Page 98 of The Ashes of Summer

The gates sit ahead of me in the headlights.

And I freeze.

Because Jacob is still in that house.

The realization comes all at once. I'm free. I could put this thing in drive and be down that mountain in twenty minutes. I could survive.

But he could be bleeding somewhere in there. He could be alive right now, in that house, waiting for me the way I waited for him.

A sob catches in my throat.

I can't leave him. I physically can't. I think about him on his knees in the gravel while a helicopter carried me into the fog. I think about him walking into this place tonight knowing exactly what it might cost him.

I'd burn the whole fucking world down for you.

My fingers tighten on the wheel.

I should go back. I should find him⁠—

Movement flickers near the gates.

I jump so hard my breath catches. Footsteps crunch through gravel out there in the dark.

Then—

"Shhh."

Hushed. Female.

I stare into the blackness beyond the fence line, my pulse hammering, and two figures come out of the trees.

And even in the dark, I know them instantly.

Constance. Adelaide.

For one impossible second I'm certain I'm hallucinating—that my mind has finally cracked and started handing me the people I need most. Because Jackson spent days building me a world where nobody was coming. Where the whole thing had stopped turning without me in it.

And yet there they are. Real enough to hurt.

"Oh my God—" Adelaide's voice breaks around my name, and that's what destroys the last thing holding me together.

They run.

I barely make it out of the SUV before Constance hits me, arms locking around me so hard my ribs ache. Adelaide crashes into us a second later, fisting handfuls of my shirt like she's afraid I'll come apart if she lets go.

And I break. Not gracefully. Everything in me caves at once, and the sound that tears out of my wrecked throat isn't human, and my knees nearly go, and Constance holds the back of my head against her shoulder while I come apart in the driveway.

"You're okay," she keeps saying, shaking, crying herself. "We've got you. You're okay."

I'm not. Nothing about me is okay. I can still feel him everywhere—his hands, his voice, the perfume he put on my skin there under the smoke and the sweat. My body isn't mine yet. I don't know when it will be again.

I pull back and grab Adelaide's wrists hard enough to make her flinch. "The gunshot⁠—"

"There were loads of them," Constance says fast, her eyes already scanning the estate behind me. "Carter brought Hayes, Vance, Groves⁠—"

"Groves?"

Something twists in my chest.