Page 131 of The Ashes of Summer

There's something colder sitting behind her eyes than there was when I found her in that corridor. Trauma changes people—I've watched it happen a hundred times over a hundred cases. Sometimes it breaks them. Sometimes it turns them into something harder than they were.

Looking at her now, I think Jackson may have built his own worst nightmare.

"I'm coming."

The words pull my attention off him.

"No."

"You are not leaving me here again, Jacob."

That one hits like a boot to the ribs—not because she's trying to hurt me, but because she isn't. There's no accusation in it. No anger. Just fear, raw and honest, and for a second I see the whole shape of it.

The adrenaline that carried her through tonight is finally draining out, and what's left underneath is reality. Reality says I got shot. Reality says she watched me go down and thought that was it. Reality says the last time she let me out of her sight, Jackson Moore put her on a helicopter.

And Christ, maybe she's right to be terrified.

I nearly lost her.

"There could be armed men in there."

"There will be armed men in there." Her voice sharpens. "And there are women trapped inside."

I drag my good hand down my face. Exhaustion is settling into my bones now, and my shoulder throbs steadily under the bandages with every heartbeat, and none of it matters.

"Summer—"

"No." She takes a step closer, and her eyes have gone glassy, everything sitting right at the surface. "I need to be there."

The room goes quiet, because I know exactly what she means.

This isn't about revenge. It isn't even about Jackson. It's about women sitting inside that building right now believing that nobody in the world is coming for them—and about somebody walking through those doors who understands precisely what that feels like.

Constance pushes off the wall. "I'm going too."

Carter mutters something under his breath. "Absolutely fucking not."

One of her eyebrows goes up. "You planning on stopping me?"

Honestly? I'd pay money to watch him try. Carter seems to reach the same conclusion, because he exhales hard through his nose and shakes his head.

Jackson lifts his swollen face and laughs weakly through the blood. "You people really think this changes anything."

Carter hits him so hard the whole chair skids sideways across the concrete.

The laugh stops.

Carter loops a second chain through the frame and locks it off against the radiator pipe, then checks it twice, and I take one last look at the man in that chair before we go. Both hands ruined. A hole through his thigh. He isn't walking out of this room, and even if he crawled, there's nowhere on this mountain left for him to crawl to.

"He's still breathing when I get back," I tell Carter. "That's the only condition."

Ten minutes later we're driving through the mountains again, and this time Summer's behind the wheel because I can't fucking drive.

Somehow that bothers me more than it should.

The dashboard lights throw a soft glow across her face while her hands grip the wheel tight enough that the knuckles have gone white. She hasn't said much since we pulled out of the gates, and it isn't calm. She's wound so tight I'm half expecting the wheel to come off in her hands.

Her fingers tighten a fraction every time headlights come toward us. Every time something shifts in the trees. Every time a noise cuts through the quiet.