Page 51 of The Ashes of Summer

The question settles over me like ice water because nothing about Jackson suggests happy endings. Nothing about this place suggests survival. I think about the missing girls. The newspaper headlines. The casual way he'd spoken about breaking me, as though it wasn't a threat but a promise.

What if she didn't survive him either?

For one horrible second, I can almost see her standing where I am now, dark hair falling over her shoulders while Jackson watched her with those same distant eyes, and the image is so vivid it sends nausea crashing into the back of my throat.

Then, absurdly, my gaze catches on something else.

My eyebrows.

They're still lighter than my hair, still stubbornly auburn beneath the dark strands framing my face, and for one completely insane second I catch myself wishing he’d dyed those too because now everything looks unfinished. Uneven. Like someone started painting over me and walked away before they'd finished the job.

The thought hits me so hard a breathless laugh escapes before I can stop it. I actually laugh.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I'm standing in a mountain compound owned by a psychopath who kidnapped me at gunpoint after threatening to murder my friends, and somehow my brain has decided this is what deserves my attention. Not the locks. Not the guns. Not the fact that I'm trapped. My eyebrows.

The laugh dies as quickly as it came, leaving something hollow behind.

Maybe that's how people survive this. Maybe the mind reaches for tiny, ordinary problems because the real ones are too enormous to carry all at once. It's easier to worry about uneven eyebrows than accept that Jackson Moore has stolen another piece of me, and that somewhere out there Jacob still thinks the girl he loves has hair the color of fire.

That thought hurts enough to make me tear my eyes away from the mirror.

I sink onto the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath my weight as I stare blankly at the opposite wall and force myself to breathe through the panic clawing at the inside of my chest. I'd already searched the room while they'd left me alone. Every drawer. Every cupboard. Every inch of the bathroom. There was nothing. No loose vents, no broken glass, nothing heavy enough to swing or sharp enough to stab with.

Jackson had stripped the room back to exactly what he wanted me to have.

My fingers drift absentmindedly to the waistband of the joggers, twisting one of the drawstrings around them while my thoughts betray me and wander somewhere they have no business going.

Jacob.

He loved my hair.

Not in the casual way men tell women they look pretty, but with the quiet fascination he had for things he never realized he was paying attention to. Sometimes we'd be watching television and I'd feel his fingers disappear into it without him even noticing he'd done it. Other times he'd wrap a strand loosely around his hand while I lay against his chest, completely lost in whatever was going through that complicated head of his. Once the afternoon sun had caught it through the kitchen window, and he'd looked at me with dilated pupils before quietly muttering, Looks like fucking fire.

The memory steals the air from my lungs.

Grief climbs so quickly into my throat I have to look down before it swallows me whole, my fingers tightening around the drawstring as though it's the only thing anchoring me to the room.

They stop moving.

My eyes follow them, as realization dawns.

The cord.

My pulse stutters.

Slowly, I ease one end free until the entire drawstring slides into my hand. It's longer than I'd expected. Woven. Strong too. I pull it tight between both fists, watching it stretch without snapping, then pull harder, testing the fibers, my breathing slowing as panic quietly gives way to something else.

Maybe it would break. Maybe it wouldn't. It only has to hold once.

My mind races ahead before I can stop it, piecing together movements instead of memories now. From behind. Across the throat. If I pull back with everything I've got and don't let go. I don't know if it'd kill someone. I don't need it to. I just need enough time. Long enough to make them let go of a gun. Long enough to run.

Something shifts so suddenly inside my chest it almost frightens me.

Hope.

I push myself to my feet before I've even realized I'm moving, wrapping the cord tightly around my hands and pulling it taut again, imagining the resistance, the weight of another body, the desperate fight that would follow.