Across, Juno said something that might’ve been a prayer and might’ve been a blade. “All of you,” Cap said, same tone. No qualifiers. It landed different because he didn’t dress it up.
The room resettled around the space Tess left. She’d thrown a sentence like a body and paid for it. Shame flared, then hardened into something I could carry. If I got out, the first name I wrote down would be hers. She could’ve stayed quiet. She didn’t. Sunshine kept her hand tangled in mine. Her pulse, a rabbit learning not to bolt. Give her an anchor, my brain said. Anything that wasn’t blood or clocks.
“Tell me your favorite breakfast,” I blurted, then committed. “Anything. Pancakes? The cereal with colors you’re not allowed to like when you’re grown? I’ll go first. There’s a taco truck by the park. Egg and chorizo. The salsa is felony good.”
“That’s not breakfast,” Juno muttered, and I heard the smile she tried to hide.
“It is for me,” I said. “Sunshine?”
“Sourdough toast,” she whispered. “The butter in the gold paper. And jam. The good kind. Not the kind that lies on the label.”
“Excellent.” I tightened my fingers around hers like naming it could put some of it back in her.
Cap didn’t interrupt. He didn’t need to. His approval lived in the quiet. It warmed me in a place that had nothing to do with air temperature.
Paper rustled somewhere near the corridor door. A voice with crisp edges passed close, then away again, men downstairsstraightened just because of how the consonants clipped. Trained. I filed the cadence and let it go; there was nothing useful I could do with it from here.
“Why do they keep us close?” Sunshine asked, voice little but not shaking now.
“They don’t see a threat behind bars,” Cap said. “Close makes counting easy.”
“How’s that a mistake?”
“Because we’re already using it.”
We settled into a quiet that wasn’t empty. I tapped two fingers into Cap’s wrist through our seam. He answered two back. Not a code. Enough.
I felt my hair snag the wire when I leaned. A small, mean idea arrived with it. I slid my fingers up to the bobby pin tucked behind my ear, worked it loose without the metal clicking, and palmed it.
“Cap,” I murmured.
“Yeah.”
“In case this helps,” I said, and eased the pin and the wire I used earlier through our seam into his hand.
His fingers closed over them. One squeeze, he understood. I exhaled for the first time in a while.
Later, maybe minutes or maybe an hour a voice too close to the wood said, “…shipment delayed.” Paper shifted. “Storm route blocked.”
The words stamped themselves behind my eyes. Delay meant time. Storm meant reroute. Reroute meant men making mistakes they hadn’t planned for.
I leaned into the seam. Cap felt the decision roll through me and didn’t ask.
“Good,” he breathed, too soft to carry. “Make them hurry.”
Sunshine’s hand flexed in mine. “What does that mean?”
“It means the morning is going to try to save the wrong people,” I said, steady because she was listening for shape, not detail. “We’ll make it save us instead.”
Cap’s thumb traced the top of my hand, a small yes. I didn’t need more.
Dawn was coming. And now it was late.
