Page 56 of The Ashes of Summer

"He has acted very ungraciously toward her since her arrival."

The room goes very still. "What did he do?"

My hands have started to shake against the edge of the table. I give the smallest shake of my head—please, don't—but Harris has already decided.

"On the way down here, sir, he informed her he couldn't wait to—and I quote—have a taste of her… backside."

He hears everything in this house and says none of it, and the fact that he's saying this tells me exactly what it's costing him.

Jackson's face doesn't change in any way I could point to. He doesn't shout. He doesn't slam his hand down or shove his chair back hard enough to scrape the floor. He simply goes still—utterly, completely still—and somehow that empties the air out of the room faster than any of those things could have.

"Oh," he says quietly. "Is that so?" He drags his knuckles slowly along his jaw while something cold shifts behind his eyes. "I'll rectify that."

And then, as though he hasn't just tipped Donnie's whole life over the edge of something, he turns back to me like it was nothing—like handling men is an errand, a thing to be crossed off a list. My gaze darts to Harris as he moves to go, and for half a second his eyes find mine over all the old grief he carries in them. He looks almost sorry. Then the doors close, and I'm alone with Jackson, and the panic comes crawling back up my throat.

"Jackson, I—whatever Papa did, I⁠—"

He cuts me off gently. One hand cups my jaw, his thumb catching the tear that slips free before I can stop it. He studies it, almost reverently, before lifting it to his mouth and licks it from his skin. Something small and broken escapes me, the sound scraping up my throat before I can force it back down.

He blinks, and whatever he was seeing when he said it disappears behind the mask again. "Things are going to be different from now on, Princess." Quiet. Almost tender. "But first—you need to understand why you're here."

He reaches beside him and sets a laptop on the table. Relief catches in my chest. It's ridiculous, but I can't help it. A laptop belongs to another life. One where the biggest decision I had to make was what to watch before bed.

Then he turns the screen toward me.

The feeling disappears so fast it almost hurts.

"Watch," he says.

I don't move.

He doesn't raise his voice. The command settles between us, and my body obeys before my mind can.

"I don't want to."

"I didn't ask what you wanted."

The screen wakes. Security footage—grainy, washed pale, a timestamp ticking along the bottom edge. A doorway. A dim corridor. A man stepping into frame.

My heart stops.

Papa.

He walks through a set of double doors like a man who belongs there—no hesitation, no glance over his shoulder, nothing hunted in him at all. Comfortable. Familiar. Like he's done it a hundred times, because he has.

The angle changes. Papa at a bar. Papa laughing at something, his head tipped in that particular way I'd know anywhere—the way he tipped it when he taught me to ride a bike and I put myself into the grass more times than I stayed upright; the way he tipped it the Christmas Mama scorched the turkey and we ate pizza off the good plates and called it a new tradition; the way he tipped it on Saturday mornings over a griddle, pretending not to see me stealing chocolate chips from the bag. That laugh belongs to those mornings. Watching it here feels like something sacred being dragged face-down through dirt.

A woman crosses to him. Young. Beautiful. Barely dressed. She leans to say something in his ear, and Papa smiles, and then he follows her.

"No," I whisper.

The footage keeps going. Another camera. Another corridor. Another room. The woman moves around him with an ease that comes from practice, and he lets her—not caught in some single frozen frame that could be twisted into meaning nothing. Moving. Choosing. Sitting. Smiling. Reaching for her like it's exactly where he wants to be.

"Stop it." My voice barely exists.

Another night. Another timestamp. Another woman. Then another. The dates flicker and stack in the corner of the screen, marching backward through months, and the nausea climbs until I can taste it.

"Stop," I beg. He doesn't.