Page 121 of The Ashes of Summer

That's when I notice the quiet.

Not real silence—machines beep steadily beside the bed, footsteps echo somewhere down the corridor, voices drift through the walls in muffled bursts. But compared to the Ridge? Compared to alarms screaming through blood-soaked hallways while men died around us?

This is hauntingly quiet. And the quiet is worse, because there's nothing left to drown out my own head.

The bruising has spread since I last looked. That's the part I can't get past—that it's still getting worse, hour by hour.

He doesn't complain once. But I notice every tiny reaction anyway—the jaw clenching, the tension pulling across his stomach, the catch in his breathing every time the nurse presses too close. He's in agony and still acting like he isn't, and I don't know whether that's for my benefit or because he genuinely doesn't know how to be any other way.

The nurse cleaning his shoulder glances at him nervously. "You need to stop moving."

"Then hurry up about it."

I almost laugh.

Almost.

But my chest is still too tight to breathe properly. So I stand close enough that my thigh brushes his knee every few seconds, needing the contact more than I need oxygen, because every time I look away from him I see it again. Jacob dropping. The blood. That terrible sound.

I keep reliving the half-second where I thought I'd watched him die.

And even half bleeding out, he notices everything about me.

"Baby." His voice is steady.

My head comes up. His hand lifts off the bed toward me. "Come here."

I move without hesitating, and he draws me down until I'm perched on the edge of the mattress against his hip. His good arm comes around my waist. He pulls me in until his forehead rests against my shoulder, and suddenly I can't breathe at all. My fingers slide into his hair while he exhales slowly against me.

"You okay?"

The question nearly breaks me apart all over again. "You're literally shot and we've just escaped hell."

"And you're avoiding the question." A dry laugh muffled against me.

I close my eyes and wish I could find the humor.

I can't. Because I'm not okay. Not even close.

I shot a man tonight.

I keep waiting to feel something about that. I've never held a gun in my life, never mind fired one at a person, and some small buried part of me does register it—the weight of it in my hands, the noise, the way the whole corridor split open around the sound. That should mean something. That should be the thing keeping me up.

It isn't.

What's keeping me up is that I missed.

Because it was him, and I had him, and the shot went into his leg instead of his chest, and now he's likely still breathing. I don't feel guilty. I feel cheated. If that bullet had gone eight inches higher this would all be finished, and every one of us would be free of him.

That's what I'm sitting with. Not remorse. Regret that my aim wasn't better.

Other men died tonight too. Men with names I only learned a few hours ago, who came up that mountain for a woman most of them had never met.

And every time I blink, Jackson's there.

Not the version of him on the floor with the gun leaving his hand. The man before that.

His mouth working its way up my body while I stared at the ceiling and counted cracks in the plaster.