Page 83 of The Ashes of Summer

If I can't be her, then there's nothing left of me he needs. No project. No patience. No reason to keep me whole.

Only the surname. Only the debt.

I lie very still and understand, with a clarity that cuts straight through the numbness, that I have just become something much simpler than a woman he wants.

I've become a thing he intends to spend.

"And your sheriff." The word comes out heavy, like he's been carrying it a while. "He wore the badge. He stood in that station, in that same building, drank the same coffee, laughed at the same jokes." His lip curls. "And never once looked up. Never asked one question about the girl they were processing downstairs, because he was too busy panting after Michael Miller's daughter."

He leans in.

"He didn't have to lift a finger, Summer. That's what you're not understanding. He only had to look. And he didn't. Not once. Because she wasn't anybody's daughter that mattered."

And there—right there, through all the nothing—something in me lifts its head.

No.

I can't say it. My throat is ruined and my hands are tied and there isn't a sound left in my body. But it goes through me anyway, hot and clear and entirely mine: you have this backward. Jacob didn't look away from her. You buried her under your own silence, kept her upstairs like a secret, and then you spent every year since making the whole world pay for a door you closed yourself.

You didn't lose her because nobody looked.

You lost her because of what you built.

Jackson settles back into the chair, and the mask slides quietly into place, and he smiles at me like we've come to an understanding.

"So let him come." His voice is easy again. Pleasant. "Let him walk into my house and stand exactly where I stood. Let him find out what it costs."

He turns his head toward me, and what's on his face now is worse than any of it.

"And then he can be the one on the floor."

The footage loops. The timestamps climb. My father keeps walking through the same doors into the same room and the same life, over and over, forever.

And I lie in the wreck of my own body with rope at my wrists and a dead woman's perfume on my skin, and I make myself a promise while the numbness closes back over me like water.

He's told me what he wants. He's told me what he's waiting for. He's so certain he's already won that he's stopped hiding a single thing from me.

Let him be certain.

Because Jacob is coming—and now I know exactly what's waiting for him.

And I'm the only one in this house who does.

Chapter 28

I’ll Walk Into Hell

Jacob

The closer we get to Rivers Ridge, the harder it is to sit still.

Not physically. Physically I'm exactly where I need to be—both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, speed steady, breathing even. Underneath it I'm a fucking disaster. My jaw aches from how long I've been grinding it. My fingers close on the leather until it creaks and I have to make myself let go before I tear the wheel off the column.

It's the waiting. It's always the waiting.

I can fight. I can shoot. I can bleed. I've buried men and cleaned up after worse and never lost an hour's sleep over any of it. But sitting in a truck while she's out there in the dark with him—that's a different animal. That's the one thing I've never learned how to do.

The road narrows as we climb, trees crowding in on both sides until the headlights are the only thing holding the dark back. My leg's been going against the floor for half an hour. I don't notice until Carter reaches over and sets a hand on my knee. It stops. For a second. Then it starts again.