Darkness Had Crept In -Libby #3
I pulled her tighter against me, wrapping my arm around her head and pressing my hand flat against her hair.
Callan staggered back a full step, his boot catching on a dock plank. His hand reached out blindly, finding the older man’s shoulder—Lock—and gripping it so hard I could see the tendons standing out across the back of his hand.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, the word rough and thick. “No. Not Finn. He doesn’t just go down. You don’t understand; he always finds a way. He always—”
“He did fight,” I said softly, holding his eyes when I said it because he needed to hear this part, and I needed him to believe it. “He fought harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. He never stopped. Not for a single second.”
The silence that followed ate those words whole and gave nothing back.
Callan’s face contorted—a single, violent spasm of grief that rippled across his features and disappeared just as fast, shoved down, buried, locked away behind a jaw that clenched so hard I could see the muscles jumping beneath his skin.
He turned from us to face the water, and his shoulders shook once—a deep, full-body tremor that started at the base of his spine and rolled upward—before he forced himself still through what looked like sheer, brutal willpower.
Lock let out a slow, measured breath through his nose, his eyes closing for a long moment before opening again, darker now, deeper, something behind them rearranging itself permanently.
He didn’t argue, didn’t deny it, didn’t offer disbelief or false hope or any of the comfortable lies people reach for when the truth arrives covered in blood.
He just stood there and absorbed it, his jaw tightening in increments, his hand still resting on Callan’s shoulder—holding him up or holding himself up, I couldn’t tell which.
The red-haired woman stepped forward, moving past the men with a quiet, deliberate grace. Her expression shifted from sharp assessment to something softer and more careful as her eyes found Lily’s shaking form pressed against my side.
“Hey,” she said, her voice pitched low and steady in a way that sounded practiced—not cold, but trained, the voice of someone who knew how to approach wounded things without spooking them further. “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay—”
“It’s not okay!” Lily cried, her head snapping up, her face swollen and red and streaked with tears and snot and fury. The rawness of it—the sheer, unfiltered agony pouring out of this 16-year-old girl on a dock at the edge of the world—hit every adult standing there like a physical blow.
“I know,” the woman said quietly, not flinching, not pulling back, not pretending. “I know it’s not. You’re right.”
She held still, crouched on the dock, not reaching for Lily, not forcing anything. She simply existed in the space beside her grief, letting it be exactly as terrible as it was.
“I’m Sloane,” she added after a moment, her voice still gentle, still steady. “And you’re safe here, I promise.”
Lily didn’t answer. She just pressed her face back into my side and cried harder, her body shuddering with sobs that sounded as if they came from somewhere deeper than her lungs—somewhere that wouldn’t heal quickly and might not heal completely.
Callan stood at the edge of the dock, his back to all of us, staring out at the darkening water with his hands hanging at his sides.
He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He just gazed at the empty horizon as if looking hard enough, long enough, with enough desperate concentration, might conjure a shape from the water—a boat, a figure, anything to prove the story I’d told had a different ending.
“He always does that,” he said finally, his voice rough enough to draw blood, barely audible above the wind. “Runs straight at the fire. Every single time. Doesn’t think about it, doesn’t weigh it, doesn’t calculate—just sees someone in trouble and goes.”
No one laughed.
No one spoke.
Lock moved first. He stepped forward and placed his hand on the back of Callan’s neck—a firm, grounding touch that didn’t try to fix anything but simply said, “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.
” Callan’s head dropped forward an inch, his chin touching his chest, his breath leaving him in a long, ragged exhale that carried the sound of something essential being surrendered.
I tightened my arm around Lily and held her close as the reality settled over all of us—heavy, permanent, reshaping the air on the dock into something we’d all have to learn to breathe.
We had made it. We had found them. We stood on solid ground, surrounded by people who carried weapons, kept watch, and knew how to survive.
And it still hollowed me out completely.
Because the person who’d brought us here—who’d planned this, who’d believed in this, who’d given everything to get us to this exact moment on this exact dock—stood nowhere among the living faces surrounding me.
The water stretched out behind us, dark and endless and keeping its secrets, and I stared at it the same way Callan did—searching for something I knew I wouldn’t find, unable to stop looking anyway.