7. Sage
SEVEN
SAGE
The private ambulance smells like antiseptic and fear.
Mine, probably. I’ve been in the back of this thing for fifteen minutes and my hands haven’t stopped shaking. The paramedic—a quiet guy with a shaved head and kind eyes—keeps checking the portable monitor clipped to my finger. He hasn’t said much. I get the feeling Odin told him not to.
Knox is beside me. His hand swallows mine completely. He hasn’t let go since they loaded me in, and every time the ambulance takes a turn and the equipment rattles on its hooks, his grip tightens.
“Almost there, Fury.”
I nod. Speaking still costs me. Every word scrapes through my throat like it’s being dragged over gravel, and by the end of a sentence I sound like a chain-smoking ghost.
The ambulance slows. I feel us turn, then stop, and the engine cuts.
“We’re here,” the paramedic says.
The doors open and evening light floods in. Holden is standing in the driveway in jeans and a gray T-shirt, arms crossed, waiting. Behind him is the house we all took refuge in when the noose was just a threat—what I wouldn’t give to go back to that moment now.
It’s been a week since I stood in his kitchen making coffee. It feels like a year.
It’s nothing like the apartment I never should have gone back to. No broken landscaping lights. No bushes where someone strung me up like an animal.
No. This house is a—
“Welcome home, wildcat.” Holden reaches into the back of the transport and offers his hand.
I take it. My legs are unsteady when they hit the driveway—I’ve been horizontal for days and my body hasn’t recalibrated. But he catches my elbow before I wobble and tucks me against his side, solid and warm.
“I can walk.”
“I know you can.” He doesn’t let go.
Inside, the house is cleaned to sparkling. It smells like wood polish and coffee and the faintest trace of something cooking—Milo, probably, because Milo always cooks when he doesn’t know what else to do.
Speak of the devil—Milo appears from the kitchen doorway, holding a mug in one hand. He grins when he sees me, and for a second the knot in my chest loosens.
“Kitten! You made it. We’ve set up your room.
There’s extra pillows, water on the nightstand, and I may have reorganized Holden’s dresser to make more space for your stuff, which he’ll find out about eventually.
” He glances over his shoulder. “Also, I made soup. It’s the only thing you can eat, so I hope you like minestrone, because I made a vat. ”
“I like minestrone,” I rasp.
“Great, there’s enough for a small country.”
Micah is on the stairs. He’s leaning against the wall, watching me with that quiet intensity of his. His eyes move to the bandage on my throat, then back to my face. Mine drop to the bandages around his knuckles—they’ve been there since I woke up. I’ll ask when my voice works.
He catches me looking, but he doesn’t say anything. He comes down the last three steps, takes my bag from Knox, and carries it upstairs without a word.
Eli is on the couch.
He’s in my peripheral. Sitting at the far end, elbows on his knees, hands laced together. He looks up when I come in and our eyes meet for a fraction of a second before I look away.
I’m still not ready for that.
Holden steers me to the kitchen table. Pulls out a chair. I sit, and Knox sets a bowl of soup in front of me.
The steam rises and curls and my stomach does a complicated thing that’s half-hunger and half-nausea. I haven’t eaten real food in days. Everything at the hospital came through an IV or in the form of room-temperature jelly that tasted like sweetened plastic.
I pick up the spoon. The first swallow is agony. The soup is warm and good, but my throat clamps down on it like it’s forgotten how to let things through. My eyes water. I force it down. Take another.
Knox watches from the counter. He doesn’t comment. He doesn’t need to.
I eat half the bowl—mostly the liquid. But it’s the most I’ve managed and I’m stupidly proud of myself.
Milo takes the other half when I push it away. Before I’ve even managed to thank anyone, the medical team arrives and I’m whisked upstairs to bed.
The bathroom mirror becomes a problem.
When ten o’clock hits and the house has gone quiet, I’m finally left alone long enough to look at myself.
I don’t mean to.
That’s the stupid part.
I need the bathroom. Need to brush my teeth, maybe splash water on my face, maybe prove to myself I can stand in a room by myself for five whole minutes without falling over or coming apart. That’s all.
But the second I step into the pool of yellow light and look up, there I am.
For a second, I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
My brain keeps trying to slide off it, like the image won’t hold.
The girl in the mirror is too pale. Too hollow.
Her hair hangs limp around her shoulders, brushed smooth by someone else’s hands.
Her eyes look huge in her face, silver and glassy and ringed in shadows.
And then there’s my neck.
I peel off the bandage.
I haven’t looked. Not properly. At the hospital, I’d felt it with my fingers—the raised welt, the tender edges—but Rosaline always changed the dressing with my chin tilted up, eyes on the ceiling. I never asked for a mirror and nobody offered one.
The rope left a groove. A dark, uneven line that wraps my throat from one side to the other.
The skin is raw along the deepest part, shiny and pink and ridged where it’s healing wrong.
Around it, the bruising fans out in a watercolor of purple and yellow and a sickly green that I didn’t know skin could turn.
It looks like a necklace made of violence.
I turn my head. The mark goes all the way around.
I can trace the path of the rope—where it cinched, where it twisted, where my own fingernails clawed at it and left a second set of scratches overlapping the first. My fingers were bandaged at first because I’d shredded three fingernails to the quick trying to get it off me.
I stare at the woman in the mirror.
She stares back. Whoever did this signed their name on her body.
I grip the edge of the sink.
The anger arrives without warning. It comes up from somewhere deep and low, bypassing all the fear and the exhaustion and the please-and-thank-you politeness I’ve been wearing like armor. It’s hot. It fills my chest like a breath I can’t let out.
Someone did this to me. Someone lured me into those bushes with a dog that probably wasn’t even hurt. Someone unscrewed the landscaping lights and made sure there were no cameras and measured the branch height and tied the knot and waited for me to walk into it.
Someone planned this. Someone enjoyed planning this.
And I don’t know who.
My reflection’s eyes go flat. For a second she doesn’t look like a victim. She looks like someone thinking about what she’d do if she found him.
I pull the T-shirt up to my chin, covering the mark, and the woman in the mirror disappears behind gray cotton.
I turn off the light. Get into bed.
I curl onto my side and pull the blankets up to my chin. In the dark, the house ticks and settles. Through the wall, Micah’s floorboards creak like he’s pacing—slow and steady and close.
I close my eyes.
The rope drops over my head.
It cinches before I can scream. My feet leave the ground. I claw, fingers splitting, the world tilting sideways as the pressure in my skull builds and builds and my vision tunnels to a pinpoint of light getting smaller, smaller—
I wake up gasping.
I’m on the floor. Tangled in the sheets. My hands are at my throat, clawing at nothing. I can’t breathe—I can’t breathe—and for three terrible seconds I don’t know where I am. Hospital. Bushes. The dark. The rope.
The bedroom door opens.
“Baby girl?”
Micah.
He doesn’t turn on the light. He crosses the room in the dark, crouches beside me on the floor, and puts his hand on my back. He doesn’t grab me. Doesn’t pull me into his arms. He’s been around enough broken people to know that touch can go either way in the first seconds after a nightmare.
“You’re at Holden’s house,” he says. “You’re on the floor. You fell out of bed. You’re safe.”
I’m shaking so hard my teeth click together. My throat burns from the gasp and my eyes are streaming. I press my forehead against my knees and try to breathe.
His hand stays on my back. Anchoring me in place.
“Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Out for four.”
I try. The first breath stutters. The second is better. The third reaches my lungs.
“Good. Keep going.”
The shaking slows. My fingers uncurl from my throat. I feel the sheets twisted around my legs, the cold floorboards under my hip, the warm weight of Micah’s palm between my shoulder blades.
“How did you hear me?” My voice is wrecked. Worse than it’s been all day.
“Light sleeper.”
I lift my head. In the dark, I can make out his shape—the outline of his shoulders, the pale smudge of his face. He’s in a T-shirt and sweats. His hair is a mess.
“Can you get back in bed?”
I nod. He helps me up, untangles the sheet from my ankles, and waits while I climb back in. I pull the blankets up. My hands are still shaking.
He straightens to leave.
“Stay.”
He stops.
“Please.” I hate the sound of my own voice. Hate how nothing it is, how wrecked, how much it hurts and feels like begging. I’ve never been someone who begs.
But I can’t be alone right now. Not in the dark, not with the rope still around my throat in a dream I can’t wake up from fast enough.
Micah doesn’t hesitate. He walks around to the other side, pulls back the covers, and gets in. He doesn’t touch me. He lies on his back, one arm behind his head, and stares at the ceiling.
I roll toward him. Press my forehead against his shoulder.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
His arm comes down and settles around me. He pulls me closer, my head on his chest, his chin on my hair. His heartbeat is steady under my ear. Solid. Consistent. The kind of rhythm you could set a clock by.
“Go to sleep, baby girl. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
I close my eyes. The rope doesn’t come back.
But the anger stays.
It sits in my chest all night, quiet and patient, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.