44. It Belongs To Them
It Belongs To Them
Summer
Just when I think I understand him, he does something like this.
I watch the women climb out of the trucks one by one in the gray morning light and I think about what Jacob said in that parking lot—standing on the hood with blood soaking through his bandages, offering them a choice.
Not demanding. Not deciding for them. Offering.
Like their agency was the one thing left in this whole nightmare that still belonged entirely to them.
Maybe that's what this is. His way of making sure Jackson Moore ends the way he lived: completely surrounded by the consequences of what he chose to do with his life.
Jacob made one call before we left that parking lot.
He stepped a few feet from the trucks with his back to the group, his voice too low for me to catch any of it.
But I watched his face while he talked—the way it tightened, then steadied, then did something I didn't have a clean word for—and when he came back he didn't say a word about it.
Twenty minutes into the drive, headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. A single truck keeping pace with us through the mountain roads, steady and unhurried.
I didn't ask. I already knew.
Mason meets us at the gate.
He must have driven fast to get here first, but he doesn't look rushed.
He looks exactly like a man who's been waiting a long time for this and didn't want to be late for it.
He's standing outside his truck with his hands in his jacket pockets when we pull in, and when Jacob gets out the two of them exchange a look that doesn't need anything attached to it. Mason nods once. Jacob nods back.
That's all.
He falls into step with us as we move toward the entrance and nobody questions it. Some things don't need explaining.
The driveway of Rivers Ridge looks different in daylight.
I don't know what I expected. Something uglier, maybe.
Something that matched the version of this place that lives in my chest—cold marble and red camera lights and the smell of chemicals and fear.
But the morning has softened it, if you can look beyond the bodies on the ground.
The lawn catches the early sun. The stone facade is almost beautiful, all clean lines and tall windows throwing back a pale sky.
I feel everything.
Jacob's hand finds the small of my back as we walk, and I lean into it without thinking, the way I do now.
The way my body has learned to move toward him like it's the most natural thing in the world.
He grunts low as his boots hit the gravel steps and I feel the tension move through him even through his jacket—the careful way he's holding that shoulder, the catch in his breathing he doesn't bother hiding from me anymore.
He doesn't say anything.
Neither do I.
There's a guard still slumped against the low wall near the entrance, half collapsed sideways with one arm at an angle arms don't go. One of the women walks past him without looking. Another slows, stares at him for a long moment, then keeps moving. Her face doesn't change at all.
They all have that look. Whatever they felt the first time they were brought to this house—the fear, the disorientation, the terrible dawning understanding—it's been replaced by something quieter and far more settled. Women who have already decided something and don't feel the need to announce it.
The marble inside is ruined.
Dark footprints track across the white floor in overlapping arcs, ours from last night, dried to a deep reddish brown.
Broken glass from one of the corridor lights lies scattered near the base of the stairs.
A painting has come off the wall and leans crooked against the baseboard, gold frame split at one corner.
The Ridge's performance of wealth and control has been pulled apart at every seam, and what's underneath it turns out to be a building. Stone and glass and empty rooms.
I'm not afraid walking through it this time. I'm not sure I feel much of anything at all, right up until we reach the doorway at the top of the basement stairs and one of the women behind me stops walking.
"I can't." Her voice comes out small. Not weak—honest. Like someone who has done an enormous number of hard things and has finally found the exact edge of what she can carry. "I'm sorry. I just—I can't go back down there."
Sarah steps beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touch. "It's closure, Bethany," she says gently. "He can't reach us anymore. That's all this is."
Bethany shakes her head once and presses her lips together.
Then she turns and walks back toward the entrance without another word, and I watch her go and I understand it completely.
If Jacob weren't beside me right now, if his hand weren't warm against my back, I don't think I could go down those stairs either.
But he is.
So I do.
Carter doesn't look surprised when we push through the heavy door at the bottom—Jacob called ahead—and he just nods once toward him with something unreadable in his face and steps aside.
Adelaide leans against the far wall with her arms folded.
She looks up when I come in and something passes between us that isn't words and isn't quite an expression.
Just the particular understanding of two people who survived the same thing from different angles.
She straightens and comes to stand beside me without saying anything at all.
The room smells like blood and concrete and something faintly chemical underneath. The single overhead light throws everything into a hard shadow.
Jackson sits in the middle of it, chained to the chair exactly as we left him, head hanging forward.
When we walk further in, he lifts it.
His face is barely recognizable. The swelling has darkened, one eye completely closed now, the other reduced to a narrow glittering slit. Blood has dried in long tracks down his chin and throat.
He looks like something close to finished, but he smiles anyway. Of course he does.
"Well, well, well." His voice comes out wet and ruined, barely the same voice that used to move through me like ice water. "The big bad sheriff came back. You got the balls to finish it this time, you fucking coward?"
Jacob laughs.
It isn't a pleasant sound. Not amused. Not cruel, exactly, either. Just the sound of a man who has moved completely past the point where Jackson Moore can reach him.
"I came to wish you every misery you've got coming," he says. "Right up until you rot."
Jackson's ruined mouth pulls wider. "Then do it. Shoot me. Stab me. Beat me to a fucking pulp if that's what gets you off." Spit gathers at the corner of his mouth. "Stop with the theatrics and finish it."
I step forward.
His one working eye slides toward me, and the smile stays but something underneath it shifts. Something uncertain. Because I'm not looking at him the way I used to. Not with fear, not with hatred, not with the involuntary flinch my body learned inside these walls.
I'm looking at him the way you look at something that used to be dangerous and isn't anymore.
"My fiancé and I have somewhere to be," I say. "But we brought some people to see you."
I swing the door open without taking my eyes off his face.
They come in one at a time.
Thirteen women, moving quietly, filing into the room until they've formed a loose ring around the chair.
Jackson's eye tracks each of them as they come.
I watch his face work through it—confusion first, then a flicker of something that might be fear, put away fast, replaced by a performance of contempt that doesn't quite arrive in time to be convincing.
He knows most of these faces. I can see it in the way his jaw sets as the room fills. In the change in his breathing.
Constance pushes off the wall and steps in to close the circle, arms still folded, expression giving away nothing. She doesn't look at him with hatred. She looks at him with the particular blankness of a woman who has already decided he doesn't warrant the energy of an emotion.
"What the fuck is this." Flat. Like he's trying very hard to make it sound like a statement.
Nobody answers him.
Carter wheels a cart to the side of the room. I don't look at what's on it. I don't need to.
From the corner of my eye I see one of the women lean toward another and murmur something. The other one nods. Both of them look at Jackson with expressions so completely without mercy that I feel it move through the room like a current.
Then Mason steps through the circle.
He walks slowly, deliberately, like a man who has waited an extremely long time for this exact moment and intends to be present for every second of it. He reaches the cart and his hand closes around the handle of the mallet without him having to look for it.
He turns it once in his grip. Twice. His eyes stay on Jackson the whole time.
"Sophia Jerome," he says.
His voice is completely steady.
"My little girl."
I look at Jacob without meaning to, and he's already looking at the floor.
Not away. Down. The way a man looks when he's carrying something he's been carrying a long while and has just been reminded of the exact weight of it.
He made that call knowing what he was calling this man into.
He drove up here knowing the name was going to be said out loud in this room.
He knew. He's always known. And Mason has stood beside him through every hour of the last three days with that name locked in his mouth.
"She'd be twelve now," Mason says. "If you hadn't taken her from me." He tosses the mallet lightly, catches it by the handle, holds it up—not threatening. Just showing him. Making sure Jackson understands exactly what this is.
"This is for her."
The sound when it connects with Jackson's knee is something I'll hear for the rest of my life.
Someone behind me makes a small involuntary noise. Two of the women near the back turn away. I keep my eyes forward—not on Jackson, not on Mason, somewhere in the middle distance—and I breathe through my nose and tell my body to stay where it is.
"This one's for Reyes."
The second impact. Jackson's scream tears out of him raw and animal and enormous, the sound of a body finally being handed everything it's owed.
"And this one—" Mason's voice cracks for the first time. Just slightly. Just enough. "This one's for Calder."
Jackson doesn't scream that time. What comes out of him is worse: a long ragged exhale that collapses into broken gasping, his whole body shuddering against the chains, sweat running down his face into the blood.
Then Harris steps forward.
He must have come through the door quietly with the rest of them. He looks older than he did yesterday, moving slowly, slightly hunched, his bruised face set with a dignity that closes my throat. He holds his hand out toward Mason without a word, and Mason passes him the mallet without hesitating.
Harris looks down at Jackson for a long moment.
Jackson looks back at him through that one narrow eye, and something flickers across his face—not guilt, nothing as clean as guilt, but maybe the recognition of what it means that this particular man is standing in this room at all.
"This," Harris says quietly, "is for hurting my Sarah."
He brings it down on Jackson's hand.
The crack is different from the others. Higher. More final. Several of the women flinch. Somebody vomits near the back of the room.
Adelaide doesn't move. She stands completely still with her arms at her sides now, watching, bearing witness the way only a person with very deep reserves of controlled rage can.
I press my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth and I do not look away.
Then Jacob looks at me. Just that. A look—patient, steady, asking without asking.
I nod once.
I cross the room and crouch down in front of the chair so our eyes are level. Up close he's barely conscious, his breathing shallow and wet, his one working eye struggling to hold focus. But when I settle in front of him something in him surfaces, and he looks at me.
Really looks. Not through me. Not at some version of a dead woman he wanted to carve me into.
At me.
"I want to put a bullet through your head," I tell him, and my voice comes out steadier than I expected it to.
"I want to give you exactly what you gave my mama.
No warning. No time to understand it. The world just stopping.
" I hold his gaze. "But you don't deserve that. You don't get the mercy of fast."
I stand up slowly.
"So instead I'm going to go and live my life. With my man. With my freedom. And you're going to stay down here and know that every person in this room is taking back what you stole from them, piece by piece, until there's nothing left of you at all."
I step back.
Adelaide appears at my side a moment later. She doesn't hug me. She just stands there, shoulder pressed against mine, solid and steady, and somehow that's exactly right.
And I wait for Jacob to step forward.
To take his turn. To do the thing I've always known he's capable of—that cold, meticulous violence he carries around like a second skin. Part of me thinks it would be a relief to watch. A clean ending.
He doesn't move.
He stands with his hands loose at his sides and looks at Jackson for a long moment, and the thing I've been watching in his face since the first day I met him—that coiled, barely contained fury, the rage that was always looking for somewhere to put itself—simply isn't there.
Something quieter has taken its place. Something that's finally found its shape.
He looks at the women standing in their circle.
"Go get him, girls."
Then he puts his hand on my shoulder, takes in Adelaide with a nod, and turns us all toward the door.
"No—" Jackson's voice behind us, cracked and desperate. "No. No, no—"
Then a sound that dulls as the door swings shut behind us, sealing itself into the room where it belongs.
We walk the corridor in silence. The Ridge stands around us one last time—the marble, the paintings, the expensive lighting that never once felt like warmth—and none of it touches me.
It's just a building. It was always just a building.
"I thought you were going to do it yourself," I say.
Jacob walks steadily beside me, one hand still at my back. "I wanted to." A pause. "Believe me, I wanted to."
He glances down at me and the expression on his face is one I haven't seen before. Not peace, exactly. Not relief either. Something settled.
"But every ounce of that pain belongs to them. Not me."
I look at him for a moment.
"I'm proud of you," I say quietly.
He doesn't answer. He just presses his hand a little firmer against my back as we push through the door at the end of the corridor and step out into the morning, into the garden, into the sun.