41. Do We Save Her?
Do We Save Her?
Jacob
The closer we get to the warehouse, the quieter everything becomes.
No jokes. No conversation. Even Constance stops running her mouth. The only sounds are boots crunching over gravel and the distant hum of the security lights strung above the freight yard.
My shoulder throbs with every step. The pain's settled into something constant now—not piercing enough to stop me moving, not dull enough to ignore.
Just a steady reminder that I lost more blood tonight than a man's supposed to and that Tamara’s somewhere having an aneurysm imagining me standing here.
I don't care. There are women inside that building and I promised Summer I would get them out. Everything else waits.
Constance reaches the entrance first.
The metal door looks like a hundred others I've stood in front of over the years. Rusted. Industrial. Forgettable. It's amazing how evil always hides itself inside ordinary things.
She knocks three times, and the sound carries across the whole freight yard.
Then nothing.
My grip tightens around my weapon. Beside me Summer stands perfectly still—not frozen, focused—and I can feel her staring at that building. Waiting. Remembering.
The lock clicks, unnaturally loud in the quiet.
The handle turns.
The guard barely has time to register what he's looking at.
One second he's standing there in the gap with his hand still on the door, and the next Black's man fires and the crack of it splits the night open.
The round catches him high in the forehead and he goes backward through the doorway like somebody cut his strings.
Constance is already moving—flat against the wall beside the frame, out of the line of it, exactly where Black told her to be.
"Move!"
We surge forward, and the adrenaline hits my bloodstream hard enough to almost drown the pain out.
Almost.
The second I cross the threshold, the smell hits me.
Jesus Christ.
Sweat. Unwashed bodies. Damp concrete. Underneath all of it something sour and animal that I've smelled twice before in my career, both times in rooms I still see when I close my eyes.
Rows of mattresses cover the floor exactly as Summer described. Thin curtains hang from metal poles, sectioning the space into pathetic little compartments. Some stained. Some torn. None of them washed in years.
The women stare at us. Lots of them—sitting on mattresses, curled under blankets, standing frozen behind the hanging curtains.
A girl who can't be older than nineteen blinks at me from the corner, a blanket clutched against her chest so tight her knuckles have gone white.
The woman beside her doesn't move at all.
Her eyes are swollen from crying and there are bruises ringing both wrists.
Neither of them speaks. Neither of them so much as flinches toward us.
Like they can't process what they're looking at. Like rescue stopped being a real thing a long time ago.
Rage floods through me, because Summer was here. And if Moore hadn’t have taken her to try to morph into Annalise, she could have ended up here instead. Sleeping on one of these mattresses. Breathing this air. Lying awake in the dark listening to these women cry themselves to sleep.
The thought hits hard enough that I nearly miss the movement to my left.
Nearly.
A guard comes through one of the hanging curtains with a handgun already up, and training takes over before thought does. I fire. The shot catches him square in the chest and his body slams back through the divider, taking fabric and poles down with him in a tangled heap.
Screaming detonates across the warehouse.
Another guard appears near the loading bay entrance and one of Black's men drops him before I've even got my sights up. No hesitation. No warning. Just efficient violence, the kind men learn from years of fighting monsters in places with worse names than this one.
Then everything comes apart at once. Women scrambling off mattresses. Crying. Screaming. One woman drops to her knees and sobs so hard she can't get air in. Another presses both hands over her mouth and screams the same word over and over.
"No. No. No."
Like she's certain this is another trick. Another game.
Then Summer steps forward.
"It's okay!" Her voice cuts clean through the chaos, and every head in that warehouse turns. "It's okay," she shouts again. "We're getting you out."
The change moves through the room like something physical. One woman starts crying. Another presses her hands to her mouth. A third just stares at Summer like she's looking at something holy. And standing there in the middle of the panic and the gunfire, I finally understand what I'm watching.
They aren't looking at us. They aren't looking at the weapons or the men or the open door behind us.
They're looking at her. Because they recognize her. Not her face.
Her pain.
They know exactly what she is.
One of them.
And for the first time since we came through that door, something like hope starts moving through this building.
Then another gunshot tears across the warehouse from somewhere above us. The sound ricochets off the metal walls and half the women scream and duck. One of them throws herself over the girl with the blanket, covering her with her own body like she's expecting rounds to come through the ceiling.
Everything in me locks.
Upstairs.
The knot that's been sitting under my ribs since we pulled into that yard pulls tight, because Summer told me Vince never left this place. That he's been running it since the night they took her. And something underneath all the noise in my head knows he's still up there.
A shout follows the gunshot. Then another—muffled by concrete and distance, but the urgency comes through fine.
Somebody's running.
I'm moving before I've consciously decided to, and pain explodes through my shoulder hard enough that the world tips sideways. My vision blurs badly enough that I have to catch one of the support beams to stay upright, sweat breaking across my forehead while the next wave rolls through my chest.
Fuck.
Not now. Not tonight.
By the time it clears, Black's already at the staircase with one of his men behind him, weapon up. And somewhere above us Constance's voice rings out across the whole building.
"Get back here, you little cunt!"
A door slams hard enough to shake the upper level.
Vince.
I push off the beam and force my legs to work. Every step hurts. Every movement drags at stitches that should be healing in a hospital bed. I don't care. The only thing that matters is getting up there before the bastard finds a way out.
The upper level is exactly what Summer described, and it's worse than I'd built in my head.
The corridor is lined with dressing stations.
Vanity mirrors ringed with bright bulbs.
Makeup palettes open across the countertops, brushes laid out in neat rows.
Hair products. Cheap perfume. Racks of clothing shoved up against the walls—the kind of clothing nobody chooses for herself.
And every station is set up. Ready. Somebody works up here.
That's what turns my stomach. Not the neglect. The care. Somebody sits in these chairs and takes their time, and when they've finished, a woman downstairs stops looking like a person and starts looking like a product.
Somebody tried to disguise a slaughterhouse as a dressing room.
A young woman stumbles out of one of the rooms ahead of us—barefoot, mascara down both cheeks, oversized clothes hanging off a frame that's lost too much weight. When she sees us, she flinches so hard she nearly goes down.
"It's okay," Black says. "We're here to help."
She points down the corridor with a shaking hand. "He went that way."
Then she starts crying. Not quietly. The kind of crying that comes out of somebody whose body has finally worked out the danger might actually be over.
I don't stop moving.
Another gunshot goes off somewhere ahead. Then Constance swears—loudly, viciously, the kind of swearing that tells me somebody is about to have a very bad night.
I round the corner and everything clicks into place.
Vince is at the far end of the corridor with a handgun clenched in his fist. Sweat's darkened the collar of his shirt and his chest is heaving. Whatever mask the man has worn all these years has finally cracked clean down the middle, and what's underneath it isn't untouchable at all.
There's a woman standing beside him.
Dark hair. Mid-fifties, maybe. Her fingers are locked around his arm hard enough that her knuckles have gone white.
For a split-second, I think she's trying to stop him.
Then she shoves a fresh magazine into his hand.
She's helping him.
"Shoot!" she screams. "Vince, get them!"
Constance comes out of a doorway before I can react. One second the woman's standing beside him, and the next she's going backward by a fistful of hair, screaming, clawing at Constance's wrist, kicking, trying to throw herself back toward Vince.
Constance doesn't break stride.
Vince swings the weapon toward her and I fire, and the shot smashes into the wall beside his head.
He ducks behind a doorway and returns fire, plaster blowing out of the wall a foot from my shoulder. One of Black's men pushes forward to cover the corridor while the rest of us move up.
And the woman keeps screaming his name while Constance drags her along the floor. Desperate. Panicked. Like losing him is the worst thing that could happen to her tonight.
Something about it snags. There's a piece of this I'm not seeing.
Then Vince runs.
The coward launches himself out of cover and bolts for the staircase at the far end. One of Black's guys nearly gets a hand on him before he throws himself through the stairwell entrance, and by the time we reach the top he's already halfway down.
His eyes find mine.
Recognition. Then hatred.
Then something worse.
Because his gaze drops past us. Past the staircase. Down onto the warehouse floor, to where Summer's moving between the mattresses getting women toward the door.
My blood turns to ice, because I know that look. I've seen it across an interrogation table more times than I want to count.
It lands a fraction of a second before he raises the gun.
Not at us.
At her.
"SUMMER!"
The shout tears out of me. Below us women scream as he levels the weapon at the warehouse floor—at the woman he helped put in this building, at the woman he'd rather see dead on that concrete than walking out of here free.
Everything slows down.
I can't get a clean shot. Neither can Black. One wrong round and it goes straight through him into her.
Then the woman in Constance's grip starts screaming again. Not at us this time.
At him.
"No! Vince!"
And he hesitates. Only a second. Only long enough to glance back over his shoulder.
One of Black's men fires and the round catches Vince high in the chest. The impact knocks him back and his foot misses the next step entirely, and for a fraction of a second he hangs there with his arms going, trying to find his balance.
Then gravity takes him.
His body slams off the metal staircase hard enough to rattle the whole structure and tumbles the rest of the way down, and he hits the concrete floor below with a crack that seems to go on echoing.
The warehouse falls so silent I can hear the shell casing spin across the concrete before it finally settles.
Vince never gets back up.
My attention comes back to the woman still fighting Constance's grip, and she's crying now. Actually crying. Straining toward the stairs, trying to crawl toward what's left of him.
Constance hauls her upright by the hair. "This one tried to fucking shoot me!"
The words cut through the silence. Then she looks down over the rail toward Summer.
"Do we save her?"
Summer doesn't move. Doesn't speak. She just stares up at the woman on the walkway, and I watch every trace of color drain out of her face.
The warehouse disappears around her. The women. The bodies. The blood. All of it. Because whatever she's looking at isn't a stranger.
"Oh my God."
Her voice breaks apart completely. She takes a step forward, eyes fixed on the woman struggling in Constance's grip. Then another.
And I understand, a half-second before she says it, exactly why she's looking at her like that.
"That's Brenda."