Page 73 of The Ashes of Summer

A cold shiver works through me as I realize it: the most dangerous version of Jackson isn't the one who loses control or raises his voice. It's this one. The one who believes, all the way down, that everything he's doing is justified.

I shift against the sheets—and then I feel it.

The drawstring.

My joggers are still on; he must have dressed me again, or had someone do it. Either way the cord is still threaded through the waistband.

I keep my movements small. Unhurried. The dazed, drifting movements of a woman still half-under from a blow to the head. I let my hand wander and work the cord loose in tiny increments while I keep my eyes unfocused, aimed at nothing over his shoulder.

He watches me.

I let him think he's watching someone surface from shock.

The cord slides free. I fold it once and press it into my pocket, palm flat against my thigh.

There.

His gaze stays fixed on me, patient, expectant, like he's waiting for me to become something.

"What is it going to take," he asks quietly, "to make you realize the sheriff can't save you?"

The words should cut deeper than they do. Maybe they would have, before the note—before that scrap of hope folded into a tampon wrapper. Jacob is coming. The memory of those three words moves through me like a second pulse, steady underneath everything else.

"He will come," I say. My voice comes out rough, but it holds.

Something shifts in Jackson's face. Not anger. Worse. Disappointment—like I've given the wrong answer, like he expected more of me.

"You still don't understand, do you?"

I don't answer. I understand far more than I want to.

He rises and crosses the room, unhurried, and I make myself not shrink back, because every flinch is something he files away and spends later. He stops in front of me, and his eyes move over my face with that assessing stillness I've come to recognize. It isn't lust. It's an evaluation. He's cataloging all the places I still fall short.

And that's the thing I finally understand. Jackson isn't just hurting me. He's paring away everything that makes me Summer Miller until there's nothing left he has to reject.

He grabs a fistful of hair at the nape of my neck and hauls me up, but I let myself go limp, dead weight in his hand.

Give me the pain. Let me feel something—anything—other than despair and grief.

"Stand up."

I try to shake my head, but his grip leaves no room for it, so I do the next best thing. I spit at him.

In that second he draws a gun from his slacks and raises it to my head.

"Pull it," I snarl. "Do your worst, Jackson. Do it."

I feel the tremor move through him—see his teeth digging into his tongue, the fire banked behind his eyes. But he doesn't pull the trigger. Instead, he shouts.

"Harris!"

My eyes go wide as I understand what he means to do, but before I can get a word out, Harris steps into the room—and Jackson swings the gun toward the old man without ever taking his eyes off me.

"Stand," he says, slow and soft.

I weigh it in the half-second before I move. Refuse outright and Harris pays for it. Obey too fast and he'll think I'm breaking. So I find the middle—reluctant enough to be believed, compliant enough to keep him patient—and I get my legs under me, taking my own weight, rising the rest of the way on limbs that don't feel like mine.

Approval flickers in his eyes. I hate it. I hate that I can read it. I hate that some part of me is already learning him the way you learn the weak points in a locked room.