Page 27
Panic hit her like lightning — immediate, total, no slow build, no rational assessment of the unfamiliar room. Just gone. That old deep terror, flooding her exhausted body with adrenaline she couldn’t begin to afford. She was stumbling erratically off the couch and hunting for a weapon before conscious thought could catch up.
The pocket knife had been in her back pocket for four weeks — a cheap gas-station blade, dull, handle cracked. She’d bought it in New Mexico when she realized she’d be sleeping in parking lots and rest stops, the kind of places where girls like her disappeared.
She’d made it to the corner because corners were safe. Nothing behind you. Full view of the room. She could see the door. If he came back — when he came back, they always came back — she’d see him coming and she’d have the knife.
She was shaking so hard the blade was hard to grip.
The fever was devouring her thoughts. She couldn’t hold a timeline — couldn’t tell if this was the diner, the truck, or somewhere worse. Couldn’t remember if the giant had been kind or if she’d only dreamed it. Warm hands kept blurring into all the other hands that had found her in the dark.
Rick was behind her.
She knew he wasn’t — knew it the way you know things in fever dreams, with the knowing and the not-knowing twisting together — but she could still feel him. The weight. The sour stink of whiskey and weed. The sound of the lock turning. The clink of his belt. The nausea rising as she prepared to spread her legs and count the curling tiles on the ceiling.
The door opened.
“No! Not anymore—”
He was there.
Massive. Filling the entire doorframe and blocking the light behind him. In his arms was her backpack, her guitar case, and pressed against the strap — Shadow. That small, dark, one-eyed shape she would have recognized in any nightmare, in any room, through any fever.
“P-p-please—” Her teeth chattered so violently the words fractured. The knife shook wildly in her grip. She pressed herself harder into the corner, trying to disappear into the wood and stone. “Don’t f-f-fuck me—”
She could hear herself. How small and young she sounded. A terrified child pretending to be dangerous — three pathetic inches of dull steel against a man who could snap her in half without trying. She knew the knife was useless. She’d known it the second she pulled it. But it was all she had, and six brutal years had taught her that all she had was still worth fighting with.
“Just… just my mouth—”
He set her things down slowly. The backpack and guitar case met the floor with careful silence. Then he straightened, and she watched him do something impossible.
He made himself smaller.
Not physically — you couldn’t shrink seven feet four inches of solid muscle and bone. But he changed. His shoulders dropped. His hands came up open, palms out in the same empty offering he’d given her in the diner before the only prayer anyone had ever said for her. He lowered himself, bending his knees, sinking down until he’d dropped more than a foot, then another, until his eyes were closer to level with hers.
“Sage.”
His voice was so gentle it almost didn’t fit the body it came from — low, soft, steady. A deep rumble she felt in her chest before it reached her ears. The same warm frequency as Felicity’s voice in the Jeep. Not the words. Just the quality of someone who was going to stay.
“Sage, look at me. Okay? Look at me, honey.”
She didn’t want to. Looking at men was dangerous. Looking meant seeing what they wanted, and they always wanted the same thing. She didn’t think she could survive it if those gray eyes held the same hunger Rick’s always had — not after he’d prayed for her, not after he’d called her friend.
But she looked.
His eyes were wet.
Not crying — this man looked like he’d never cried in his life, like his body had been built to lock everything down tight. But his eyes were wet, the hard gray softened to warm pewter, the color of lake stones and winter sky. And what she saw there wasn’t what she expected.
No lust. No cold calculation. No appraisal of what she was worth or what she’d cost.
Just pain.
He was looking at her like she was breaking his heart.
“See?” he said softly. His hands stayed raised, open, empty. Those scarred, enormous hands that had never grabbed, never taken — only held hers in prayer and carried her through the snow. “I’m not going to hurt you. Okay?”
The knife trembled harder. Her arm burned with exhaustion. The fever dragged at her, the adrenaline that had fueled her collapse now sputtering out fast, leaving only bone-deep cold and emptiness.
“P-promise?” she whispered. The word cracked right down the middle, small and childlike. “Promise?”
