I’d glanced around, making sure no one was watching. “That’s right.”
“From the bad things outside?”
“From everything.” The words had come out rougher than I’d intended.
She’d studied me for a long moment with those serious eyes, then held up her rabbit. “This is Promise. Mama gave her to me when I was a baby.”
The cult had renamed Sophia that—Promise. Their “special one.” Their “chosen child.” I’d seen how Hopeful watched her during gatherings, the way he talked about her future role in their sick vision. It made my skin crawl. But the name change had been confusing for a three-year-old, so she’d called her rabbit by her cult name instead.
“That’s a good name for a rabbit,” I’d said.
Sophia had smiled then, just a little. “You can pet her if you want.”
I’d reached out and touched the worn fabric of the rabbit’s ear, and something in my chest had shifted. This kid trusted me.Her mother trusted me, even though we’d barely spoken directly beyond the bare minimum required by commune life.
But Evelyn’s eyes found mine across crowded rooms. Brief moments of connection that said she saw what I was, what I was really doing there.
She’d known I wasn’t one of them.
The trust had built slowly. Sophia bringing me dandelions she’d picked from the garden. Evelyn letting me watch her daughter during the mandatory prayer sessions when parents were separated from children. Small acts that shouldn’t have mattered but did.
I’d watched the cult get darker. Hopeful’s sermons shifting from peace to prophecy, from community to control. The school closing. The perimeter fence getting higher. People who questioned things vanishing overnight, their cabins cleaned out like they’d never existed.
I’d watched Evelyn’s fear grow as she realized what she’d gotten herself and Sophia into. How the place she’d come to for safety when Sophia was barely more than a baby had twisted into something dangerous.
Three weeks before the end, Sophia had been taken for “spiritual preparation,” and I’d spent six hours tracking her down, finally finding her locked in the meditation building with three other children. I’d gotten her out using my security access and returned her to Evelyn just after midnight.
Evelyn had opened her cabin door at my knock, her face pale and streaked with tears. When she saw Sophia in my arms, asleep and unharmed, something in her expression had cracked open.
“Thank you,” she whispered, taking her daughter from me. She carried Sophia to the small bed, tucked her in, checked her over with shaking hands. No injuries. No signs of the “purification” she’d feared. Just exhaustion.
I turned to leave, to give them privacy, but her hand caught my wrist.
“Stay,” she said. “Just for a minute. I can’t...” Her voice had failed. “I can’t be alone right now.”
I stayed.
She sat on the edge of her bed, shoulders shaking with silent sobs of relief. I stood there, unsure what to do, until she looked up at me with red eyes and something raw in her expression.
“I thought I’d lost her.”
“You didn’t. She’s safe.”
“Because of you.” She stood and crossed the small space between us. Her hand had come up to my face, palm against my cheek. “You keep saving us.”
I meant to step back. Maintain distance. Instead, my hand covered hers.
She kissed me first. Desperate, grateful, full of relief and fear and everything that had been building between us for years. I kissed her back, pulling her close, feeling her body shake against mine.
We’d moved to her bed, as far from where Sophia slept as the small yurt allowed. We were quiet. Careful. She pulled at my clothes with an urgency that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with needing to feel alive, to confirm we were both still here, still breathing.
Afterward, we’d lain tangled together, her head on my chest, both of us listening to Sophia’s steady breathing across the room.
“This can’t happen again,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Sophia comes first. Always.”
