Page 122 of The Ashes of Summer

His face when he stood up afterward and straightened his cuffs like he was leaving a meeting.

The way he paused at the door. The way he looked back at me, tied down, and there was nothing in his eyes at all. Not anger. Not even satisfaction. Just a man closing a ledger.

And then the sound of him telling them they could come in.

Three of them.

I don't get the whole memory. That's the thing nobody warns you about. It comes in pieces, out of order, and each piece arrives on its own like a photograph shoved under a door. Hands on my ankle. Fabric giving somewhere near my shoulder and the strange, small, ridiculous grief of a shirt tearing—as if that was the part worth mourning. The pain. The noises they made. Somebody laughing at something that wasn't me.

And underneath all of it, the shame. Which is the piece I can't put down. I know I shouldn't feel it. I know none of it was my fault. I could stand in a room and argue that to anyone else in the world and win.

I just can't make myself believe it.

It's on me like the perfume was. Something somebody else put there that I can't scrub off, and I'd take my own skin off to be rid of it.

But I don't say any of it.

I can't.

Because saying it out loud makes it real, and then Jacob has to carry it too—the picture of three men using my body, taking whatever was left of me and throwing it in the trash. He'd see it every time he looked at me. I know he would.

And then what?

He nearly lost his mind over Tyler. Over a boy I'd dated before I ever knew Jacob existed, in a life that had nothing to do with him. That's how he is about anyone else's hands on me. Ever.

So what happens when he finds out about that room?

He looks at me and sees something dirty. Something contaminated, handled, ruined. Or—and I don't know which is worse—he doesn't. He looks at me and sees a victim. Something breakable he has to be careful with. Something to handle gently for the rest of our lives, until neither of us can remember what I was before.

I'd rather he never knew than watch him start being careful with me.

So I sit there with my fingers in his hair, and I say nothing at all.

The door opens and Tamara steps back in carrying a stainless steel tray lined with surgical instruments. The red mark from my hand still burns visibly across her cheek.

Nobody speaks. She sets the tray down beside the bed with careful, controlled movements, and every one of them says the same thing.

Professional now.

Good. Because whatever she thought she had permission to show him earlier is gone.

"I need to close the wound before infection gets in," she says finally, pulling on fresh gloves.

Jacob leans back against the bed. "Then do it."

She wheels a stool over while the nurse lays out fresh gauze and surgical thread. The metallic clink of instruments turns my stomach, and of course he notices.

"Don't look if it's going to make you sick, baby."

"I'm not leaving."

His thumb presses hard into the back of my hand, and that's all the answer I get. It's enough.

She draws up a needle and starts injecting clear liquid into the torn skin. Jacob's entire body goes rigid. A rough breath leaves his chest, and from the doorway Adelaide mutters, Jesus Christ, under her breath.

I'd honestly forgotten she was still here.

She's standing near the entrance with dried blood smeared across her clothes from the Ridge, blonde hair a wreck, eyes hollow under the fluorescents. She drove us down a mountain road in the dark at eighty miles an hour with a dying man in the back, and she hasn't sat down since.