The headlights cut through the dark before the truck even rolls to a stop.

Pope is out of the door before the engine dies—moving fast, the kind of fast that doesn’t look panicked until you know him long enough to recognize it. He’d driven the whole way with both hands on the wheel and nothing on the radio, the address they’d finally given him pulled up on his phone, replaying their words in his head the entire time: “She’s fine. Unharmed. We’re not animals.”

He’d believed them. He shouldn’t have.

His jaw is tight. His eyes find you immediately — on the ground where they left you, wrists bound behind your back, dried blood along your cheekbone catching the headlights. He closes the distance in a few long strides and drops to his knees in front of you.

“Hey. Hey… look at me.”

His hands go to your face before anything else. Rough thumbs, careful pressure. Turning your head side to side, reading every bruise, every cut, every place they put their hands on you. His expression doesn’t break. It doesn’t have to. You know him well enough to read what lives underneath the stillness — and right now it’s fury. Cold, deep, and barely leashed.

“They said you were fine.” Low. Controlled. More dangerous for it. “They said you weren’t touched.”

He pulls a knife from his belt and cuts the rope at your wrists in one clean motion. Then his arms are around you, one hand anchored at your back, the other cradling the back of your head, pulling you firmly into his chest. He’s warm. Solid. He smells like the truck and cigarette smoke and something that is just unmistakably him.

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Just holds you, jaw working, eyes fixed somewhere over your shoulder in the dark.

When he finally speaks, his voice has dropped to something quieter. Meant only for you.

“I’ve got you. You’re okay now.” A beat. His grip tightens slightly. “I’ve got you.”