3. Zoe #2
When the crying finally subsides to the occasional shudder I can breathe through, he refills the mug without being asked and sets it back on the table. Same careful distance. Same step back.
"I need to ask you some questions," he says.
"Not now. You're in no shape and I'm not going to push.
But when you're ready, I need to know what happened to you.
Who took you, how the operation worked, anything you saw or heard that might help us find the people we're still looking for.
There's a man named Tyler who was connected to the operation.
We know his first name and nothing else. He slipped the net during the raid."
My body goes cold so fast it's like the broth never happened. Tyler. The name lands in the warm room like a dropped blade. I feel my face go blank, the protective nothing-expression I learned to wear when Tyler was watching me and I didn't want him to know what I was thinking.
"You know him," Ryker says. Not a question.
I nod. The motion is small and costs more than it should.
"Okay. When you're ready. Not before."
He turns back to the fire and adds a log. I watch the sparks swirl upward and disappear into the dark space above the hearth. The cabin settles around us with creaking wood, popping embers, and wind pressing against the windows. The storm is fully here now. I can hear it in the walls.
I want to ask him something. The question has been building since I woke up, pressing against the back of my teeth. A simple question.
Where will you sleep?
That's all. There's only one bed, this bed, and one main room.
There's a couch against the far wall, leather, worn at the arms. The chair he's sitting in.
No other doors except what looks like a small bathroom.
I want to know where he plans to be tonight while I'm lying here in his shirt in a place where no one else on earth knows I exist.
I open my mouth. The question is right there, fully formed. And nothing comes out.
My throat closes around it. Not only because I'm afraid of the answer, but because asking means admitting I'm thinking about it.
About him. About the space between his body and mine and what happens in a room with one door.
Because asking means showing him that the fear is there, specific and ugly, and I don't want him to see it because what if seeing it changes the way he looks at me?
What if the careful kindness shifts into pity or offense?
I take a breath. I open my mouth again. The words stack up behind my lips and not a single one moves forward.
My face heats. I'm blushing, burning from my collarbones to my hairline, and the absurdity of it, of being embarrassed about a question I haven't even managed to ask, makes the blush worse.
I duck my chin and look at the broth because at least the broth isn't complicated.
"I'll be on the couch."
I look up. Ryker is watching the fire, not me. His voice is matter-of-fact, like he's telling me where he put the firewood.
"Door stays unlocked. Bathroom's to the left.
If you need anything in the night, say my name and I'll hear you.
I sleep light." A pause. "I put fresh clothes on the chair by the bed.
They're mine, so they'll be too big, but they're clean and warm.
There's wool socks in the top drawer of the dresser.
Your sneakers are done. I'll find you something better in the morning. "
He says all of it to the fire. Casual. Easy. As if he's answered the question a dozen times before and long ago learned that the kindest way to address the fear is to acknowledge it without ever using the word.
The knot in my throat loosens. Not all the way.
That's going to take more than one night and one mug of broth and one careful man on the other side of a warm room.
But enough. Enough to breathe past it. Enough to lean back against the pillows and feel the quilts settle around me and allow, just barely, the possibility that this isn't a new kind of trap.
"Thank you," I say. My voice is small and rough and it carries everything I can't manage to put into better words. The broth. The quilts. The unlocked door. The answer to the question I couldn't ask.
He nods. Doesn't look at me. "Get some sleep, Zoe."
I close my eyes. The fire crackles. The storm presses against the walls.
Ryker's chair creaks as he settles into whatever position he holds through the night, and the sound is so quiet and so steady that my body, against every screaming instruction from my ruined nervous system, begins to believe what he said.
Door stays unlocked.
I repeat it inside my head like a prayer. Three words that shouldn't mean everything but do. The opposite of every door Tyler ever closed behind me. An open path. A choice I get to make in the morning. Stay or go. Trust or run. Let someone in or build the walls higher.
Sleep comes in uneven waves. I drift under, then surface gasping at a sound that turns out to be the wind.
Under again, then jolted awake by my own heartbeat, too loud and too fast, my body convinced that the warmth is a lie and the cold is waiting just outside the quilts.
Each time I surface I find the same thing.
The fire still burning. The storm still raging.
And the quiet, steady sound of breathing from the couch across the room that tells me he's still there.
Still keeping watch. Still close enough to hear me if I say his name.
I don't say it. Not tonight. But I listen to the breathing and the fire and the storm, and sometime around the third or fourth time I surface, I stop scanning for exits.
My fists unclench inside the quilts. My shoulders drop an inch from my ears.
And I sleep. Not well, not deeply, not the way I used to sleep in my little apartment above the diner with the radiator clanking and the hedgehog mug waiting on the shelf for morning.
But I sleep. In a bed that isn't mine, in a cabin I didn't choose, in a world that contracted to a point of terror and is now, carefully and without any guarantees, beginning to expand again.
Door stays unlocked.
I hold onto that and let the rest go.