42. The Promise I Kept
The Promise I Kept
Summer
Igenuinely think I'm seeing things.
The warehouse is chaos around me. Women crying.
Some screaming. Others standing frozen between the rows of stained mattresses, staring at the bodies scattered across the concrete like they still can't make any of it real.
Gunpowder hangs sharp in the air over the sweat and the blood and the damp, and underneath all of it there's something else I don't want to put a name to.
And somehow, above all of it, up on the maisonette walkway with Constance's fist twisted into her hair—
is Brenda.
Something cold slides through my chest.
Because of course she's here. Of course she fucking is.
Every single interaction I ever had with that woman rearranges itself in my head, all at once, into something uglier.
The dresses laid out neatly across the bed. The heels lined up beneath them. The makeup spread carefully over the vanity, brushes in a row, lipsticks stood on end like little scalpels. The lingerie waiting for me every time she came into that room.
That calm, unbothered voice.
Needs paint. And red.
At the time I told myself she was another woman surviving around Jackson. Another thing he owned, trapped in a life she hadn't chosen, doing what she had to do to stay breathing.
I was so sure of it that I used to feel sorry for her.
Now I understand exactly what she was.
Not trapped. Employed.
My stomach turns as the memories keep coming. Brenda brushing powder over bruises so they wouldn't show in the photographs. Brenda laying out scraps of lace for terrified girls to put on.
Constance jerks harder on her hair when she starts to fight.
"This bitch tried to shoot me!"
The words carry across the whole warehouse.
Brenda's face is streaked with tears now, mascara run, lipstick smeared. For the first time in all the days I've known her, she looks frightened.
But not for herself.
Her eyes keep going to the bottom of the staircase. To the body lying twisted on the concrete down there.
To him.
Not the women. Not the girls she painted. Him.
"Summer," she gasps.
Hearing my name in her mouth makes my skin crawl.
Because how many of them begged her? How many cried while she zipped them into dresses knowing exactly where they were going afterward?
How many stood shaking in front of those mirrors while she brushed their hair and made small talk, like it was a salon appointment, like any of it was normal?
My grip tightens around the gun.
Her eyes lock onto mine, and I see something in them that looks almost like hope. Like she genuinely believes I'll help her. Like she thinks the two of us are the same thing.
And that's the worst part of it.
Because six months ago I would have believed her. Six months ago I'd have looked up at that walkway and seen one more woman caught in something too big for her.
Now all I can see are the choices she made. The girls she handed over. The way she screamed Vince's name across a building full of women wearing his bruises.
"Please," she whispers, and the word breaks apart halfway through.
My throat tightens—not because I feel sorry for her, but because I hate that some small part of me still wants to. There's a piece of me that still remembers the woman who brought me food. Who put blankets on the end of the bed. Who spoke softly to me when everyone else in that house was shouting.
Then I make myself look around properly.
At the women pressed together near the exits. At the teenager clutching a stuffed rabbit against her chest with both arms. At the girl whose wrists are still raw from restraints. At all of them crying because they've only just started to believe they might get out of this building alive.
And whatever was left of my sympathy dies right there.
"No."
It comes out quietly. Steadily.
Brenda's face crumples.
I take a step forward. "No. We don't save her."
Constance shrugs. "Works for me."
Brenda screams. The sound tears across the warehouse as Constance shoves her forward, and she hits the railing and claws at it—desperate, grabbing for anything—before she goes over the edge.
The sound she makes when she hits the concrete is one I'm going to hear for the rest of my life.
I flinch. Around me a few women gasp. One starts crying.
Brenda lies twisted beside one of the stained mattresses, and just like that she's gone.
And I wait to feel something about it.
Nothing comes. Not horror, not satisfaction. Just a kind of flat, level quiet, the same one that arrived when I pulled the trigger on Jackson.
I'll think about what that means later. Not now.
The silence lasts three seconds.
Then it all erupts again.
A man bursts out from behind a curtain near the back wall, still hauling his jeans up with one hand while fumbling for a handgun with the other. One of Black's men drops him before he gets it level, and the gun skitters away across the concrete while blood sprays the divider behind him.
Another comes charging out of a side room swinging a crowbar. One of the military guys steps around it like it's nothing and drives the butt of his rifle into the side of the man's skull, and the crack of it goes right through the building before he folds.
Everything becomes movement. Women crying, men shouting, bodies hitting the floor. The whole warehouse feels alive—like the place itself is fighting being taken apart.
"It's okay!" I shout. “We’re here to get you out of this hell you’ve been living in.”
A few heads turn toward me. Others don't. Some of them are too frightened to move at all.
One woman keeps asking the same question over and over, and her voice breaks every single time.
"Is this real?"
The gun in my hand suddenly feels heavier than it did a minute ago.
Jacob showed me how to hold it before we came in—where to put my hands, what to do with my feet, how not to let the recoil take my wrist. For your safety, he said, and neither of us pretended it was anything else.
After Jackson. After Vince. After all of it.
I don't think I'll ever feel safe unarmed again. I'm not sure how I feel about knowing that.
Across the warehouse, Jacob is still moving. Still fighting. Still bleeding.
Every step of it clearly costs him. I can see it in the way he carries that shoulder, in the tension strung across his face, in the half-second pauses before he makes himself go forward again.
But he keeps going. Because that's who he is. A man who'll take himself apart before he'll let somebody else suffer.
One of the guards lunges at him with a knife, and Jacob catches his wrist mid-swing and puts his face into a steel support beam hard enough that blood sprays the metal. Another comes out from behind a curtain and one of Black's men gets there first.
Within seconds, it's finished.
The fighting dies in stages. The gunshots stop first. Then the shouting. Then the desperate sounds of men trying to find a way out of a building that no longer has one.
Until all that's left is frightened women, overturned mattresses, and everything that happened here.
My eyes drift across the room. Counting. Checking. Looking for whatever we've missed.
And that's when I see it.
One curtain, near the back wall, still closed.
Every other section has been cleared. Every other curtain pulled back and left hanging.
Not that one.
Ice settles in my stomach.
Then I hear it. A muffled sound behind the fabric. Weak. Desperate. Somebody trying to scream through something over their mouth.
My pulse spikes. I raise the gun—not because I want to, but because I have no idea what's behind it.
"Summer?"
Jacob sees me moving, but I'm already there.
The sound comes again, louder, and I grab the edge of the curtain and pull.
And freeze.
Harris.
Oh God. Harris.
He's tied to a chair so tightly his wrists have bled down onto the seat. His face is bruised past recognition, one eye swollen completely shut, dried blood all down the front of his shirt. Silver duct tape stretches across his mouth.
My brain simply refuses it. Because I left him on that driveway. I saw him go down and I ran, and I have carried that for every hour since.
They must have taken him when they ran. Jackson's men, clearing out of the Ridge, throwing the traitor in the back of a van on their way through.
Then the panic hits.
"Jacob!"
He reaches me in seconds, and the second he sees the old man in that chair his face changes.
"Jesus Christ."
I drop the gun and get to Harris, peeling the tape off his mouth as gently as my shaking hands will let me while Jacob cuts through the restraints.
The moment the gag comes free—
"SARAH!"
The sound that comes out of him isn't like anything I've ever heard. Pure panic. Pure desperation. The sound of a father who's certain he's already lost his child and is going to scream her name anyway.
My chest physically hurts listening to it.
Then, from somewhere near the exit—
"Daddy?"
Everything stops.
A young woman steps out from the crowd. Bruised. Terrified. Crying.
Harris makes a broken sound the second he sees her. "Sarah—"
And she runs.
Actually runs. Jacob cuts the last restraint and Harris half falls out of the chair, and he catches her, and the sound the two of them make together nearly takes me off my feet.
"I thought you were dead," she sobs into his shoulder.
"I thought I'd never see you again."
Around us, women start crying. Not because they're frightened anymore.
Because they're watching proof. Proof that somebody in this building gets to go home. That somebody gets their family back.
And I feel it land in me too, because I made a promise on a cold driveway to a man I was certain I'd left to die.
I'll find her. I swear to God, I'll find her.
I did. He's holding her right now.
And somehow, despite the blood and the bodies and every terrible thing in this building, the warehouse doesn't feel quite so dark anymore.
Jacob steps up behind me and his good arm comes around my waist, and I melt back into him without a thought. His heart beats steadily against my back through the bandages.
Alive. Still here. Still mine.
His lips brush my temple. "We did it, baby."
And for the first time since all of this started, I believe him.
For the first time since Jackson took me, I think we might actually survive it.