.
And even half bleeding out, he notices everything about me.
"Baby." His voice is steady.
My head comes up. His hand lifts off the bed toward me. "Come here."
I move without hesitating, and he draws me down until I'm perched on the edge of the mattress against his hip.
His good arm comes around my waist. He pulls me in until his forehead rests against my shoulder, and suddenly I can't breathe at all.
My fingers slide into his hair while he exhales slowly against me.
"You okay?"
The question nearly breaks me apart all over again. "You're literally shot and we've just escaped hell."
"And you're avoiding the question." A dry laugh muffled against me.
I close my eyes and wish I could find the humor.
I can't. Because I'm not okay. Not even close.
I shot a man tonight.
I keep waiting to feel something about that.
I've never held a gun in my life, never mind fired one at a person, and some small buried part of me does register it—the weight of it in my hands, the noise, the way the whole corridor split open around the sound.
That should mean something. That should be the thing keeping me up.
It isn't.
What's keeping me up is that I missed.
Because it was him, and I had him, and the shot went into his leg instead of his chest, and now he's likely still breathing. I don't feel guilty. I feel cheated. If that bullet had gone eight inches higher this would all be finished, and every one of us would be free of him.
That's what I'm sitting with. Not remorse. Regret that my aim wasn't better.
Other men died tonight too. Men with names I only learned a few hours ago, who came up that mountain for a woman most of them had never met.
And every time I blink, Jackson's there.
Not the version of him on the floor with the gun leaving his hand. The man before that.
His mouth working its way up my body while I stared at the ceiling and counted cracks in the plaster.
His face when he stood up afterward and straightened his cuffs like he was leaving a meeting.
The way he paused at the door. The way he looked back at me, tied down, and there was nothing in his eyes at all. Not anger. Not even satisfaction. Just a man closing a ledger.
And then the sound of him telling them they could come in.
Three of them.
I don't get the whole memory. That's the thing nobody warns you about.
It comes in pieces, out of order, and each piece arrives on its own like a photograph shoved under a door.
Hands on my ankle. Fabric giving somewhere near my shoulder and the strange, small, ridiculous grief of a shirt tearing—as if that was the part worth mourning.
The pain. The noises they made. Somebody laughing at something that wasn't me.
And underneath all of it, the shame. Which is the piece I can't put down. I know I shouldn't feel it. I know none of it was my fault. I could stand in a room and argue that to anyone else in the world and win.
I just can't make myself believe it.
It's on me like the perfume was. Something somebody else put there that I can't scrub off, and I'd take my own skin off to be rid of it.
But I don't say any of it.
I can't.
Because saying it out loud makes it real, and then Jacob has to carry it too—the picture of three men using my body, taking whatever was left of me and throwing it in the trash. He'd see it every time he looked at me. I know he would.
And then what?
He nearly lost his mind over Tyler. Over a boy I'd dated before I ever knew Jacob existed, in a life that had nothing to do with him. That's how he is about anyone else's hands on me. Ever.
So what happens when he finds out about that room?
He looks at me and sees something dirty.
Something contaminated, handled, ruined.
Or—and I don't know which is worse—he doesn't. He looks at me and sees a victim.
Something breakable he has to be careful with.
Something to handle gently for the rest of our lives, until neither of us can remember what I was before.
I'd rather he never knew than watch him start being careful with me.
So I sit there with my fingers in his hair, and I say nothing at all.
The door opens and Tamara steps back in carrying a stainless steel tray lined with surgical instruments. The red mark from my hand still burns visibly across her cheek.
Nobody speaks. She sets the tray down beside the bed with careful, controlled movements, and every one of them says the same thing.
Professional now.
Good. Because whatever she thought she had permission to show him earlier is gone.
"I need to close the wound before infection gets in," she says finally, pulling on fresh gloves.
Jacob leans back against the bed. "Then do it."
She wheels a stool over while the nurse lays out fresh gauze and surgical thread. The metallic clink of instruments turns my stomach, and of course he notices.
"Don't look if it's going to make you sick, baby."
"I'm not leaving."
His thumb presses hard into the back of my hand, and that's all the answer I get. It's enough.
She draws up a needle and starts injecting clear liquid into the torn skin. Jacob's entire body goes rigid. A rough breath leaves his chest, and from the doorway Adelaide mutters, Jesus Christ, under her breath.
I'd honestly forgotten she was still here.
She's standing near the entrance with dried blood smeared across her clothes from the Ridge, blonde hair a wreck, eyes hollow under the fluorescents. She drove us down a mountain road in the dark at eighty miles an hour with a dying man in the back, and she hasn't sat down since.
Tamara picks up the needle driver. "The local anesthetic should numb most of this. It may still hurt."
Jacob lets out a dry laugh. "No shit."
The first stitch goes through his skin and his whole body locks solid. A harsh breath hisses through his teeth, the muscles across his stomach tightening beneath the bruising spreading over his ribs.
I reach for his hand, and his fingers crush around mine.
Hard.
Tamara keeps stitching while silence settles over the room.
Just Jacob's uneven breathing, the soft beep of monitors, the small metallic sounds of surgical tools.
The needle punctures skin again and again.
Every pull of thread clearly hurts like hell.
Sweat gathers along his neck despite how cold the room is.
And I hold on. It's the only thing I can do for him and I do it with everything I've got.
"I'll get you some pain relief," Tamara says quietly after another stitch.
"No." Immediate.
"Jacob—" she sighs.
"No drugs." His eyes close briefly as another wave of it rolls through him. "I need my head clear."
And there it is.
Even now. Even bleeding and laid out on a hospital bed, he isn't thinking about recovering.
He's thinking about going back.
His fingers tighten around mine, and the movement sends panic crashing through me, because I've never seen him like this. Vulnerable. Pale. Hurting. And somehow still trying to comfort me every few seconds with small strokes of his thumb across my knuckles, like I'm the one who needs looking after.
Adelaide's cell comes to life once more, and she turns into the corridor.
I work my free hand slowly up Jacob's forearm, watching goosebumps rise under my fingers, then look up to meet his eyes.
And for whatever reason, after everything, we both smile.
Then Adelaide steps back into the room.
She doesn't stop in the doorway this time. That's the first thing I notice. The second is her face—not normal pale. Ghost pale. Like she's just seen something she'll be seeing for years.
Jacob sees it too. His whole posture changes despite the pain.
"What happened?"
Adelaide glances toward Tamara and the nurse. Jacob follows her gaze.
"Out."
They both freeze, but the nurse is the one to speak. "Sheriff, I still need to—"
"Out." His voice is rough, but there's something under it that means neither woman argues.
Tamara peels off her gloves slowly and nods at the nurse. "Give them a minute."
The second the door closes, Adelaide looks directly at Jacob.
"Carter's got Jackson chained to a chair back at the Ridge. They moved him into the room with—" She glances behind her, as though checking the corridor is empty. "—Kurt's remains. Said he freaked when he saw what you'd done."
My pulse spikes.
Jacob's smile widens, and honestly? It's terrifying.
"What happened?" I ask reluctantly, and I keep every trace of concern out of my voice. Because although Kurt meant something to me when his name was Benny, he was the one who fed Jackson every detail of my life.
"It doesn't matter, baby." Jacob doesn't look away from me. "All you need to know is that he's gone."
There's no flinch in him when he says it. No shadow. Nothing at all moves behind his eyes—and that tells me more than an answer would.
Which means Kurt didn't die of a single gunshot. It means it wasn't quick.
And knowing Jacob, I can only imagine what that room looks like now.
There's a beat of silence between us before Adelaide speaks again.
"He said he's waiting for you both to get back there."
Jacob lets out a slow breath through his nose. "Perfect."
"No."
Both of them look at me.
"We need to think about this. The longer he's there, the more time he has to get out. Let Carter kill him. End it all now."
Jacob breathes out slowly. "Summer—"
"No." My voice climbs and cracks halfway through it, and I don't care. "He needs to die now."
Because every minute that man breathes is a minute the world can still hand him back to me.
"There are still women there, and we're getting them out first." He squeezes my hand. Trying to make me see it.
And I do see it. The second he says it, I see all of it.
"The warehouses," I whisper. "Sarah."
The images slam into me. The cages. The smell. Women staring at me with completely dead eyes, past me, through me, like I was already gone.
My hand goes tight around his without me telling it to.
"We'll get them out. And then you can watch the life leave Moore's eyes."
His voice is quieter now. More dangerous somehow.
The brutality of it should probably frighten me.
Instead something in my chest unclenches for the first time in days. Because I know he means every word.
Adelaide shifts awkwardly by the door. "Carter thinks Jackson's men are already trying to clean up evidence and move the women."
Rage tears across Jacob's face. "Fuck."
A long moment passes. His eyes move across the ceiling, tracking something none of us can see, teeth working at his lower lip.
"Then we go now."
Adelaide blinks. "Jacob, you've literally been shot."
"I don't give a fuck." Raising his voice costs him. The pain of it whites across his face, his breathing turning uneven again.
I move closer. "Jacob—"
"No." His eyes lock onto mine. "I'm ending this tonight."
And I stop arguing, because I've heard that voice before and I know exactly what's behind it. Not after his men died. Not after what Jackson did to me.
There's no version of tonight where he stays in this bed.
He manages to stand and drags the rags of his shirt back on with a hiss, then turns toward the door.
"Nurse!"
A second later she reappears cautiously alongside Tamara. Jacob gestures at his shoulder impatiently. "Bandage it tighter."
The nurse crosses to him while Tamara silently pulls on fresh gloves.
No lingering now. No touching that isn't work.
The nurse begins wrapping thick bandages around his shoulder and chest. The second she lifts his arm slightly, a broken sound tears out of his throat.
"Fuck—"
His whole body tenses violently. I grab his hand tighter.
"Sorry," she mutters.
He shakes his head once, breathing hard through his nose. "Just finish it."
She secures the bandages tight around his chest and shoulder, and every pull clearly costs him. His breathing gets heavier with each one—not dramatic, controlled, like he's physically forcing himself not to react worse.
But I can see it. The sweat along his neck. The tremor in his hand. The pain burning behind his eyes.
And still.
Still.
All he wants is to get back to Jackson.