Page 61 of The Ashes of Summer

My breath comes in ragged, uneven pulls, and then—because it's the only mercy left to me, the only door that still opens from the inside—I do the thing I swore I never would. I let go of my body and let my mind leave the room.

I go back to the dining room.

I go to the polished table and the silver dome and the thing lying beneath it, and I fix my eyes on my father's slack, gray face while somewhere very far away a man I refuse to be present for does what he brought me here to do. I feel it the way you feel something through water—muffled, distant, happening to a body I've stepped out of. My fingers knot in the bedding. My cheek drags against the sheets. And still I stay with Papa, because if I can't stop this, I can at least refuse to be here while it's done to me.

I hope you can see this. I hope you can see every single thing your choices bought. I hope you know it's me paying for them—me—for every lie you told, every secret you buried, every selfish choice that dragged us here.

I hope you're burning in fucking hell.

Behind me, Jackson goes still. His fist tightens in my hair, dragging my head back, and on one final, brutal thrust I hear him breathe a single word against my skin.

Not my name.

Hers.

"Annalise."

Chapter 19

Moore

Jacob

"Where is Summer?"

The words scrape out of him, half-drowned in his own breathing, shredded by whatever they pumped into him to keep him under. And the second her name leaves his mouth, everything in me pulls wire-tight. He doesn't get to lie in that bed with her name in his mouth like he has some claim to it.

"Where's... is… she?" His eyes drift, snap back, drift again—still dragging themselves up out of the sedation, still trying to work out where he is and why the first face waiting for him is mine.

He woke asking for her before he asked where he was. Whether that's because he wants to protect her, or because Jackson put him here to keep eyes on her, I don't much care.

"You tell me," I say, low enough that he has to work to hear it.

Then I stop talking and I watch him, because the mouth lies and the body doesn't. Confusion sits a beat longer than it should. Fear shifts the breathing before it ever reaches the words. His breath is coming too fast, his pupils still blown wide from the drugs, his pulse climbing the monitor while he stares at me, trying to read what I'm about to do to him.

I close my hand over his shoulder and grind my fingers down into the muscle.

He seizes, a broken sound tearing out of him, and tries to twist away before he remembers his ribs are already cracked and his body has stopped taking orders.

Good. Pain has a way of making men honest.

"You're the one who's been working with Jackson Moore."

His eyes snap to mine. "What?" The word catches in his throat. He shoves at the mattress, gets nowhere, drops back. "Where is she, man? Is she here?"

"No, she's not here." Adelaide's voice splinters around a sob before he can push it any further. "Moore has her. She... she traded herself for us."

The color drains out of his face.

"No—" He's fighting to get up before the word's even out, one arm buckling under him, ribs seizing, and he keeps trying anyway. "No... no, he can't have her⁠—"

I plant a hand flat on his chest and slam him back into the mattress.

"Stay where the fuck you are."

The air punches out of him, and pain twists across his face—but it isn't the pain that catches me. It's the panic underneath it. Not the panic of a man who's just realized he's cornered. The panic of a man terrified for someone else.

"You don't understand," he gets out, faster now. "She can't be with him. He'll⁠—"