Page 31 of The Ashes of Summer

Sixty seconds to sit with everything—the relief and the doubt and the grief and the decision I've just made to get up and do something with the time I have. I count them out in my head the way Jacob taught me without meaning to—the way he'd go still in the middle of something dangerous and just wait, let the room tell him what it knew before he moved inside it.

He never told me to do that. I just watched him long enough that it became instinct.

Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty.

Alright.

Think.

The first thing I do is cross to the door. I put my ear against it and listen—properly, the way you listen when silence is a language. Footsteps somewhere distant, the low indistinct murmur of a voice, then nothing. The corridor outside has hard floors—I noted that when Jackson brought me here last night—the kind that carry sound with an echo. Anyone approaching this door would be audible from in here with enough warning to get back to the bed.

Good to know.

I test the handle. Locked, as expected. But I note the resistance of it—not a deadbolt, a key mechanism, the kind that operates from both sides. I look at the gap under the door. An inch, maybe slightly more. Enough to feel the faint current of air from the corridor beyond it.

Enough to hear things I'm not supposed to hear.

I file it and move on.

The window next. I cross to it and pull the curtain back just enough to look without being seen from below. The grounds stretch out in pale afternoon light—the lawn running to a low stone wall at the far edge, the tree line beyond it. Further than it seemed last night. The gate just visible as a dark shape in the distance.

Too far to run without being seen.

Too exposed between here and the wall.

I press my fingers to the glass and test the frame. It's a sash window—older than the rest of the house's aesthetic, probably original to whatever structure was here before Jackson built his statement on top of it. The lock is a simple lever mechanism. I turn it.

The window shifts, but only slightly.

There’s a clasp stopping it from opening wide enough for me to fit. But I embrace the feel of cold air before I ease it back and re-lock it.

It opens.

Not wide enough for me to climb through, but maybe with persuasion. If I find something I could use as a screwdriver…

I stand there with that fact sitting in my chest, careful not to let it become more than it is. An open window on the first floor of a guarded property with men on the roof and a gate too far away isn't an escape route. But it's a variable. A thing that exists. Something to build from.

I move to the dresser. Empty, as I already knew. But I pull each drawer out fully and check the backs of them, the undersides, the runners. I find nothing except a faint smell of pine lining and the blankness of a space that has been cleared.

Someone made sure there was nothing in this room that could be used. Which means Jackson thought about it—or had someone think about it for him—which tells me something about how long this has been planned and how much attention has been paid to the problem of keeping a woman contained in here.

He underestimated me.

I check the bathroom next—methodically, every surface, every cabinet. A bar of soap. Shampoo in a wall-mounted dispenser that can't be removed. I check the bathroom door. There's no lock on the inside.

Of course there isn't.

I look at the camera dome visible through the bedroom doorway—positioned to cover the bed and the window and most of the floor space. I step back into the bathroom and angle myself carefully, trying to calculate any blind spots between the two rooms.

I go back to the bedroom and stand in the center of it, turning slowly, then concentrate on the chair angled toward the bed. I pick it up—it’s heavier than it looks, solid wood. Too heavy for me to throw at them. I set it back down exactly as it was.

Exactly.

Because Jackson notices things. I already figured that. The way he clocks everything this—the small details are what he tracks, which means the small details are what I have to be careful with.

Put everything back exactly where it was.

I cross to the window one more time and look out at the grounds. The guards do a perimeter walk—I clocked them through the glass last night before the lights went out, the arc of their route visible in the way the floodlights caught their shadows. If the pattern holds, there's a gap on the north side where the tree line comes closest to the house. Maybe thirty seconds where the angle would make it harder to see someone moving low and fast along the wall.