Page 107 of The Ashes of Summer

Then she runs.

She runs at me—after everything, after being carried out of my own home—our home—and hauled onto a helicopter and dragged up this mountain, she is coming toward me under her own power, and nobody in this world is taking her anywhere.

I'm already moving.

Forty feet. Thirty. Ten.

She hits me hard enough to take us both down. My arms lock around her. Her feet leave the floor.

She’s warm. Solid. Her heart slamming against my chest hard enough that I feel it through both of us.

Real. She's real.

Something that's been screaming inside me since that gravel drive finally shuts up.

Her arms lock around my neck like she means to weld herself there. Her whole body shakes against mine, and the sound coming out of her isn't crying—it's days of everything she couldn't let out, arriving at once.

I get a hand into all that dark hair, hold the back of her head, don't let go.

"I've got you." My voice is gravel. "I've got you, baby. I've fucking got you."

I press my face into her neck and breathe her in.

And underneath the smoke and the sweat, there it is. Her, buried beneath a scent that isn't hers.

I want to tear this mountain out of the ground by its roots.

Instead I hold her tighter. "I'm here. I'm never letting go of you again."

My hands move without asking me—her face, her arms, her ribs—because holding her isn't enough. I need the proof under my palms.

"You hurt?" It comes out rough as hell. "Did he touch you? Are you bleeding?"

She shakes her head. Fast. Too fast.

And she doesn't say a word.

Something in me goes cold, but I decide to put that away for later.

"I thought he killed you," she chokes out.

That nearly takes my legs out from under me. And that's when my brain finally catches up with the rest of the corridor.

Because she isn't alone.

Constance and Adelaide stand twenty feet away in a trafficker's fortress in the middle of a firefight, gray under the emergency lights, Constance with a fucking gun hanging from one hand.

"What the fuck—" It's out before I can stop it. "I told you two to stay⁠—"

"Yeah," Constance says. "You did."

That's it. That's all she gives me. And I know there isn’t a single part of her that’s sorry for ignoring me.

I don't have a single second to spend on this. But my eyes go to Carter anyway, and Carter—who has never once in ten years failed to meet my eye—is very busy watching the corridor behind us.

He armed them.

He armed them because he knew they’d come up here and he never said a word to me about any of it. Carter steps awkwardly and reaches the other two. They stand like people who've come through a war.