Page 10 of The Ashes of Summer

"You let this happen," she says. The words catch something already broken inside of me. "You let him take me."

My chest caves in around them. "I didn't," I choke. "I tried⁠—"

Jackson doesn't look at her. He looks at me. Watching. He’s Enjoying this.

Slowly, he reaches to his belt and pulls free a blade. The metal catches the light as he turns it in his hand, giving me time to see it. To understand exactly how powerless I am.

My heart slams against my ribs.

"Don't—"

The word barely forms before he drags the blade across her throat. The sound is quiet.

Red spills across white silk, blooming fast, soaking through the fabric as it drips to the floor. She collapses.The roses tremble. Petals fall. And something inside me breaks beyond repair.

"SUMMER!" The scream tears out of me, raw enough to rip my throat. The world flickers. The lights dim. Glass fractures in thin jagged lines. I open my mouth to breathe, but my body forgets how⁠—

A hand clamps down on my shoulder. The smell hits first. Whiskey. Smoke. Rot.

My father.

He stands beside me smiling, and the sight of him fills me with a hatred so deep it feels permanent. The kind that doesn't flare. Doesn't roar. It just sits there in the bones the way scar tissue sits—evidence of damage done so long ago that the wound and the body have become one.

"You couldn't even save your mother," he says cruelly. "And you thought you could save her?"

Rage surges, violent and immediate. I turn to confront him. To challenge him. To show him I'm not that same weak boy anymore. But as I turn—his face splits open. Skin tears. Blood runs thick and dark. His eyes blacken. Smoke pours from the cracks in his flesh, filling the chapel until the air turns toxic in my lungs. Then he collapses. Bone. Ash. Dust.

Everything that he is falls apart at my feet and settles into her blood.

I choke. Try to breathe. Try to scream⁠—

"Boss!"

The world snaps.

Hands grip my shoulder, shaking me hard. My eyes fly open to darkness, rain streaking across the windows, the cab of the truck pressing in around me with a different kind of suffocation.

Carter is beside me, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping my shoulder.

"Christ," he mutters. "You were losing it. Thought you were gonna start swinging in your sleep."

I don't answer straight away. Can't.

My chest is still heaving. My throat still burns from a scream that wasn't real. My heart is slamming against my ribs like it hasn't got the message yet—like it's still back there in that chapel, still watching her fall, still hearing that sound.

I press the back of my hand against my mouth and force myself to breathe.

In. Out.

The truck. The rain. Carter's hand on my shoulder.

Real. This is real.

The two worlds bleed into one another until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Lightning tears through the sky outside, turning everything white and then gone again, and in that half-second of light I see her—not the chapel, not the dress, not the wrong smile—just her. The way she looked through that glass. Both hands flat against it. Eyes locked on mine.

Alive. Fighting.

The worlds separate and I drag a hand down my face.