Page 4 of The Ashes of Summer

Summer

The rotor blades don't just make noise. Each rotation pounds through the metal beneath me, through the seat, rattling through my ribs, my teeth, and the base of my skull until it feels like my body has stopped being fully mine. The vibration never stops. Every time I try to hold onto a thought—a plan, a memory, a single clear idea—it shakes loose before it can fully form.

The air inside the cabin smells of oil, metal, and something sterile and cold that reminds me of hospitals and evidence rooms—and underneath all of it, something else. Something that has no name but that I recognize the way you recognize your own voice on a recording.

Too close. Too familiar.

My fear.

I am breathing my own terror back in with every inhale and there is nowhere to put it, no way to dilute it, no one in this cabin who is going to help me carry it.

No one speaks.

The pilot's gaze never strays from the controls. His hands move with practiced precision, adjusting switches and checking instruments without hesitation. I watch him for several minutes, waiting for curiosity. Recognition. Discomfort. Anything.

Nothing comes.

When his eyes finally flick in my direction, it's brief. The same sort of glance a delivery driver might give a parcel to make sure it hasn't shifted during transport. Then he's looking away again. My stomach twists. To him, I'm not a woman sitting three feet away. I'm cargo. I watch him for another minute before the truth finally sinks in. He isn't going to help me. He doesn't care where they're taking me. As long as the helicopter lands where it's supposed to, his job is done.

And Jackson⁠—

I force my eyes across the cabin.

He sits opposite me. Still. No fidgeting, no restlessness, no sign that anything about this moment is remarkable to him. His hands rest loose in his lap. His gaze is directed somewhere past my shoulder—not at me, not at the window, not at anything in particular. Just elsewhere. Like I'm not worth the energy of a glance.

But then I think of his eyes on me, and my stomach turns.

Memories of the warehouse. When he sat with his arms folded, his pistol on his lap and watched me peel Jacob's pajamas from my skin one layer at a time—watched me stand bare in front of him under fluorescent light while I told myself it was survival, just survival, not submission—and said perfect in a voice so quiet it barely reached me. Like he'd been holding the word in his mouth for a long time and had finally found the right moment to let it out.

Just the way I pictured.

I press my fingers hard into the bridge of my nose, careful of the ones that might be broken. The movement alone sends flaring pain down my hand. It grounds me for half a second, cutting through the noise.

It doesn't last. Because the memory is already there. It doesn't wait to be invited. Jackson injured them before he touched me.

No.

Not touched.

Took.

The distinction matters. The distinction is everything. There is a version of touch that asks something and a version that simply announces ownership, and what Jackson did was the second kind—hands that moved like they had already decided he had the right to my body. My skin still holds the memory of it. My body keeps cataloging the violation the way it catalogs bruises—mapping the edges, returning to check if it's still real.

It is.

It will be for a long time.

Shame moves through me in a slow, nauseating wave. I know it isn't mine to carry, I know the fault doesn't live in me, but it doesn't matter. It settles anyway, sinking into my skin like dye, staining everything it touches. Everything inside me that used to feel like mine.

That part of me belongs to one person, and it isn't Jackson Moore.

It's Jacob Darnell.

His name surfaces the way it always does now—not with the old reflexive dread, not with the complicated tangle of hatred and want that used to accompany it. Just with a kind of ache that I don't have a clean word for. Something that arrived quietly somewhere between the moment I stopped running from him and the moment I started running toward him, and that hasn't left since.

And when he found me⁠—

His face.