Page 58 of The Ashes of Summer

"Eat." Jackson's voice is gentle.

"I can't."

"You can."

"My Papa⁠—"

"Is dead." He says it for me, flat, and the words go straight through me, cold and thin as a blade. "I said eat."

And I will. Because if a chance comes—tonight, tomorrow, a week from now—I'll need a body that can take it. I'll need legs that will run and a head that will stay clear. Jackson can force food into me. He doesn't get to decide why I swallow it.

My hand shakes so hard the fork chatters against the plate. I spear a piece of chicken and stare at it a moment, my whole stomach in revolt, and then I put it in my mouth anyway. The first chew is almost impossible; my throat closes and I have to force it down. It doesn't taste like chicken or butter or bread. It tastes like ash. Like grief. Like the salt still drying at the back of my throat from tears I won't give him. Every mouthful is another small surrender, and I hate him for making survival feel like giving in—but that's all this is. Survival. Nothing more.

Just stay alive until I find the way out. Or until Jacob gets here.

Jacob is coming.

I say it to myself like a prayer, over and over, until it almost feels solid. The silence stretches, and it's worse than anything he could put into it. I can feel him watching me eat—cataloguing every tremor, every hesitation, waiting to see whether this is the mouthful that finally cracks me open.

I set the fork down. My stomach clenches as if it means to reject everything I've forced into it. I fix my eyes on the door at the far end of the room and count my breaths, because breathing is easier than thinking, and thinking is easier than breaking.

Then Jackson claps.

Three slow, flat cracks, ricocheting off the high ceiling before the quiet has a chance to settle. A heartbeat later the kitchen door opens again.

The cook returns with a large domed serving dish, the kind meant for grand reveals at the kind of dinner this is only pretending to be. His face has gone gray. His hands shake so badly the metal shivers as he walks. He sets it in the center of the table, and something cold and instinctive moves through me before my mind can name it.

The cook reaches for the lid.

"No." Jackson's voice stops him cold. Then, softer, almost courteous: "Ladies first."

The cook steps back so fast he nearly trips over his own feet. Jackson rises, lifts the dish himself, and carries it—slow, deliberate, savoring it—to my end of the table, setting it down directly in front of me.

My own reflection stares back off the curved metal, warped and pale, dark hair falling around a face I don't recognize. For one disorienting second I don't look like myself at all. I look like a stranger sitting down to dinner at a dead woman's table.

I don't move.

"Every action has a consequence, Summer." His voice is quiet now. Almost gentle. Almost loving. "Your father made his choices. And now you get to understand exactly what those choices cost."

His hand settles on the lid.

"Mortuary staff are surprisingly accommodating when my men hold a gun to their heads."

I press back into the chair. "Don't⁠—"

He lifts it.

My father's head sits on the platter.

Everything stops. The room. The air. The beat of my own heart. His face is slack, eyes closed, the skin gone waxen in a way I feel before I understand—the color, the texture, the terrible stillness of it. Death has turned him into something that is both him and not-him at once, and my mind refuses to hold the two of them together.

Papa.

Not Papa.

The sound that comes out of me isn't a scream. It's older than screaming, something primitive my body finds before my mind can catch up, and then the nausea folds me in half and my stomach empties itself across the polished floor, the chair shrieking backward as I brace both hands on the table's edge. There's almost nothing left in me to bring up, but my body doesn't care; it knows nothing living should have to share a room with what's in front of me.

Behind me, Jackson laughs. That broken, rasping laugh, the one that sounds like something in him snapped a long time ago and healed crooked. It cuts through the ringing in my ears, and whatever fragile thread has been holding me together finally lets go.