Page 76 of The Ashes of Summer

That's my girl. Do it. Finish him. End the sick fuck.

The door on the screen slams open.

A man crosses the room in two strides—Donnie, it has to be fucking Donnie—and buries a fist in her hair and rips her backward. Metal flashes in the gray. A knife saws through whatever she's holding, and then he's dragging her off him by the roots of her hair and throwing her down on the bed hard enough that I feel it land in my own chest.

I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing.

On the screen Jackson climbs the wall to get upright—alive, coughing, one hand clamped to his throat. Then two more men come through that door, and they take hold of her, and they start tying her down while she fights them—and there's no sound, no way in, nothing but gray pixels and the roar of my own blood while the whole of my life gets pinned to a mattress ninety fucking minutes out of my reach.

And my mind does the thing I can't stop doing—it runs ahead of me, up that mountain and through that door, into every hour I won't be there to fill. Men don't strap a woman to a bed to leave her the fuck alone. I've spent a career walking into rooms after the fact, seeing what gets done to a woman who can't get her hands free, and now my head takes every one of those rooms and sets her down in the middle of it—no hands, no wall at her back, no me—and I have to grind my teeth against the images to stop them finishing, because if even one of them completes I'm no fucking use to her at all.

Something tears loose inside me.

I don't throw the phone. I need the phone. But my hand crushes down on it until the case groans, and every careful fucking word I've said tonight—move quiet, go slow, don't give him a reason—burns off at once and leaves one thing standing in the ash.

Now.

I cross to the bed and haul Kurt up out of it by the front of his gown.

He chokes on a sound, face folding around his ribs. "What⁠—"

"We're leaving." My voice comes out flat and wrong. "You're walking me through that fucking house, or I drag you through it in pieces."

"Jacob—" Tamara's already moving.

"Now."

Kurt's swollen eyes drop to the phone still burning in my fist. He sees enough. Whatever color was left in his face goes with it.

"Okay." It scrapes out of him. "Okay. But you go in there like this—blind, out of your mind, no plan—and you'll get her killed. You'll trip every alarm on that mountain, and he'll put a bullet in her before you're through the second door."

I want to hit him. I want to hit something. I want to put my fist through this whole fucking hospital.

Because he's right.

"So slow down." His breath drags over something broken in his chest. "Give me a pen and a minute. Let me draw you the way in. Then you can drive as fast as you want."

For one long, murderous beat I just look at him.

Then I let go of his gown, drop him back into the pillows, and pull a pen off the tray.

"One minute," I say. "Draw."

And in my other hand, on the screen I can't make myself put down, they finish strapping her to the bed—wrists, then ankles, one of them testing the tension like he's got all the time in the world.

And I know exactly what they’re going to do.

Chapter 26

She’s Not A Ghost

Jacob

Ihear them before I see them.

Boots on polished hospital floor. Low voices carrying down the corridor. Then one of the security guards says Carter's name, and something darkly amused shifts through my chest despite the hell sitting inside it.

Of course they know him. Everybody knows Carter. He's been at my side for years—my right hand, the man people go to when something needs handling without the fucking theatrics. He doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't bare his teeth. Men just move when Carter tells them to.