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The door to my room bursts open so violently it nearly comes off its hinges, and for one disorienting second all I register is noise and motion, a shape filling the doorway, weapon raised, moving too fast for me to process who or what I’m looking at.

My whole body flinches back against the chair, some animal part of me still braced for another threat rather than rescue.

Then he says my name. “Harper.”

His voice cuts through everything else happening around me, and something in me recognizes it before my eyes fully catch up, before the shape in the doorway resolves into Artem, blood on his sleeve, weapon still up as he sweeps the room once before his eyes land fully on me.

The sight of him doesn’t feel entirely real yet, my mind still lagging several seconds behind what my ears already know for certain.

“Harper.” He crosses the room in three strides, dropping to his knees in front of my chair, his hands already working at the restraints on my wrists. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

I can’t speak yet. My whole body’s shaking, adrenaline and relief tangling together too fast for words to catch up, and I just stare at him, half convinced this is one of the dreams I’ve had a dozen times in this room already, one where rescue arrives and then dissolves the second I try to reach for it.

“Talk to me.” His voice cracks slightly, hands still working fast at the restraints, cutting through the last of the plastic with a knife I don’t remember seeing him pull. “Are you hurt? Tell me where.”

The restraints fall away, and my arms drop, numb and useless from hours of being held in the same fixed position, pins and needles flooding back into feeling all at once, sharp enough that I hiss through my teeth at the sensation.

I try to lift them and can’t quite manage it yet, my body still catching up to the sudden absence of the thing that’s been holding it in place for what feels like days.

“The baby.” The words come out before anything else does at all, before I can even think to answer his actual question first. “Is the baby okay? I don’t know if it’s okay; I haven’t felt it move in a while. I don’t know if that means something’s wrong.”

“Harper.” He catches my face in both hands, forcing my eyes to his, something fierce and controlled in his expression all at once, like he’s holding two entirely different reactions together by sheer will alone. “We’re going to find out right now. I’ve got a medical team standing by. You’re going to be checked the second we’re clear of this building. Both of you.”

“Promise me.” My voice breaks on the words, everything I’ve held together for two days finally cracking apart now that there’s someone here to catch the pieces. “Promise me it’s okay. Please, Artem.”

“I can’t promise you something I don’t know yet.” His thumb brushes along my cheekbone, gentle despite everything else happening around us, gunfire still echoing somewhere in the building above. “But I promise you this. Whatever’s true, we’re going to know it together, and I’m not leaving your side until we do.”

That has to be enough. It is enough, some steadier part of me insists, even as the rest of me wants a guarantee no one can actually give me right now.

He gets an arm under my knees and lifts me before I can protest, before I can tell him I might be able to walk if he gives me a minute, and I don’t have the strength left to argue.

My body sags against his chest, exhausted in a way that goes deeper than muscle, and I let him carry me the way I haven’t let anyone carry me since I was a child, my face pressed against his shoulder, breathing in the smell of smoke and blood and something underneath it that’s simply him.

“Yuri,” he calls, voice sharp and commanding, nothing like the gentleness he just showed me. “Clear the corridor. We’re moving.”

The hallway outside is chaos I catch only in fragments: men moving fast, someone shouting coordinates into a radio, the acrid smell of gunpowder still hanging thick in the air.

Artem angles his body to keep most of it from my view, moving fast but careful, taking corners like he’s memorized every inch of this route already, stepping over things on the floor I choose not to look at directly.

“Almost there,” he murmurs, mostly to me, mostly to keep me anchored to something other than the fear still climbing up through my chest. “Almost out. Stay with me, okay?”

The night air hits me like something physical when we finally clear the building, cold and sharp after days of that concrete room’s stale, unmoving air, and I gasp at the shock of it, at the sheer size of the sky opening up above us after so long staring at a single bare bulb.

Stars scatter across the sky overhead, more of them than I remember ever noticing before tonight, and something in my chest cracks open at the sight of something so simple and so far outside anything that room could offer me.

Vehicles wait in a loose perimeter, engines running, and true to his word, a medical team is already moving toward us before Artem’s even finished crossing the last few feet of open ground.

Hands reach for me, professional and quick, someone already asking questions about how far along I am, whether I’ve had any bleeding, any cramping, checking my pulse before I’ve even been fully settled onto the stretcher they’ve brought.

Someone wraps a blanket around my shoulders that I hadn’t realized I needed until the warmth of it registers against skin gone cold from hours in that room.

“She took a fall. Possible head trauma from earlier in the day, restrained for over forty hours straight.” Artem’s voice stays close, steady, refusing to let go of my hand even as the medical team works around him. “She’s pregnant. Twenty weeks.”

“We’ve got her now.” The woman checking my pulse doesn’t look up from her work, focused, competent, exactly the kind of calm I need right now more than anything else in this world. “Vitals are strong so far. We’ll know more the second we get her to the hospital.”

I turn my head enough to find Artem’s eyes, and he’s still right there, exactly where he promised he’d be, his hand wrapped around mine tight enough that I can feel his pulse hammering just as hard as my own, both of us running on the same raw adrenaline that hasn’t fully caught up to the fact that this part, at least, is over.

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