Page 69 of The Ashes of Summer

There's another question that's been sitting behind my teeth since the moment I understood what he wants to make of me—the one thread in all of this that refuses to lie flat. It's dangerous. But he's cracked open right now, as close to reachable as he is ever going to be, and I might not get another moment like this one.

I test the edge of it the way you'd move around a sleeping animal. I keep my body soft against his. I keep my voice small.

"Before Jacob took me," I say, "there was a listing. On the dark web. Me—my face, my name. Listed for—" My pulse jumps under his hand, and I don’t continue that sentence, instead I force myself go on, but from a different angle. "If I was always meant to be her... why put me up to be used and thrown away?"

His hand goes still on my throat.

Something turns over behind his eyes—the cold machine under the grief, waking—and for one horrible second I'm certain I've cut too deep, too soon.

Then he smiles. And it's worse than any answer, because it's almost pleased.

"That was never about you." His thumb starts its slow stroke again, unhurried, and the calm of it lifts every hair on my body. "That was a message. And your father read it exactly the way I meant him to."

I wait, barely breathing, for him to say more.

He doesn't. He just watches me want it.

"When that parasite wouldn’t back away from her, I made it clear I could take his little girl and drag her into my world," he says softly, "I never had time to remove the listing before⁠—"

He stops then. Shakes his head and that's all I get. The rest of what I wanted to know sealed up behind that patient, terrible smile—and somehow the not-knowing sits heavier than the whole story would have, because it tells me exactly how far his control is meant to reach. Even this. Even how much of my own life I'm allowed to understand.

His fingers curl at the base of my skull, drawing my face a fraction closer.

His gaze travels over my face, slow, cataloguing every feature—my mouth, my eyes, the dark hair he arranged over my shoulder—the way he looks at me isn't the way you look at a person. It's the way you look at something you're partway through making.

"You're mine now," he says. "You understand that."

I don't answer. I can't. The performance is fraying at the edges and I'm holding it together with everything I have left.

"And when the sheriff comes for you"—he says it lightly, a remark about the weather—"I'll bury him in my back yard."

That's the word that does it. Sheriff. The mask I've held together for an hour tears clean down the middle, because there is no version of her I can play through the image of Jacob in the ground behind this house.

"You're insane." My voice cracks. I wrench back out of his hands and shove myself up off the bed. "You're fucking insane."

I make it three steps before my stomach turns over completely and I have to bring my hand up to my mouth to stop myself vomiting right there and then. I rush sideways, shouldering into the wall before eventually hitting my knees at the toilet and bring up everything left in me.

He follows, unhurried. I hear him lower himself down beside me, pulling my hair back.

"You think this is insanity." Not a question. Quiet, almost kind, which is the most frightening thing about him. "Insanity is a man believing he can take the love of my life." His hand settles at the back of my neck, gentle. "The Miller bloodline ends with me. You will learn to be what I want you to be."

I heave again.

"Which reminds me." He says, conversational. Almost fond. "I felt that little device inside you. It needs to come out, princess."

My IUD.

No. No, no, no.

And all at once I understand the full size of what he means to do. He doesn't want to keep me. He wants to consume me—every hour, every choice, every cell—until there's nothing left in me he didn't put there himself. No future. No child that isn't his. No door that isn't locked from the outside. My friends will grow old without me while I rot in this house, being carved, one piece at a time, into a dead woman.

He turns me gently by the chin until I have to look at him.

"You'll give me the future he took from me." He almost sings.

"And what if I don't?" My pulse slams so hard it hurts. "What if I'd rather fucking die?"

He studies me in silence for a long moment. Then he leans in and presses his mouth to my forehead, gentle as a blessing.