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She looked up at him. Her eyes were clearer than they’d been on the stairs — or maybe it was just that she’d found a purpose, and purpose cut through the fever better than anything else. “I’m disgusting,” she said, plainly, like this was simply a fact she was reporting. “Your bed is clean and I haven’t showered in a long time. I’m going to make it dirty.”

Something in his chest folded over, gentle and terrible, like paper.

Because the hoodie was half off — pulled up over her ribs, twisted around her arms — and he’d seen. Just for a moment, in the low lamp light. The pale skin of her lower back before the fabric fell back into place. Old scars laddered across it — silvered, some raised, the unmistakable width and rhythm of a belt used over and over on a body too small to run.

The sight of them hit him like a physical blow.

For one raw second all he could feel was the need to find whoever had done that to her and make them pay for it in blood. The fury was immediate, black, and absolute. It wanted names. It wanted a direction. It wanted time alone with the man who had left those marks.

He forced it down.

Not because it wasn’t real — it was the most real thing he’d felt in years — but because she was still sitting there in front of him, sick and ashamed and trying to apologize for existing in his clean sheets. The rage could wait. She couldn’t.

He crouched down. Not beside her but in front of the nightstand, giving her space, keeping the distance that the past two hours had taught him she needed. “Sweetheart. Listen to me. The bed doesn’t matter. The sheets don’t matter. You matter. You’re sick and you’re exhausted and you have a fever that’s been climbing since before you walked into that diner, and the only thing I need you to do right now is get back in that bed.”

She was looking at him with an expression he recognized. The expression of a person who no longer trusted that they deserved to take up space without justifying it first.

Oh Lord help me help her.

“You can shower tomorrow,” he said. “I promise it’ll still be possible tomorrow. But tonight, the only job you have is to rest. Okay?”

She held his gaze for a moment. He waited.

Then, slowly, the fight went out of her shoulders. Her arms dropped. The hoodie half-fell back into place and she stopped trying to take it off and just — stopped laying against the wall her eyes closed.

She was asleep before he got her fully onto the mattress.

6

SAGE

There were hands on her.

The part of her that never slept — the watchdog, the sentry, the piece of her that had been keeping vigil since she was twelve years old — fired instantly. Full body alert. The old language, the old response, her hands coming up to push, her mouth opening around a sound that was going to be “no” or “please” or “don’t” or all three⁠—

“Easy, baby. Easy. It’s just me.”

The voice landed before she could finish the sound. Low. Familiar? Yes…already familiar, she realized, the way her mind had already started to file this voice in the last two hours somewhere separate from the sounds that meant danger. She didn't trust it yet…but some instinct that told her maybe this time it would be different. And because her nervous system was too depleted to maintain full alert against something that had not yet, against all reasonable expectation, hurt her.

She let her hands fall.

Felt herself lifted. Felt the mattress receive her weight. Felt — warmth, the duvet pulled up over her, and then something pressed against her side, small and soft and familiar in a way that made her chest crack open.

Shadow.

Sage didn’t open her eyes. Didn’t have to. Her fingers found the plush bear by instinct—the matted fur worn thin in places, the lumpy stuffing shifted from years of desperate clutching, the small depression where a button eye used to be. She pulled it tight to her chest, curling around it like it was the only solid thing left in the world.

The bed shifted as his weight left it. Footsteps followed—careful, almost silent, careful not to disturb a single molecule of air. Moving… away?

She should have let herself sink. Her body was begging for it, heavy and fever-drunk. But instead the words slipped out, small and raw and far away, like they belonged to someone else.

“Don’t go.”

A heartbeat of silence.

“Can you… can you stay? Please?”

CAL