The words mean nothing to her yet. I can feel that in the way her body stays rigid, ready to spring. She makes a thin keening sound into my collarbone before clamping her teeth shut, as though noise itself might betray her. The fear in it digs under my skin.
Someone taught her to fear her own voice.
When a branch snaps somewhere off to our right, she tenses so hard her nails dig into my shoulder. I shift my stance, putting myself between her and the sound out of instinct more than thought. The woods calm again a moment later. She doesn’t.
“It’s just the mountain,” I say quietly. “She won’t hurt you.”
My tone makes her blink up at me. Her eyes browse my face. My jaw. My hands. The angle of my shoulders. Every point where a man can inflict harm.
I let her look.
I want her to understand I am not what she ran from.
Her throat vibrates with a tiny sound—questioning, confused. It’s the first noise she’s made that isn’t pure fear or warning. She doesn’t know what to do with it. Neither do I, not yet. But it settles somewhere deep inside me all the same.
I shift her higher in my arms when her legs start to slip. She doesn’t fight this time. Exhaustion wins out, dropping her head against my shoulder. Her breath warms my neck. She trembles through every inhale.
“Almost home,” I tell her.
Home for me. Something she’s probably never known.
When the trees thin and the cabin comes into view, an ache spreads through my chest. I didn’t realize how lonely that doorway looked until I imagined her crossing it. Not as a captive. As someone the mountain handed to me for a reason I can feel in my bones.
She stirs, eyes fluttering open long enough to see the cabin. A terrified sound scrapes out of her throat. She thinks I’m delivering her somewhere terrible. Somewhere like where she escaped from.
“No.” I lower my head until my cheek rests against her hair. “Not that. Not ever again.”
A single tear lands on my collar.
I hold her tighter, just for a moment. “I’ve got you,” I say, quiet enough that the trees take the words from me. “You’re safe now, sweet girl.”
Something settles in my chest—heavy, certain.
Whether she believes it or not, I carry her inside.
Chapter Three
Briar
The cabin smells like woodsmoke and a warmth I can’t name. It hits me the moment he carries me over the threshold, and my body jerks in his arms before I can stop it. Warmth has never meant safety. It meant fire stoked too high, water poured too hot, punishments meant to soften the spirit until it bent.
The man lowers me onto a blanket near the hearth. My palms slide across the woven fabric, too soft to make sense. I drag myself backward on instinct, spine hitting the corner wall before I realize I moved.
He doesn’t follow.
He crouches a short distance away, hands resting on his thighs so I can see every inch of them. No fists. No rope. No blade. Just stillness. But I feel him anyway—the space he takes up, the weight of him in the room.
Too quiet. Too unpredictable.
I pull my knees to my chest and curl into the smallest version of myself. My throat hums without permission, a high, thin sound that means danger to me and nothing to him.
He speaks low into some device, and it isn’t long until more footsteps approach.
My heart slams against my ribs, and I push myself deeper into the corner. A woman enters first, older, wrapped in layers that rustle. Her presence fills the room without touching me. Her eyes are steady but soft, the kind of soft that makes my chest ache in ways I didn’t prepare for.
She kneels slowly, not in front of me, but to the side—far enough that I can run if I choose. She doesn’t reach out. Doesn’t ask for my name. Doesn’t ask for anything.
She just says, “Child,” on a breath that’s more prayer than word.
