I flinched at every noise.
My body was still trapped on that porch, even if I wasn’t.
“Hazel?”
Maude’s voice was a soft tether, gently pulling me back into the room. “Sweet girl, look at me.”
I lifted my head.
Her face blurred through tears I couldn’t feel falling.
“You’re going to get through this,” she said. “I’ve got you. Gideon’s got you. You’re not doing any of this alone.”
Alone.
For so long I’d carried that word like a shield. A punishment. A truth.
Now it felt strange.
Ill-fitting.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“I know,” Maude said. “Anyone would be.”
The kitchen swayed slightly. I blinked until it steadied.
A new sound drifted in from the porch—footsteps on the stairs, measured and heavy and unmistakably familiar.
Maude’s hand tightened on my arm. “There he is.”
I didn’t turn.
Not yet.
Didn’t trust my legs to hold me up or my face not to crumple into something wild and hysterical.
But I felt him?—
the shift in the air,
the warmth behind me,
the quiet exhale that was all Gideon.
And for the first time since the moment the shouting woke me, my body remembered how to breathe.
27
GIDEON
The Dominion Hall security team arrived within twenty minutes.
Four men in plain clothes—jeans, jackets, the kind of casual that only looked casual until you noticed the way they moved, the way their eyes tracked everything, the bulges under their arms where shoulder holsters sat. They fanned out around the inn's perimeter without being told, falling into positions that covered every approach.
Professional. Efficient. Invisible unless you knew what to look for.
Ethan had made the call. I'd stood there on the porch with my father—my father—ten feet away, and listened to Ethan's voice go flat and tactical as he requested a security detail and a cleanup crew and didn't explain why because he didn't have to. Dominion Hall didn't ask questions when one of their own called for help.
