Page 72 of The Ashes of Summer

And he cares about her. I hate that more than I can say. But right now it's a lever, and a lever's a lever.

"You're coming."

Tamara looks genuinely horrified. "Jacob, he's been conscious for forty-five minutes."

"And he's the closest thing we've got to leverage."

Kurt's eyes narrow, because he's smart enough to hear exactly what I'm not saying. Jackson cared about Annalise. Maybe he cares about his brother, too. Maybe there's enough left inside that bastard for half a second of hesitation.

Hesitation gets people killed. Usually the man doing the hesitating.

"You help me get her back," I say quietly, "and I won't kill you."

Adelaide's eyes flick to me. Constance narrows hers. Because they both hear the wording.

He'll still die. I'll have Carter do it, and I'll take my time watching.

Kurt studies my face for a while, then nods once. "Okay."

I fold the map into my pocket and check the magazine in my gun without thinking about it, and the metal clicks sharply through the room. Familiar. Steady. The only thing in this building that's behaving itself.

Constance watches me. "When do we leave?"

I slide the magazine home with a hard snap. "The second my men get here."

Nobody argues. Not even Tamara. Because they can all see it now—I'm already gone. Mentally I'm halfway up that mountain with blood on my hands and Summer somewhere inside that house, waiting.

And underneath it I know that taking Kurt is the right call. Not because I trust him. I don't, and I never will.

But Jackson Moore already lost one thing he loved.

And if there's a shred of humanity left in that monster, it's tied to the broken man in this bed.

Chapter 24

The Ghost Goes Too

Summer

Consciousness comes back violently.

One moment there's nothing—darkness, the far-off sensation of falling—and the next I'm staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling with pain blooming across the back of my skull. For a long moment, I don't move. I just lie there while my mind drags itself back into a body that doesn't want it.

Then the memories come. The dining room. Papa. Jackson. Each one hits heavier than the last, and when I shut my eyes against them, it isn't Papa's face that rises up.

It's Mama's hands.

I can see them so clearly I could almost reach into the memory and hold them. Flour on her knuckles. The careful way she held a wooden spoon, like it was something worth looking after. Sunday afternoons with the whole house going warm and sweet around us, me up on the counter with my legs swinging while she told me about the first meal she ever cooked for Papa at my grandparents' house—how he'd asked for seconds, how that was the moment she knew he was the one.

She spent the rest of her life feeding a man who was never really at the table.

And she never knew. That's the part that guts me. She died believing the story he'd handed her every single day of their marriage. She never got the truth. She earned it a thousand times over, and she died without it.

I force my eyes open before the grief can pull me all the way under.

That's when I see him.

Jackson sits in the chair across the room, watching me. I think he's asleep—the room is so still it feels as though time has stopped—but then his gaze shifts a fraction and I understand he's been awake the whole time. Waiting. And somehow that unsettles me more than pacing would have. Because I understand his anger now. This quieter version, the one with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped, the one who looks almost relaxed—this is the one I can't predict.