Page 106 of The Ashes of Summer

Fuck—

Carter fires past me and drops him. There's no time. There's no fucking time.

Hayes isn't getting up.

"Move," I say, and I hate the sound of my own voice saying it. I don’t leave my men. I never fucking leave them. But when I see blood up the walls, glass under our boots, smoke starting to curl from somewhere deeper in the house where the wiring's gone, I know time isn’t on my side.

A man comes out of a side room swinging a knife. I catch his wrist, drive my elbow into his throat until he gags, take the knife out of the air when it drops, and put it into the side of his neck. Hot blood sprays across my face, then he goes down choking and I step over him without looking.

Because I'm past mercy. Past restraint. Past everything except getting to her.

We take the stairs two at a time.

"You think she made it out?" Carter asks, reloading as we move.

I don't answer straight away, because if I let my head go there—if I let myself picture getting to her too late—there won't be anything left of me to finish this with.

"She's alive."

Not hope. Fact.

We come through into the lower corridor⁠—

Movement at the far end.

My gun's up before I've registered anything.

Then everything in me stops.

There's a woman standing in the smoke down there. Her hair is dark. For one gutting half-second my brain says not her while every other part of me is already screaming that it is.

Then she turns her head.

And she sees me.

Summer.

And the world just—goes. The alarms. The strobing. The blood drying to my forearms. Carter somewhere at my shoulder. All of it drops away like someone cut the sound, and there's nothing left in the whole world but forty feet of corridor and her standing at the end of it.

Because I have carried the same picture behind my eyes every second since that gravel drive. Both her palms flat on the glass. Her mouth going round my name. The fog closing over the whole thing while I ran with my lungs tearing and my legs failing, thirty seconds behind her.

I've hauled those thirty seconds around like a stone sewn into my chest. I've felt them every time I closed my eyes. Thirty seconds is the distance between a man who saved her and whatever the hell I've been since.

And now she's forty feet away, and there is not one thing left standing between us.

She's a wreck. I take it in the way you take a bullet—all at once, no defense. She's shaking. Filthy. Barefoot. Her throat is a ruin of bruising and there's dried blood at the corner of her mouth, and she's holding herself like her own ribs are a stranger's.

He did that. Every mark on her is his.

I'm going to take this house apart.

Her face crumples. I watch it happen in pieces. The fight drains out of her shoulders first. Then her mouth trembles. Her eyes fill so quickly it's as if someone opened a valve behind them, and suddenly she's trying to breathe through something her body can't swallow.

“Jacob…”

My name in that wrecked voice. Screamed at a window that wouldn't open, at a man who wasn't there in time.

This time I am fucking here.