“They set it on fire,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
Damian’s eyes found the window too, just for a second, and something moved behind them that I couldn’t name — grief, maybe, for a house, or for the people who might not have made it out of it, or for something older than tonight that I didn’t yet have the context to understand.
“Yes,” he said. “They did.”
“Those people. The guests—”
“Some of them ran the second the shooting started. My security has been drilling evacuation routes for two years for exactly this reason.” His jaw worked. “Not everyone listens to drills.”
I didn’t ask him to finish that sentence. I didn’t think either of us wanted him to.
Marcus’s breathing had gone shallow and fast under my hands, and I pressed harder, some part of my brain running through half-remembered first aid advice from a workplace training I’d sat through years ago and never expected to need. Keep pressure. Keep them talking. Keep them awake.
“Marcus,” I said, because it seemed important that someone kept saying his name. “Tell me something. Anything. What do you do when you’re not getting shot at?”
A weak huff of breath that might have been a laugh. “Coach my daughter’s soccer team. Under-tens.” His eyes fluttered, found mine. “She’s got a game Saturday.”
“Then you’re going to that game.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Damian was watching this exchange with an expression I couldn’t read, something caught between the man giving orders into his phone and someone else entirely — someone quieter, watching a stranger in a stretched-tight catering uniform hold his employee’s life together with nothing but her bare hands and refusal to be afraid.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said, low, once his call had ended.
“Neither did you. In the library. You could have left me there and gone straight to your people.”
“I don’t leave people,” he said again, and this time I understood it wasn’t a policy. It was a wound, healed into a principle. “Someone left me once. I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to be that.”
