Page 152 of The Ashes of Summer

"I know. But you don't have to." He brings a hand up to my face, his thumb brushing lightly along my cheekbone, careful of the bruising still yellowing there. "I'm not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere." His eyes hold mine. "However long you need. Whatever you need. That's what we do."

I look at his face for a long moment, searching for the thing I've been dreading. The discomfort. The impatience. The slight withdrawal that would tell me some part of him has been changed by what Jackson did.

I don't find it.

What I find instead is something so steady and certain it makes my eyes sting.

He means it.

Of course he means it. This is Jacob Darnell, who drove through a mountain in the middle of the night with a hole through his shoulder because I needed him to. Patience is the very least of what this man is capable of.

"I'm going to need help," I say. "With the other stuff. Talking to someone."

"Already sorted."

And something about the quiet certainty of those two words—already sorted, like he made a note somewhere in the middle of all that chaos and filed it and kept hold of it—makes me laugh. Just slightly. Just barely.

"Of course you did."

The corner of his mouth lifts.

Then his phone buzzes against the counter.

He picks it up one-handed, reads whatever's on the screen, and something changes in his face. Not surprise. Confirmation.

"Carter?"

"Mm." He sets it back down. "The warehouse is gone."

I go still. "Gone?"

"Burned." He says it the way he says everything that matters most to him, which is to say evenly. "They cleared it out first. Every woman, every file, every hard drive, anything with a name or a face on it. Then they put a match to it. Black's men stayed until the roof came in."

I try to picture it and can't, quite. That building. Those flickering strip lights. The mattresses laid out in rows across the concrete, the curtains hanging off their poles, the dressing tables upstairs with the bulbs around the mirrors.

All of it going up in a black column over an empty freight yard where nobody would think to look twice.

"And the Ridge?"

Jacob doesn't answer straight away.

"Tonight."

Something in my chest turns over, slow and heavy.

"With him in it."

It isn't a question, and he doesn't pretend it is. He just holds my eyes and doesn't look away, and that's the whole answer.

I wait to feel horror about it.

It doesn't come.

What comes instead is the sound of my own voice in that basement, level and certain, telling Jackson Moore there'd be nothing left of him at all. I said it as a promise about the women standing in that circle. I didn't know how literally it was going to land.

By morning there won't be a house. No marble. No cameras with their little red eyes. No white stone catching the sun like something beautiful. No room at the end of a corridor with a chair in it and a dead woman's photograph on the nightstand.

No grave for anyone to stand at. No address for anyone to drive past and wonder about. Nothing left of Jackson Moore or the empire he built out of other people's daughters except a black scar on a mountainside and whatever the wind decides to take.