“She’s eating. Not much, but enough.” Sable glances back into the room. “She responds to physical contact: grips a hand, presses into warmth. Curls into whoever holds her. She hasn’t spoken.”
I look past her. Mia is sitting on a cot near the window, knees drawn up, her dark eyes tracking the room the way a feral animal tracks movement through the bars of a cage. Watchful. Still.
“Can I sit with her?”
Sable nods. “Slow. Let her come to you.”
I cross the room and lower myself to the floor beside her cot. Not on it, beside it. Below her eye level. I learned this with Cameron when his magic was bad, and the world was too loud: make yourself small, make yourself still, let them decide when to close the distance.
Mia watches me. I stay silent.
A minute passes. Then two. Then one of the Ravenclaw children—Eli, maybe five, missing his front teeth—ambles in with a red rubber ball and drops it. It rolls across the wooden floor in a lazy arc, bumping against the leg of Mia’s cot.
Mia’s gaze follows it. Not the flinch I expected. Not the blankness I’ve seen on her face since the facility. Something else.Her eyes trace the ball’s path with a focus that has nothing to do with threat assessment.
Interest.
I look at Sable. She’s seen it too. Her hand is pressed against her mouth.
Eli, oblivious, retrieves the ball and drops it again. It rolls back toward the cot. Mia’s fingers twitch on the blanket.
She doesn’t reach for it. Not yet. But she watches it until it stops, and when Eli picks it up and wanders out, her gaze stays on the empty floor where it was.
“That’s new,” Sable says, her voice thick. She clears her throat. “That’s new as of today.”
The first sign that the world outside her survival instincts might hold something worth noticing.
When Conner comes for Mia in the late afternoon, I’m still in the children’s ward.
I’ve been sitting with her for an hour, not touching, just there. She’s drowsy. the kind of half-sleep that isn’t rest, just a body too exhausted to maintain full vigilance. Her eyes drift closed, snap open, drift again. Every time they open, they find me first. Checking.
The door opens. Conner fills the frame, still dusty from the fence work, his bad arm strapped against his side. He sees me and stops.
“I can come back.”
“Stay.” I rise from the floor, my knees protesting. “She knows you.”
He crosses the room slowly, no sudden movements, keeping his footsteps audible. He lowers himself onto the edge of the cot. Not the floor, where I sat. The cot. Closer. I wonder if he decided that or if instinct took him there.
Mia’s eyes are open now. She watches him come with that silent, assessing gaze. But when he settles, she relaxes. Sheknows him. Not safe, maybe. Not yet. Butknown. The man who came for them and carried her out.
Conner doesn’t speak. He rests his good hand on the blanket beside hers. Palm up. Open. Offering, not taking.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Then her fingers creep across the wool and curl around his index finger. The grip is fierce, clinging.
He doesn’t react. Doesn’t look at her hand. Just sits, looking out the window at the valley, breathing slow and even, letting her hold on.
I lean against the wall near the door and watch them. The enforcer and the broken girl. There’s no poetry in it, no redemption arc tied up in a bow. Just a man sitting with a kid because he said he would, and a kid holding his finger because it’s the only thing she knows how to do.
Sable appears beside me. She watches for a moment, arms folded, her expression unreadable.
“She goes down faster with him,” she murmurs. “Heart rate drops. Breathing evens out. Whatever he did in that facility, she remembers it.”
“He got her out.”
Sable nods slowly. “That’d do it.”
We watch. Mia’s eyes drift closed. This time, they stay closed. Her grip on Conner’s finger doesn’t loosen—if anything, it tightens as sleep takes her—but the rigid line of her body softens, curling toward the warmth of him.