17. Michael Miller #3
The cook steps back so fast he nearly trips over his own feet. Jackson rises, lifts the dish himself, and carries it—slow, deliberate, savoring it—to my end of the table, setting it down directly in front of me.
My own reflection stares back off the curved metal, warped and pale, dark hair falling around a face I don't recognize. For one disorienting second I don't look like myself at all. I look like a stranger sitting down to dinner at a dead woman's table.
I don't move.
"Every action has a consequence, Summer." His voice is quiet now. Almost gentle. Almost loving. "Your father made his choices. And now you get to understand exactly what those choices cost."
His hand settles on the lid.
"Mortuary staff are surprisingly accommodating when my men hold a gun to their heads."
I press back into the chair. "Don't—"
He lifts it.
My father's head sits on the platter.
Everything stops. The room. The air. The beat of my own heart.
His face is slack, eyes closed, the skin gone waxen in a way I feel before I understand—the color, the texture, the terrible stillness of it.
Death has turned him into something that is both him and not-him at once, and my mind refuses to hold the two of them together.
Papa.
Not Papa.
The sound that comes out of me isn't a scream.
It's older than screaming, something primitive my body finds before my mind can catch up, and then the nausea folds me in half and my stomach empties itself across the polished floor, the chair shrieking backward as I brace both hands on the table's edge.
There's almost nothing left in me to bring up, but my body doesn't care; it knows nothing living should have to share a room with what's in front of me.
Behind me, Jackson laughs. That broken, rasping laugh, the one that sounds like something in him snapped a long time ago and healed crooked. It cuts through the ringing in my ears, and whatever fragile thread has been holding me together finally lets go.
Consequences don't enter my mind. There's no room for them.
There's only the animal need to do something before whatever's left of me freezes solid.
My hand closes around the steak knife beside my plate, my fingers locking so hard around the handle they ache, and before I've decided anything I'm already moving.
Steel opens his palm in a bright, clean line of red.
He jerks back. I don't wait to see the rest.
I run.
I tear through the dining room without looking back, the chair crashing down behind me, my feet slapping the marble as the house blurs past—white walls, dark wood, meaningless flashes of gold—my heart slamming so hard I feel it in my throat.
Somewhere beneath the thunder of my own footsteps, I realize I'm screaming.
The sound is just there, torn up from somewhere so deep it no longer feels like it belongs to me.
A door.
I throw myself at it, both hands, my shoulder driving into the heavy wood hard enough to jar every bone in my body—and it gives. Cold air slams into me as I stumble out onto gravel, catching myself half a step from falling, and for one impossible, glorious second the world opens up around me.
I'm outside.
I'm out.
Hope surges through me so hard it hurts. Maybe this is it. Maybe I found the gap they never thought to close. Maybe God hasn't given up on me entirely—
Then movement snags my eye and my head jerks up.
Figures line the rooftops around the courtyard, rifles already shouldered, already aimed. Tiny red dots drift lazily across the gravel and then find me, sliding over my body one by one—my chest, my stomach, my forehead—settling there with a patience that says they were always going to.
My feet stop on their own.
The knife is still in my fist, and all at once it feels laughable. I drag my gaze off the rooftops only to find more men at the gates, weapons up, the same unhurried, practiced calm. Every way out was covered before I ever reached the door.
"Don't shoot."
Jackson's voice carries across the courtyard behind me, steady and controlled, and somehow that frightens me more than the guns do. His footsteps crunch slowly over the gravel. The rifles don't lower. There is nowhere left to go.
I wait until he's close enough to touch before I move.
The knife cuts through the space between us with everything I have left—but he's faster. His injured hand snaps shut around my wrist before the blade can reach him, his grip crushing down until my fingers spasm open and the knife strikes the gravel with a small, hollow clatter.
I don't surrender. I fight him with everything in me, clawing with my free hand, kicking, twisting, forcing him to earn every inch, because Jacob is still coming—he has to be—and I only need one more second. One mistake. One distraction.
Jackson gives me none.
He hauls me off my feet like I weigh nothing, one arm locking around my waist while my legs thrash uselessly at the air, his cut hand smearing warm blood across the front of my clothes.
"You're done," he says against my ear. "Let's get you inside."
I shake my head so hard it hurts. Because the quiet certainty in those few words is so much worse than anything he could have shouted.