39. The Man in The Mountain
The Man in The Mountain
Jacob
The nurse looks about two seconds away from restraining me herself.
"You cannot leave."
I stare at her while shrugging my jacket carefully over the uninjured shoulder. "Watch me."
"Sheriff—"
"You were shot less than two hours ago." Tamara cuts across her from the doorway. "You've lost a dangerous amount of blood, your shoulder needs monitoring, and your blood pressure is still unstable."
I don’t give a fuck, because all I can think about is Jackson Moore chained to a fucking chair, waiting for me.
That image alone is enough to hold me upright.
The bandages strapped around my chest pull with every movement, my arm's bound against my body to stop me tearing the stitches open, and none of it does a thing for the throbbing underneath.
Every heartbeat pushes another pulse of fire through my shoulder and down my ribs.
Still not enough to keep me here.
Summer stands beside me watching my face while I push rounds into my handgun, her fingers brushing my good arm every few seconds. Checking. Grounding herself.
Tamara hasn't moved from the door. "You need rest, Jacob."
I glance at her once. "I need vengeance."
The room goes quiet, because everybody in it knows exactly what I mean. She exhales hard through her nose.
"At least wait until morning."
"No."
"You could reopen the wound."
"Don't care."
"Jacob—"
"No." My patience finally goes. "While that man still has blood moving through his veins, my job isn't done."
That shuts everybody up.
Summer moves in against my side. "We'll be careful."
I almost laugh, because there is nothing careful about what's going to happen tonight. Somewhere behind me the nurse mutters something that sounds a lot like, you're all insane, and honestly, that's probably fair.
Adelaide reappears in the doorway holding a stack of towels. "We should take these. Just in case."
Summer takes them from her while I start toward the door, and pain detonates through my shoulder hard enough that a rough breath tears out of me before I can stop it.
Summer's head snaps around. "Jacob—"
"I'm fine."
Lie. Massive fucking lie. My vision swims for half a second before it steadies again.
Tamara notices, because of course she does. "You're pale. Please Jacob, go back to bed."
"Flirting with me again, doc?"
Summer glares at me, and honestly? Seeing that fire behind my eyes makes it all worth it. Tamara rolls her eyes.
"You're an idiot," Summer mutters.
"Yet somehow still alive."
The nurse gives up on me entirely and walks off shaking her head, muttering something about liability forms. Then Summer steps in behind me and runs her fingers down the uninjured side of my back, following the line of it as she comes around until she's standing in front of me.
Her hand slides over my beard, and she kisses me, soft.
"You sure you can do this?"
The question should probably offend me. Instead something twists warm and painful under my ribs, because she's worried—terrified, probably—and she's still willing to walk back into that fucking mountain beside me anyway.
"There's a life for us that's safe from all this, Summer." My voice drops. "The sooner I end it, the sooner we go home."
Something passes over her face at that. And then Adelaide ruins it completely.
"If you two start dry humping in front of me after the night we've had, I'm driving off a cliff."
Summer snorts. A laugh nearly gets out of me too, right up until the pain punches through my shoulder again.
"Fuck."
"Yeah," Adelaide says. "That's what I thought."
Ten minutes later, we're back in the SUV heading for the Ridge, towels spread over the seat beneath me because for all the bandaging, blood is still working its way slowly through the dressing.
Summer checks it every few minutes, her hand sliding under the edge of the spare jacket Tamara pulled out of lost property for me.
The roads are dark and empty this late. Nobody talks much—the adrenaline crash is catching all of us at once.
Adelaide drives with both hands locked on the wheel, and every so often I catch her eyes flicking to the mirror.
Not at the road. At the blood on my clothes, making sure I'm still breathing.
Summer curls into my side for the whole drive. It can't be comfortable for her and I don't stop her, because every time she touches me something in my chest settles a fraction.
The Ridge comes back into view twenty minutes later, and somehow it looks worse than when we left it. The gates hang half open. Emergency lights still flash across the property. There are bodies on the driveway that haven’t been moved, and the whole place looks like a war zone.
Good. That's exactly what his empire turned into.
Adelaide pulls up near the main entrance, and the second I get out the cold slams into me along with the smell that's settled over the property. Smoke and blood. I grit my teeth and start walking.
We go in through the front and head for the room where they held us, and Carter appears at the entrance almost as we reach it. Christ, he looks nearly as bad as I do—blood all over his clothes, knuckles split open, fresh bruising along the side of his jaw.
But his eyes go straight past me to Adelaide, checking she's okay. Something eases in his face when he finds her standing there, and then his attention comes back to me.
"You look like shit, boss."
I glance at his knuckles. "You too."
A humorless grin pulls at the corner of his mouth, then fades. "He's waiting for you." Something wicked works its way onto his face. "Should warn you, though. He's barely alive. Conscious, but barely."
A smile tugs at my mouth, because today's the day Jackson Moore meets the devil.
Summer's hand slides into mine and we start walking. The closer we get, the more the air smells like blood. Fresh blood.
Carter looks at Summer. "You sure you want to see this?"
Her fingers tighten around mine. "Yes."
He studies her a second longer. Then steps aside.
Jackson Moore is chained to a chair in the middle of the room, and Jesus Christ. Summer's shot went through his thigh, high on the outside—there's a wide dark stain soaked into the leg of his trousers and a puddle beneath the chair, but from the angle of it she missed the artery.
Lucky bastard. Though looking at the rest of him, I'm not sure lucky's the word.
His face is destroyed. Blood coats his mouth and chin, one eye's swollen almost shut, the side of his jaw's gone dark with bruising, and there's dried blood across his teeth where somebody split his lip open more than once.
He lifts his head as we come closer. And despite all of it—the blood loss, the swelling, the chains—he smiles.
"Well," he rasps. "There they are."
My hand tightens around the gun Carter handed me. Summer steps in closer to me while Carter moves past us and leans against the wall.
I look at Jackson's face again. Then at Carter's swollen knuckles.
"I see Carter had fun with you while I was gone?"
Carter blinks once. "Wasn’t me, boss."
My brow pulls in. Jackson lets out a weak laugh that turns into a cough, blood dripping off his chin.
And then, from behind us, Constance walks into the room.
Her dark hair is tied messily back. There's blood smeared up her sleeves and exhaustion carved into her face, and her eyes are murderous. She folds her arms and looks directly at Jackson.
"I did."
The words hang there. And honestly? That's the first time since I met Constance that she's genuinely put a chill down my spine.
Jackson lifts his swollen face toward her, blood dripping steadily from his lip onto the floor. Then he smiles again.
Still fucking smiling.
"You hit harder than your boyfriend does."
Constance doesn't blink. "Oh, Carter's not my boyfriend." She laughs. "I'd never date a cop. No offense."
Carter lets out a low chuckle. "None taken."
I step forward and feel my shirt come away tacky from my back. The drive reopened something—there's warmth spreading slowly through the bandages under the jacket—and I don't care in the slightest.
Jackson watches me adjust and laughs weakly through the blood. "Doctor clear you for this, Sheriff?"
I don't answer him. I just start walking, and every step hurts, the bandages pulling tighter with each one while exhaustion drags at the back of my skull. None of it slows me down.
He tilts his head as I stop in front of him. "You know," he rasps, "I really thought she was just a fuck to you."
Wrong thing to say.
I go very still. "Be careful talking about her like you understand a single thing."
His smile widens through the blood on his teeth. "Oh, but I do understand her." His eyes flick toward Summer. "I understand she likes it from behind. The way her—"
I hit him before my brain catches up. My fist slams into the side of his jaw hard enough that the chair rocks under him, and the pain that tears through my shoulder afterward is white-hot and immediate. Worth every second of it, watching him cough blood onto the floor.
"Jacob—" Summer starts.
"He doesn't get to speak about you." My voice has gone somewhere rougher. Darker.
Jackson spits red onto the concrete and laughs. "You really think you're different from me?"
Carter comes off the wall. Summer's grip tightens hard around my hand. And something ugly coils low in my chest, because that question has been following me since the second I walked into this house.
Jackson watches my face. Sees the hesitation. Of course he fucking does.
"You kill for her," he murmurs. "You torture for her." His mouth twists. "You'd burn the whole world down for her."
I step closer. "I would never hurt innocent women."
His smile fades, just slightly.
Good.
Because unlike him, I know exactly what I am. I know what's in me—the violence, the obsession, all of it—and I've never once pretended otherwise. The difference is I'd put a gun in my own mouth before I kidnapped women and handed them to monsters.
Jackson drags his head up again. "Miller took everything from me. And she—she was going to bring Anna back. With a bit of training she—"
Summer steps forward, and the look on her face is lethal.
"No," she says quietly.
Jackson actually stops. Her voice shakes when she goes on, but not from fear. Pure fury.
"You know what the difference is between you and Jacob?"
He watches her without a word.
"Jacob would die before he tried to replace me." The room goes completely still. "And you?" She takes another step toward him. "You thought Annalise was replaceable."
Something crosses Jackson's face then, for the first time since we walked in. Not anger—something stranger, almost like disbelief. Like hearing it said out loud actually wounds him.
Good.
I slide my arm around Summer's waist and she leans into me without hesitating. Home. That's what she feels like now, even standing in a room that smells like blood and death.
Carter pushes off the wall with a tired sigh. "We done playing relationship therapist with the psychopath?"
Jackson's attention shifts to him, and something colder comes into the room, because Carter doesn't look angry anymore. He looks empty.
Which is infinitely fucking worse.
He crouches down in front of the chair. "You know what I can't stop thinking about?"
Jackson says nothing.
"Groves."
Pain slices through my chest. Not the shoulder—something worse—because I can see him again, strapped upright in that chair with a hole between his eyes.
Carter's voice stays calm. Too calm. "He had two kids."
Jackson's expression doesn't move.
"Vance just bought a house." Silence. "Hayes had a baby on the way."
Summer stiffens against me, and suddenly everything around me feels cold, like every one of them is standing in here with us.
Carter studies Jackson's face for any flicker of guilt and doesn't find one. Of course he doesn't.
"They died at your hands."
"No." Jackson's voice is quiet. "They died because of Miller."
Summer trembles beside me and Jackson notices, and slowly turns his head toward her.
"You know the funniest part?" Blood runs from his mouth as he speaks. "Your father still has no idea how many bodies he made. Even now. Even dead." He keeps his eye on her. "He buried Annalise and walked away. Meanwhile I buried half this town trying to survive what he did to me."
Summer's gone pale, like she's trying not to go under. I tighten my arm around her.
"This isn't on you."
Jackson laughs weakly. "No. It's all on him."
Carter grabs the back of the chair and slams it backward hard enough that Jackson's skull cracks off the concrete wall. Summer flinches. Jackson groans low in his throat.
"Enough," Carter says.
Fresh blood runs from the back of his head now. But still—still—he's smiling.
"You all think this ends with me."
My pulse slows right down.
What?
Carter's expression darkens. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Jackson drags his swollen face up again. "There are men making millions off my inventory." His eye flicks to Summer. "Men considerably more dangerous than me."
Silence crashes through the room. Then Summer says, quietly, "The warehouse."
Jackson smiles again. "I'd bet it's already empty."
My stomach drops. Carter swears under his breath.
Summer turns to me. "We need the location."
Jackson eases back in the chair as far as the chains let him. "And what do I get in return?"
I step forward, and the pain tears through my shoulder, and I don't care.
"You're confusing this for a negotiation."
He laughs, weak and wet. "You still don't understand, Sheriff." His good eye locks onto mine. "I've already won."