Page 6 of The Ashes of Summer

A sob claws its way into my throat, but I bite down on it so hard my jaw aches. Crying won't bring them back. It won't stop the man sitting opposite me. It won't change the fact that I'm trapped thousands of feet above the ground with the monster who orphaned me.

My fingers curl into my palms until my nails bite through my skin. Letting the pain ground me in some twisted way.

I won't give him my tears. Not now. Not while he's watching. Because if grief is all I have left of them… He doesn't get to take that too.

Something is taking root beneath the grief and the fear. It doesn't arrive all at once. It unfurls slowly inside me, tightening around my ribs like ivy finding cracks in stone. Every lie. Every bruise. Every person who's tried to own me, silence me, or decide who I should become has fed it, piece by piece, until I barely recognize the frightened girl who once believed monsters only existed in bedtime stories.

My gaze stays fixed on Jackson. He doesn't look at me. Doesn't speak. Doesn't acknowledge the devastation he's left behind as though taking lives is no more significant than crossing another item from a list.

This requires nothing at all.

A painful ache blooms in my chest. God... I don't want to be this version of myself. I don't want to sit across from a murderer and wonder whether hatred burns hotter than fear. I don't want my hands to curl into fists every time I look at him. I don't want violence to feel understandable.

I just want to go home. I want to be eight years old again, tucked beneath my pink floral comforter while Mama sat on the edge of my bed with another storybook balanced across her lap. Her voice always softened when she read the happy endings, lingering over every word as though she wanted me to believe every fairy tale she'd ever placed in my hands. Princesses were always rescued. Villains were always defeated. Good people always found their way back to one another.

I believed her. I believed the world worked that way.

Now, as the helicopter carries me farther away from everything I've ever loved, I realize those stories were never meant to prepare little girls for men like Jackson Moore. Because no fairy tale ever tells you what to do after the monster wins.

I swallow hard against the pressure building in my throat.

"Why did you kill my mama?"

The words come out weaker than I intend, weighted down by everything I'm trying not to feel. I hate the sound of them instantly. Hate the crack in my voice. Hate the vulnerability in it. It makes me sound small in a moment when I want to be anything but. Like I'm pleading instead of demanding. Like I'm asking him for something when the truth is he's already taken more than he ever had the right to. But I need to hear it.

I think he's going to ignore me entirely. Then his jaw shifts. The smallest movement—a single muscle tightening and releasing. So brief I would have missed it if I hadn't been watching his face with the focused attention of someone who has learned that in the absence of words—the body tells you everything.

He shakes his head once.

That's all.

My throat tightens until swallowing hurts.

"You killed my parents." Louder now, even though my voice shakes, even though the grief is leaking into every word and I can hear it and I can't stop it. "I understand why you hated my Papa. But my Mama⁠—"

The words fall apart on my tongue. Grief hits too fast, too hard—crashing into the wall I've been building against it and pouring through before I can reinforce it. My chest locks. My breath catches somewhere between my ribs and my throat and won't move either way. I drag a hand across my face painfully. There’s wet skin under my fingers.I’m crying and I didn’t even realize it.

"She didn't deserve to die." The words come out broken and quiet and completely honest. "Neither of them did. But she had nothing to do with any of this."

My voice breaks.

A sob tears free—raw, humiliating, the kind that comes from somewhere deep inside you and doesn't care what it sounds like or who's listening. I hate it instantly. Hate the sound of it crackling through the static in my headset. Hate that it's the first human noise I've heard since we left the ground and that it came from me.

He exhales slowly. And then—finally—he looks at me. Just for a heartbeat.

And there's something there. Something that surfaces and disappears so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it. Not softness. Not remorse. Not anything I would call human feeling, exactly. But something. A crack in the blankness—a single hairline fracture through the surface.

Hope is stupid. I know it's stupid. But it rises anyway. A reflex I can't override, the part of me that has spent my whole life looking for the version of events where there's a human being on the other side of the worst things.

And then it's gone.

His expression smoothes over, seals itself back into nothing, and he looks away. The hope collapses.

My teeth find the inside of my cheek—I bite down hard, copper flooding my mouth. The pain is grounding and enough to catch me before the grief takes everything. It gives me a second. Just a second.

And in that second, something else moves in.

"Why did you take her from me?" I hold my voice this time, loud and demanding.