24. The Ghost Goes Too
The Ghost Goes Too
Summer
Consciousness comes back violently.
One moment there's nothing—darkness, the far-off sensation of falling—and the next I'm staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling with pain blooming across the back of my skull. For a long moment, I don't move. I just lie there while my mind drags itself back into a body that doesn't want it.
Then the memories come. The dining room. Papa. Jackson. Each one hits heavier than the last, and when I shut my eyes against them, it isn't Papa's face that rises up.
It's Mama's hands.
I can see them so clearly I could almost reach into the memory and hold them.
Flour on her knuckles. The careful way she held a wooden spoon, like it was something worth looking after.
Sunday afternoons with the whole house going warm and sweet around us, me up on the counter with my legs swinging while she told me about the first meal she ever cooked for Papa at my grandparents' house—how he'd asked for seconds, how that was the moment she knew he was the one.
She spent the rest of her life feeding a man who was never really at the table.
And she never knew. That's the part that guts me. She died believing the story he'd handed her every single day of their marriage. She never got the truth. She earned it a thousand times over, and she died without it.
I force my eyes open before the grief can pull me all the way under.
That's when I see him.
Jackson sits in the chair across the room, watching me.
I think he's asleep—the room is so still it feels as though time has stopped—but then his gaze shifts a fraction and I understand he's been awake the whole time.
Waiting. And somehow that unsettles me more than pacing would have.
Because I understand his anger now. This quieter version, the one with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped, the one who looks almost relaxed—this is the one I can't predict.
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.
His hand lifts to the side of my throat. Not squeezing. Just resting there—a reminder of everything he could do and hasn't.
"That'll be all, Harris," he says, his eyes never once leaving mine, and I hear the old man's footsteps retreat from the room.
"Good girl," he murmurs, and brushes his hand from my cheek down toward my breastbone.
His mouth drops toward mine, and every part of me recoils from it—not visibly, not enough to warn him, just inside, where the real me is still buried under everything he's tried to stack on top. His grip tightens at the back of my neck. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to be sure of me.
That's his mistake.
Because he thinks I'm breaking. He thinks I won't put up a fight.
Well, he's fucking wrong.
When his face comes close enough, I bite him.
Hard.
Blood floods my tongue, hot and instant.
Jackson lurches back and hisses a curse, one hand flying to his mouth, and for half a second his face empties completely—not with pain, but with shock, like the world itself has betrayed him.
I don't give him the time to recover. My knee drives up with everything I have and makes contact between his legs, and the sound that tears out of him isn't quite human as he folds and crashes to the floor.
Holy shit.
For one breath I stare down at him. Then I move.
The cord is in my fist before I've finished dropping onto him, and I loop it around his throat and pull with everything I have left.
He makes a strangled sound, hands flying up to claw at it, and I pull harder.
Harder. My arms shake with the effort and I don't stop, because every second I've spent in this house is pouring down into my hands—every touch, every threat, every lie, every moment he looked at me and saw someone else.
"You fucking monster," I sob, the words tearing loose before I can stop them. "You psycho—"
His nails rip into my wrists but I barely feel them. Because I realize that from this angle he can see our reflection in the mirror. He's looking at me. Summer. Not a memory, not a ghost—me—and I want that to be the last thing he ever sees.
But then the door bursts open.
Donnie fills the doorway, eyes wild as he takes in the floor, the cord, the two of us—and in the half-second before he moves, the truth lands cold and sick in my gut.
He's been watching. The camera in the corner, the little red eye that never blinks. This whole room streamed straight into wherever he was sitting.
Then he's across the room. His fist twists into my hair and wrenches back, and pain detonates across my scalp, but I don't let go. Not yet.
Please. Please die.
Metal flashes beside my face—a knife—and the blade saws through the cord.
The tension vanishes all at once. Jackson drags in a violent, whooping breath beneath me, coughing, choking, while Donnie hauls me off him by the hair and throws me onto the bed hard enough to punch the air from my lungs.
I hit the mattress and scramble back on instinct, ribs screaming.
Jackson shoves himself up against the wall. He's coughing hard, one hand at his throat, the other dragging blood from his split lip, red already striping his neck where the cord bit in. For several seconds nobody speaks. The room fills with the wet sound of him trying to breathe.
Then he lifts his head, and his eyes find mine—and what's in them floods me with a terror deeper than rage would have.
It's hurt. Like I betrayed him. Like I broke a promise I never made.
"You tried to kill me," he says hoarsely.
My chest heaves. "You kidnapped me." My voice shakes, but the words come anyway. "You killed my parents, you psycho fucking cunt."
Donnie huffs a breathless laugh. "Told you she was a fucking—"
"Shut up." Jackson barks it, and Donnie goes silent instantly.
Jackson steadies himself against the wall, and I watch the exact moment the hurt drains out of his face and takes the softness with it.
The ghost goes too. Whatever version of Annalise he thought he'd found in me is simply gone—and for the first time since I woke, Jackson Moore looks at Summer Miller.
And hates what he sees.
"Tie her down."
Low. Rough. Empty.
"You want to be Summer Miller?" He wipes the blood from his lip with his thumb. "Fine. Then my men can treat you like Summer Miller."
Donnie's grin spreads. Jackson doesn't look at me again. He just turns and walks out, and I'm left on the bed with blood in my mouth and terror in my chest and the one unbearable fact settling over everything else.
I had one chance.
And I failed.