Page 93 of The Ashes of Summer

Debt. From both of you.

Across from me Groves is breathing like an animal—fast, ragged, rage and grief and years of buried shit all clawing for the door at once.

Jackson watches us. Calm. Like a man who enjoys seeing what happens when people finally come apart.

The steel door opens again behind him.

Kurt stumbles in. Actually stumbles. One of the guards reaches to steady him and Kurt jerks away with a grunt, and he still looks half dead—gray skin, bruising gone yellow, one eye swollen almost shut.

Weak. Barely upright.

But his eyes find me instantly, and what's burning in them is hatred.

"You really thought I'd help you take her back?" he rasps.

Then he lunges.

It isn't graceful and it isn't strong. It's just pure feeling dragging a wrecked body across a room. His fist catches the side of my jaw. Then again, weaker, off my cheekbone, while his breathing saws like something's collapsing inside his chest.

"You'll die here," he spits.

I laugh. Actually laugh—because that's the thing about pain. Past a certain point it just stops mattering.

"You hit like a fucking child."

He swings again anyway.

Beside me, Carter hasn't reacted once. Not to any of it. Which tells me exactly what he's doing under there.

Good.

And Groves sees it too—sees Carter's wrists working—and understands he has to give him something. Time. Noise. Anything.

So Groves gives him everything he's got left.

"FOUR YEARS AGO."

The sound tears through the room. Every head turns.

"Four years ago, you dated my daughter,” he manages, quieter.

Chair rattling under him, tears streaming down his face and no attempt to hide a single one of them.

"WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?"

Jackson's expression doesn't move.

"You dated her!" Groves surges against the straps. "You sick fucking bastard, you dated her and then she vanished!"

My stomach turns over.

Beth Groves.

And here's the thing—I didn't forget her. I never forgot her. I worked that case myself. Nineteen years old, gone off the face of the earth between a Tuesday and a Wednesday. No body. No leads. Nothing.

I sat in Groves' kitchen with a notebook and asked him if she'd been seeing anyone, and he said some guy, older, she wouldn't say who, and I wrote it down and I chased it exactly as far as it went, which was nowhere.

I never once connected her to Jackson Moore.