Page 7 of The Ashes of Summer

I don't let it fracture. I push it out at full volume, from somewhere deeper than grief, and it fills the headset in a way my earlier words didn't.

Nothing. Not even a glance. The dismissal lands harder than any physical response could have. Because it isn't anger—anger would mean I matter enough to provoke a reaction. That is what breaks me. Not the silence itself. The dismissal.

My hands move. Clumsy with grief and fury and the harsh, specific pain of broken fingers, I fumble at my belt—the buckle releasing with a click that sounds enormous in the enclosed space—and then I'm moving, already committed.

I lunge. My headset tangles in my hair and pulls on my scalp but I don’t care. I don’t fucking care any more. My fist tangles in his hair and I hit him. Pain detonates through my hand—white-hot and immediate and nauseating—but I don't stop. I hit him again. And again. It's messy and uncontrolled and I know, even as I'm doing it, that it's useless. I have no leverage. No reach. My body is running on grief and adrenaline and the desperate, animalistic need to make him feel something—anything—to prove to myself that he is not actually untouchable, that there is a version of this where I am not completely powerless.

I need him to react. I need him to acknowledge me. To acknowledge what he’s done. What he took from me. Even if the acknowledgement is violent.

I swing again—this time, he moves. Not urgently. Not with surprise. With the precision of someone who was waiting for this to happen and simply chose their moment. His hand comes up and closes around my throat mid-swing—fingers wrapping with a calm, deliberate pressure that stops everything at once.

My breath. My body. My thoughts.

One second I'm fighting—messy and furious and real—and the next I'm nothing. Just held. Just stopped. The sudden stillness is almost more frightening than the motion was.

My hands fly to his wrist. My nails dig in—I feel the give of skin, feel him register the pressure of it—but it doesn't matter. He doesn't shift. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't give me even the smallest yield to work against. His grip is absolute, the grip of a man who has done this before and knows exactly how much force is required.

The air disappears.

Panic detonates through me—fast, violent, overriding everything else. My lungs spasm. My mouth opens on a gasp that produces nothing. The helicopter noise distorts, stretching out and warping at the edges, becoming something distant and strange.

His face is close. Close enough to feel his breath moving warm against my cheek. Close enough to see every detail.

And his expression is empty. Completely, absolutely empty.

Not pleasure. Not anger. Not any of the things I've seen on men's faces when they hold a woman's throat in their hand. Just nothing. Just the blankness of a man doing something that requires no more emotional investment than checking a lock or changing a setting.

This means nothing to him.

That is the worst thing. Worse than the pain. Worse than the lack of air. That this—me, struggling, fighting for breath, nails in his skin, trying with everything I have left to make some kind of mark on this moment—means nothing.

Darkness creeps in at the edges of my vision. Black spots bloom and spread, gentle and insidious, the way deep water rises. My strength drains. I feel it leaving—out through my hands, out through my legs—no matter how hard I try to hold onto it.

This is it.

The thought lands with a terrible, clear calm.

This is how I die.

Not fighting my way out. Not running fast enough. Not reaching Jacob's hand through that window. Not in some future where this all resolves itself and I find a way through.

Here.

In a helicopter I can't identify, over ground I can't see. With Jackson Moore's hand around my throat and his face empty of everything that would make this death mean something to the person causing it.

My chest burns. My ears ring with a sound that is swallowing the world, pulling it inward, compressing it down to a single point. But underneath it—underneath all of it—something refuses.

Not hope. Not fight. Something quieter and more stubborn than either of those things. Something that doesn't care about the darkness creeping in or the strength leaving my limbs or the pressure of his hand.

His patterns can be learned.

I am still here.

Still—

And then⁠—

Nothing.