40. The Third Fingernail
The Third Fingernail
Jacob
Jackson talked after the third fingernail.
Fucking coward.
The first one came off easy enough. Carter held his hand flat against the table while I worked the pliers under the nail and pulled up, and the scream that followed went round that concrete room and came back at us off the walls.
Not the controlled kind either—not the kind a man forces through his teeth to save face.
Real screaming. The kind that tears out of somebody when pain strips away every layer of bullshit he's spent his life wrapping around himself.
By the second nail he was crying. Actually crying, tears cutting tracks through the blood on his face while more of it ran off his ruined fingertips onto the floor.
By the third he was begging.
Turns out Jackson Moore wasn't half the man he'd spent years pretending to be.
The address came out between sobs and ragged breaths. South side of Blackwater Ridge—an old freight depot converted into a storage facility a couple of decades back.
Only it isn't storing freight.
The thought puts something ugly under my skin, and it brings all of them with it. Every girl they've taken. Every family still sitting up wondering where their daughter went. Every body we've pulled out of the ground with no name to put on it.
Every father like Groves.
Jackson's chained back into the chair while Carter wraps gauze around his hand—not because either of us cares whether he suffers, but because dead men stop talking and I'm not convinced he's given us everything yet.
He looks terrible.
Good.
His face has gone gray beneath the blood smeared across it. One eye's swollen shut now and sweat beads along his hairline despite the cold coming through this house. Every breath catches somewhere around the hole Summer put through his thigh.
I hope it hurts. I hope every single inhale feels like a blade going in.
Across the room, Summer watches him from beside the doorway, and she's gone quiet.
Not scared. Not anymore.
There's something colder sitting behind her eyes than there was when I found her in that corridor. Trauma changes people—I've watched it happen a hundred times over a hundred cases. Sometimes it breaks them. Sometimes it turns them into something harder than they were.
Looking at her now, I think Jackson may have built his own worst nightmare.
"I'm coming."
The words pull my attention off him.
"No."
"You are not leaving me here again, Jacob."
That one hits like a boot to the ribs—not because she's trying to hurt me, but because she isn't. There's no accusation in it. No anger. Just fear, raw and honest, and for a second I see the whole shape of it.
The adrenaline that carried her through tonight is finally draining out, and what's left underneath is reality. Reality says I got shot. Reality says she watched me go down and thought that was it. Reality says the last time she let me out of her sight, Jackson Moore put her on a helicopter.
And Christ, maybe she's right to be terrified.
I nearly lost her.
"There could be armed men in there."
"There will be armed men in there." Her voice sharpens. "And there are women trapped inside."
I drag my good hand down my face. Exhaustion is settling into my bones now, and my shoulder throbs steadily under the bandages with every heartbeat, and none of it matters.
"Summer—"
"No." She takes a step closer, and her eyes have gone glassy, everything sitting right at the surface. "I need to be there."
The room goes quiet, because I know exactly what she means.
This isn't about revenge. It isn't even about Jackson. It's about women sitting inside that building right now believing that nobody in the world is coming for them—and about somebody walking through those doors who understands precisely what that feels like.
Constance pushes off the wall. "I'm going too."
Carter mutters something under his breath. "Absolutely fucking not."
One of her eyebrows goes up. "You planning on stopping me?"
Honestly? I'd pay money to watch him try. Carter seems to reach the same conclusion, because he exhales hard through his nose and shakes his head.
Jackson lifts his swollen face and laughs weakly through the blood. "You people really think this changes anything."
Carter hits him so hard the whole chair skids sideways across the concrete.
The laugh stops.
Carter loops a second chain through the frame and locks it off against the radiator pipe, then checks it twice, and I take one last look at the man in that chair before we go.
Both hands ruined. A hole through his thigh.
He isn't walking out of this room, and even if he crawled, there's nowhere on this mountain left for him to crawl to.
"He's still breathing when I get back," I tell Carter. "That's the only condition."
Ten minutes later we're driving through the mountains again, and this time Summer's behind the wheel because I can't fucking drive.
Somehow that bothers me more than it should.
The dashboard lights throw a soft glow across her face while her hands grip the wheel tight enough that the knuckles have gone white. She hasn't said much since we pulled out of the gates, and it isn't calm. She's wound so tight I'm half expecting the wheel to come off in her hands.
Her fingers tighten a fraction every time headlights come toward us. Every time something shifts in the trees. Every time a noise cuts through the quiet.
Like part of her is still standing in that house, waiting for someone to come and drag her out of it.
My hand rests against my thigh, fingers tapping out the same restless rhythm they've been keeping for twenty minutes. I hate this. Hate sitting still. Hate knowing there are women trapped somewhere ahead of us while we crawl along these roads at fifty miles an hour.
Most of all I hate that she's sitting two feet away from me and I still can't shake the feeling that if I look away long enough, somebody will take her again.
It's irrational. I know it's irrational.
Doesn't stop my eyes going back to her every few seconds. Checking. Making sure she's still there. Still breathing.
I shift in the seat and pain rips clean through my shoulder, a piercing burn spreading out across my chest, and I grit my teeth against it.
Tamara told me to rest. Told me I'd lost too much blood already. Told me that if I tear something inside I'll wake up on an operating table.
Tamara can get fucked.
My phone's against my ear, Black talking low on the other end.
"You're sure it's the right place?"
"Yes."
"And Jackson gave it up willingly?"
I glance down at my hand. There's dried blood still trapped under my fingernails. Some of it his. Some of it mine.
"Eventually."
Silence from the other end. Black's known me long enough not to ask the follow-up.
Smart man.
"I've got some guys who are game to join us."
I look out at the darkness beyond the windshield. "Officers?"
"No."
"Good." The word's out of my mouth before I've thought about it, because we're already a long way past police work. We crossed that line so far back I honestly don't know if I'll ever be the sheriff this town needs again.
Black exhales slowly. "They're military. Men I served with."
Summer glances over at me. Listening. Always listening.
"They know what happened to Summer," he says. "They knew Groves. They know what happened to his girl."
Groves.
The name goes between my ribs like something sharpened. I can still see his face. Still hear the desperation in his voice asking a monster to tell him whether his daughter was dead.
He deserved better. Every one of them deserved better.
"They've wanted this operation burned to the ground for years," Black says quietly.
Good. So have I.
The call ends a few minutes later and the silence settles back over the SUV.
The roads get rougher the further we go, trees crowding in tighter, and every so often an abandoned industrial building appears out of the dark like a skeleton somebody left to rot.
Rusted fencing. Collapsed loading bays. Warehouses that haven't seen legitimate business in thirty years.
Perfect place to hide something.
Perfect place to hide people.
Eventually Summer slows. "There."
The single word drags my attention forward.
The warehouse sits alone at the far end of an old freight yard, ringed by chain-link fence and stacks of rusted shipping containers. Security lights throw hard pools across cracked pavement, and whole sections of the property stay black between them.
No movement. No patrols. No vehicles going in or coming out.
Nothing at all.
Which is worse, not better. Because places like this are never empty. And if Summer's right about Vince, it isn't empty now—it's just quiet, in the way a house goes quiet when somebody inside doesn't want to be found.
Summer kills the headlights without being told.
"Good girl," I mutter. "We don't get any closer than we have to."
She doesn't even look at me. "Obviously."
Despite everything, the corner of my mouth twitches. A year ago she'd have argued with me about it. Now she's thinking tactically before I've finished the sentence.
We roll another quarter mile and pull in behind an abandoned loading structure that blocks the line of sight to the warehouse. Two dark trucks are already waiting.
Black's out before we've fully stopped, and the second he sees me climbing out of the SUV he goes still. Then his eyes narrow.
"What the fuck happened to you?"
I glance down at the bloodstained bandages under my shirt. "Long night."
"You got shot."
"Observant."
He stares at me a moment, then shakes his head slowly. "You should be in a hospital."
"I was."
His expression somehow gets worse.
Behind him, three men come out of the shadows. Older. Harder-faced. The military comes off them in the way they move, the way they scan the ground, the way not one of them leaves his back exposed for more than a couple of seconds at a time.
One steps forward—broad through the shoulders, gray threaded through his beard. "Black said there are women held inside."
"There are."