Page 6 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

"So about eight days."

The number hits different when someone else says it. When I was scratching tallies into dirt it felt like a project, something to manage each morning that proved I still understood what mornings were. Hearing it from his mouth, flat and factual, makes it real in a way that sends a tremor through me.

"Yeah," I whisper. "About eight days."

He stands and moves to the kitchen area, which is part of the same room. The cabin is one big open space, everything visible from the bed. I watch him through the shifting firelight. He moves carefully indoors, turning sideways between the counter and the table, keeping his elbows close like he's aware of how much space he takes up.

I hear the click of a propane burner. The soft clatter of a pot. Water running. Simple domestic sounds that shouldn't mean anything but land hard because they belong to a world I thought I'd left behind. Kitchens. Running water. The expectation of food made by someone who isn't doing it to control you.

My body won't relax. I'm aware of it happening and powerless to stop it. Every noise makes my shoulders climb toward my ears. Every shift in the light makes my eyes dart to the window. The cabin is warm and safe and I believe that with the rational part of my brain, the part that can process Ryker's badge and his calm voice and the quilts that smell like clean laundry. But the other part, the part that kept me alive in the woods and ran when the shooting started and didn't stop until the cold forced it to, that part doesn't know the danger is over. That part thinks this is a trick. It’s waiting for the lock to click, for the kind voice to harden into something dangerous. Something that says, you belong to me now.

I pull the quilts tighter and hate myself for it. Hate the flinching, the scanning, the way my heart rate spikes every time he opens a drawer too fast. I want to be the kind of person who can accept help without cataloging the exits. I want to trust how I used to, easily and stupidly, the way I trusted a man who sat at my counter and ordered cherry pie and smiled like everything was fine.

But that trust is the reason I'm here. And the irony of that, that trusting got me into this and now I need to trust to get out, sits heavy in my stomach.

Ryker comes back with a mug. He doesn't hand it to me. He sets it on the small table beside the bed and takes a step back, giving me the choice to reach for it myself. I notice that. I notice everything he does now because noticing is the only thing I have left.

"Bone broth," he says. "Made it last week from an elk I dressed in October. It's salty and it's warm and it's the best thing for a body that's been running on nothing. Small sips. Let your stomach decide the pace."

I reach for the mug with both hands because my fingers are still clumsy and unreliable. The ceramic is warm against my palms. Not hot. He's thought about that too, made it warm enough to drink but not enough to burn skin that's too damaged and too sensitive to handle real heat. I look down at the surface of the broth. It's amber and clear, with a thin sheen of fat catching the firelight.

I take the first sip.

And my body comes apart.

It starts as heat spreading from the back of my tongue down through my throat and into the hollow center of me where hunger has been living for over a week. The broth is rich and deeply savory, and when the warmth hits, everything I've been holding back comes due all at once.

I take another sip and my eyes fill. Not the quiet leaking tears I'm used to, the kind that slip out sideways when I'm tired or sad, the kind I can wipe away before anyone notices. These are different. These come from deeper, heaved up with sounds I can't control, thick and ugly and broken because words are too small for what's happening.

I'm crying into a mug of elk broth in a stranger's cabin and I can't stop. The sip I just took is the warmest thing I've felt in over a week. The fact that someone made this, stored it, heated it, and adjusted the temperature so it wouldn't hurt my damaged hands, is so big and so ordinary at the same time that something cracks open inside me.

The mug shakes in my grip. Broth sloshes over the rim and onto the quilt. I try to apologize, I'm spilling on his things, making a mess, but the words come out as more of the same broken sobbing.

"Don't," Ryker says. The word is quiet but it stops me mid-breath. I look up and his face isn't pitying. Something closer to recognition, like he's watched people come back from the edge before and knows what the return looks like. "Don't apologize. Don't hold it back. And don't worry about the quilt. You've been keeping yourself together for eight days with nothing and no one. That's done now. Let it go."

So I do.

I cry until the mug is half empty and my ribs ache and my nose is running and the quilt has a dark stain of broth and tears. I cry for the cold and the hunger and the berries that might have been poisonous and the conversation with my dead mother and the rock I lost in the snow. I cry for the diner and the yellow curtains and the hedgehog mug with the tiny painted smile and the life that was small and ordinary and mine before a man walked in and took it apart. I cry until there's nothing left and then I drink the rest of the broth because my body is wiser than my grief and it knows what it needs.

Ryker doesn't touch me. He sits in the chair with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the fire and he waits. He's close enough that I could reach for him if I needed to and far enough that I don't feel cornered. The distance is careful and intentional.

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?