Six Months Ago
Falcon
The warehouse smells like diesel and old rope, and underneath it, something worse I don't let myself name until later.
We hit it at two in the morning; we go in quiet first and loud only once quiet stops working.
Vulture's voice is steady in my ear the whole way in, counting off positions, and I move through it like I've moved through a hundred raids before this one, my body is running on training, so my head doesn't have to be anywhere at all.
Then Ice Pick's voice cuts through the channel. "South container. Move."
I don't remember crossing the yard. I remember the smell hitting harder the closer I get, and I remember my hand on the latch, and I remember some old, buried instinct screaming at me before I've even got the door open, it’s instinct that knows something before the rest of you is ready to.
The container's dark., and full of shapes that don't move right away, huddled low, flinching from the light on my rifle before I think to lower it.
I lower it anyway. Fast.
"Saint’s Outlaws," I say, low, and steady in the voice I use when steady is the only thing standing between somebody and going straight into shock. "You're safe. Nobody's going to hurt you. We're getting you out."
There’s movement in the dark. Somebody is crying. Somebody else going completely, unnervingly still, and that's worse than crying because it means they've learned that doing nothing keeps them alive.
I go through them one at a time, checking, murmuring the same words over and over, you're safe, you're safe, almost out, and I'm three women in before I reach the fourth, she’s curled small against the container wall with her face turned away, and something in me stops working right before my brain's caught up to why.
I know that curve of the shoulder. I know it the way you know a smell, a sound, something that lives in your body below the level of thought.
"Hey," I say, and my voice comes out wrong, it’s cracked in a way it never cracks during a raid. "Hey, I've got you. You're safe."
She flinches at my hand before it even touches her arm, and something in my chest tears clean down the middle at that, at the fact that a hand reaching for her means something other than help in whatever world she's been living in. I pull back and let her turn toward the light on her own.
And that’s when the world stops.
Five years disappears in half a second. Five years of a closet with her clothes still in it because I couldn't make myself clear it out.
Five years of telling brothers I was fine when Cara's name came up, of drinking until fine stopped needing to be a lie I told out loud.
Five years of hating a woman I now understand never left me at all.
"Cara," I say, and it isn't a question, because I'd know her in the dark at the bottom of the ocean.
Her eyes find mine. Recognition floods in behind the fear, and something else behind that, something that might be shame, might be disbelief, might be five years of a story she's been telling herself about why nobody came.
"You weren't supposed to see me like this," she whispers.
The sentence breaks something in me that I don't think finishes breaking for a long time after.
Because that's what she's carrying, after everything, after five years I can't undo and won't ever be able to make sense of, she's worried about what I think of her, as if any of this could ever be about that.
"I've got you now," I tell her, and my voice isn't steady anymore and I don't try to make it be. "You're coming home."
She doesn't move toward me. Doesn't reach for me the way some buried, desperate part of me wants her to.
She just watches me with eyes that don't fully believe I'm real yet, and I understand, even through the rage building somewhere under my ribs, rage at whoever did this, rage at myself for five years of not looking hard enough, that belief is going to take longer than one warehouse floor to rebuild.
I carry her out myself. I don't let anyone else near her, not because I don't trust my brothers, but because some primal, wrecked part of me needs to be the one whose arms she's in when she finally leaves this place behind, even if she doesn't want them to be.
She's stiff the whole way to the truck. Flinches at the sound of engines starting. She goes quiet which I know has nothing to do with peace.
I don't know yet what the next five months are going to cost either of us. I don't know about the note that wasn't hers, about the fabricated footage that made me stop looking after three months when I should have kept going, about all the ways I'm going to fail her again before I learn how not to.
I only know one thing, standing in that yard with her too-light weight in my arms and the whole world narrowed down to the fact that she's breathing.
I'm never letting her out of my sight again.
I have absolutely no idea yet how wrong that promise is going to turn out to be, or how long it's going to take both of us to learn that love isn't the same thing as never letting go.