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“I’ll go,” she mumbled. “Just one sec, I’ll… get up…”
She didn’t get up.
The older woman was already there — moving with a speed that belied her age, appearing at the booth as if she had been watching and waiting for exactly this. Her hand went to Sage’s forehead and she drew a sharp breath.
“Cal, baby, she’s got a fever” The sharpness from earlier was gone. What replaced it was something older and fiercer. “She’s burning up. This girl needs—”
Where am I? Where is he? Mom? Mom!
Sage was delirious, as he moved around the table. She vaguely felt the shift in the air — the warmth of him, the size of him, the displacement of space that happened when something that large got close — and then his hands were on her.
She broke.
Not with anger or defiance. But something deeper — something six years old and locked in a dark room, something twelve and counting ceiling tiles, something that lived in the part of her brain that would probably never fully heal no matter how many hours she spent in Dr. Alvarez’s office.
His hands touched her and her body did what her body always did.
She fought.
Not effectively — she had nothing left, no strength, no coordination, just a blind, animal thrashing of a little girl that had learned in the dark that hands on her body meant pain. She twisted against him, her fists hitting something massive and immovable — his chest, his arms, surfaces that didn’t give — and the sounds coming out of her weren’t words anymore, not really.
“Nooo — don’t — *nooo* — mom, make him stop — it *hurts* — oh God, it hurts—”
She was sobbing. Full, open, ugly sobbing — the kind she hadn’t done since the bathroom floor at sixteen, the kind that came from the place where she’d stored everything she couldn’t carry and had been pretending didn’t exist. Her body went limp in his arms because there was nothing left to fight with, and the sobs kept coming, pulling sounds from deep in her chest that she didn’t recognize as her own.
“Mama, make him stop”
She didn’t know if she meant Felicity or her birth mother or God or no one at all. She just knew the word “mama” and the word “stop.” Neither of them had ever worked before but her mouth kept saying them anyway because it was the only prayer she had left.
Sage could vaguely see the old woman press her hand over her mouth.
Her steel-gray eyes — eyes that had seen everything, survived everything, held composure through decades of pain and sorrow — suddenly filled with tears. A sharp gasp tore out of her, her whole body flinching like she’d been struck. It was the raw, involuntary response of a mother hearing her child cry out for a mama who never came, while small hands fought off ghosts that weren’t even there.
“Oh, honey,” she whispered, voice cracking. “Who… who hurt you?”
4
CAL
Cal still remembered the night he saved those two little girls as if it was burned into his bones.
They’d been pushing through the dust-choked outskirts of Fallujah under a moonless Iraqi sky, the dry wind whipping sand across their faces like razors. Intel had painted the hamlet as a major IED cache, so his platoon moved house-to-house in tight, silent stacks. Cal was always point on breach. He was the first man through the door, the one who ate the flash-bang and cleared the room before anyone else could blink.
The charge went off with a deafening crack. Two hostiles dropped before they could even raise their weapons. Cal swept left into the next room and froze for half a heartbeat.
There they were.
Two young girls, no more than eight or nine, slumped against the far wall in rusty chains, barely conscious. And between him and them stood a wiry guard, AK-47 shouldered, screaming in Arabic and swinging the muzzle back and forth between Cal and the children.
Time slowed.
Later, Rodriguez would swear Cal had somehow grown two sizes and moved like a goddamn ghost. In one fluid, violent motion, Cal closed the distance, ripped the rifle from the man’s hands, drove the butt straight through his skull with a sickening crunch, and pivoted to shield the girls with his own body—all before the guard even hit the floor.
“Clear!” he roared, voice cutting through the chaos.
“Goddammit, Cal, stand down!” Captain’s Cross voice barked from the hallway, but Cal didn’t hear him. Not really.
He dropped to a knee, hands surprisingly gentle despite the blood on his gloves, and snapped the chains with the stock of the captured AK. The girls stirred, eyes wide with terror that instantly melted into desperate need the second they realized he wasn’t there to hurt them. They threw themselves against his chest, small arms locking around his neck, sobbing into his plate carrier like he was the only safe thing left in their world.
