Page 24
“Please.” Her voice was so small it barely existed. Her blue eyes — vivid even through the fever haze, even through the tears still clinging to her lashes — found his, and held them with desperation.
“Please…don’t hurt me.”
The words slammed into his chest like the rounds that tore through him on that nightmare mission in Afghanistan years ago. Not a clean impact — just a brutal, blooming pressure that deformed everything it touched, a slow-motion rearrangement of bone, breath, and the fragile scaffolding he’d built around his heart on their way to center mass.
He put his hands on the doorframe. In her sightline. Open. Where she could see them.
“Sage.” He said her name the way he said Mama’s name — like it meant something, like it had weight and history even though he’d known it for less than an hour. “Honey, look at me. Look at me, sweetheart.”
Her eyes, swimming and unfocused, found his.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said very slowly. “You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you ever again.”
He meant every word. He meant them with the same totality he’d meant every oath he’d ever sworn — enlistment, the Trident, the oath to the Agency — and he meant these more, because those oaths had been to institutions that had used him up and those words were to a girl who had been used up by something worse.
But Sage was already gone again — her head sagging against the seat rest, her eyes fluttering shut, her body surrendering to the warmth of the heaters and the exhaustion of a system that had been in crisis mode for weeks and had finally, in the presence of warmth and food and a voice that wasn’t yelling, stood down.
She whimpered softly. Her thumb found her mouth.
Cal watched her for a moment. Just a moment.
Then he closed the door. Gently.
Mary Sue and Annie were on the steps of the diner entrance, huddled against the awning, the snow swirling around them. Annie looked at the closed door and wiped her eyes, a woman who knew first hand how the world could eat you up and spit you out. Mary Sue had one arm around Annie, always protective of her charges, and the other arm holding the diner door slightly open, her apron blowing in the wind. Her entire attention was locked on the truck door, the cold clearly irrelevant to her.
“Cal, baby, do you need me to come with you?” Her voice was loud enough to be heard over the storm.
He shook his head as he turned toward the Jeep parked down the street.
“No, Mama. We’ll be fine. Get inside before you get sick.”
Mary Sue nodded. Reluctant. The nod showed she wanted to argue and was choosing to trust him instead. He heard Annie’s voice as she took Mary Sue’s arm and guided her back through the door — concerned, wondering, her tone showing someone who was witnessing something they didn’t fully understand but recognized as important.
“Mary Sue… isn’t Bear cold?”
Mary Sue’s snort carried through the wind and the snow with clarity despite the rising tempest.
“Cal? Cold?”
The door closed.
Cal headed to the Jeep. A ‘98 Cherokee, the color of dried mud, parked at the curb at an angle that suggested it had rolled to a stop rather than been parked. He tried the handle — unlocked- of course it was, because a girl with nothing left to steal didn’t bother locking doors.
He opened it and his eyes worked quickly. Clinical. Tactical assessment
The interior told a story like a crime scene — in the details, in the absences, in the things that should have been there and weren’t.
Sleeping bag in the backseat, twisted and compressed… nylon shell worn thin…probably from weeks of friction. No real blankets.
Cal looked closer as he leaned past the driver seat.
Threadbare fleece balled up near the headrest. Hmmm…heater vents closed… to keep cold air out. Dead for a while.
He looked at the floor of the jeep.
Saw candy wrappers on the floor. A lot of them. Gas station brands — Snickers, Milky Way, off-brand granola bars. Every single wrapper had been scraped clean. Not just opened and discarded — scraped, the insides worked over with fingernails or teeth until there was nothing left, not an ounce of chocolate or caramel, the wrappers turned inside out and flattened like someone had extracted every last calorie with desperate efficiency.
Cal stared at the wrappers.
