Page 103 of The Ashes of Summer

He's had her up there in this fucking house tonight and he handed her to them and stood there while it happened, and he did it to teach her that her own name has a price.

Everything I've done tonight—the door, the gas, the chair, Groves' blood drying eighteen inches from my boot—all of it happened while that was happening to her upstairs.

I'm going to kill every fucking man in this house. And then I'm going to burn what's left of it into the mountain.

"Jax." Kurt's voice cuts through it, careful now, the way you'd talk to something with its teeth out. "It doesn't matter what you do to her."

Jackson goes still.

"She'll never be Anna."

"DON'T FUCKING SAY HER NAME!"

The scream tears through the room so hard even Carter goes rigid beside me.

And there it is. There it is. The truth of him, stripped bare.

Because Kurt didn't tell him anything new. Kurt said out loud the thing Jackson's been screaming at himself—the thing he already knows, the thing he'd have felt every single time she opened her mouth and Summer came out of it.

Which makes him worse than I fucking thought. A man with a project has patience.

A man whose project has already failed has nothing left to protect.

"You're a fucking idiot," I say. And I laugh at him. Cold. "You think she'll ever stop thinking about me long enough for any of that to happen?"

His smile comes back slow. "Everyone breaks, Sheriff."

Not her.

That's the mistake the stupid fuck made the second he took her. He saw softness and thought it was weakness. He's had her for days, he's done things to her I can't let myself look at yet, and she still got a cord around his throat and half his ear in her mouth.

He's not going to break her. He's going to run out of fucking time.

"She'll come around eventually," he says softly. "And if she doesn't, I'll⁠—"

The alarm goes off.

It rips through the whole house, and his mouth snaps shut on whatever he was about to promise me. He curses and strides to the door, hauling it open on a corridor full of shouting.

"Sir—" Someone breathless. "She's out. Donnie's dead on the drive. Harris is gone too."

Everything in me sharpens to a single point.

She's out.

She got out.

And what comes up isn't triumph—it's a prayer, aimed at a God I've never once believed in. Be gone. Be miles down that mountain already. Don't stop, don't look back, don't you dare come back here for me.

Jackson turns from the door with fury reshaping his whole face.

"Watch them," he snaps at Kurt, and he's gone, both men with him.

Kurt sways on his feet the second the door shuts.

Still half dead. And still arrogant enough to set his pistol down on the desk beside him—to make a point of it. Because I'm strapped to a chair, and he wants me to see how little of a threat I am.

Then, somewhere outside, a gunshot cracks.