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Then it came from somewhere deep beneath the fever and terror — from the locked basement inside her where she kept the things she’d never said out loud.

“He promised.” A sob tore out of her, ugly and wrenching, folding her whole body around it. “He promised⁠—”

She was on the floor. She didn’t know when she’d slid down — one second against the wall, the next curled on the hardwood, the knife clattering somewhere out of reach, her hands empty. Everything that had been holding her upright simply gave way.

“OH, MAMA… WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME⁠—”

Suddenly he was there.

Not fast — never fast — but simply present. He lowered his enormous frame to the floor beside her, arms sliding around her with a gentleness that should have been impossible for a man his size. He didn’t restrain her. Didn’t trap her. He just held her the way you hold something that has been breaking for years and has finally shattered completely.

“Shh.” His voice rumbled soft against her hair. One massive hand on her back, warm and steady, unmoving. “I promise, okay? I promise, baby girl. You’re safe. I got you.”

She grabbed fistfuls of his flannel shirt, clinging with everything she had left. It was the same desperate grip she’d used with Felicity on that bathroom floor so many years ago. She pressed her face into his chest and broke open.

Not the quiet sobs from the diner. Not the angry tears over meatloaf. This was deeper, more total. It was the kind of crying that came from the very center of a person, where grief and terror and exhaustion and the tiny, flickering ember of hope all fought for space in a heart too shattered to hold them.

She cried into him like the world was ending, and he held her through every ugly, wrenching sound. He didn’t let go. Didn’t ask for anything. The snow fell soft against the windows, the cabin stayed warm around them, and somewhere deep in the fever she remembered it again — Felicity’s voice from earlier, gentle and insistent… just get in there, someone can help you.

She had.

And someone was helping her.

She couldn’t stop crying long enough to understand what that meant.

He held her the way the mountains held the valley — completely, effortlessly, with an ancient patience that had been there forever and wasn’t going anywhere.

“I got you,” he whispered again, quieter now. “I got you, baby girl.”

Then, without effort, he rose with her still in his arms. She had nothing left to fight with. She didn’t even try.

He carried her upstairs.

5

CAL

Twenty-five steps from the bottom of the staircase to the landing.

Cal had climbed them thousands of times without thinking. Had taken them two at a time in the dark after nightmares, his body moving before his brain engaged, all that carefully cultivated stillness dissolving in the first seconds after waking. Had descended them slowly on the pre-dawn mornings when the void was close, when the only thing that pulled him out of bed was the discipline of a man who had decided, after a long fight, that he was going to choose to go on living.

He had never climbed them carrying anything fragile.

She was shivering against his chest with the deep shaking that screamed cold and sick and running on nothing for too long. The kind that came from the inside, from the bones, the kind that meant the systems were still fighting even when the fight was nearly lost. Her face was pressed into the junction of his neck and his flannel, her hands fisted in the fabric at his shoulder, her grip the only strong thing left in her.

He took the stairs slowly. Methodically. One at a time, his body absorbing the motion completely, without drama, converting the effort into steadiness. He kept one hand flat against her back, between her shoulder blades, trying to keep warm. The other arm was under her knees, bearing her weight without thought.

“Shhh,” he said, quietly, into her hair. She’d smelled like snow and diesel and three weeks of sleeping in a car. Underneath it, something faint and almost floral — soap, maybe, a long time ago. A girl who used to be able to take care of herself. “Shh. You’re okay, baby. Almost there.”

She made a sound. Not a word. Something smaller and worse than a word. Involuntary. A cry or moan or maybe both. He felt it in his sternum.

At the landing, he paused.

Not because he needed to rest. Because she deserved the pause — deserved to not be carried somewhere unfamiliar at a pace set entirely by someone else, her face pressed into a stranger’s shoulder, no information about where she was going or what was waiting at the end of it. He’d seen what happened when people who’d been hurt moved through spaces they couldn’t control. He knew what uncertainty did to a nervous system that had been trained to treat the unknown as threat.

He waited until he felt her head move. Just slightly — a shift in weight, the faint tightening of her grip that meant she was surfacing.

“Sage.” He said it carefully, the same way he would say everything now — softly, with warning, like every word was a door being opened slowly so she could see who was on the other side before she had to decide whether to let them in. “Baby. Can you look at me for a second?”