I had grown up with every comfort a family could offer , warm meals, soft beds, people who checked on me in the night. I had never once been shoved to a floor and laughed at. But the one thing my parents had made sure of, through all that comfort, was that I would never let fear make me small. Fear was a tool other people used against you. The moment you showed it, you handed them the lever.

Wisteria was laughing above me, her hand still pressing against the back of my head. She was about my size. That was the only thing I needed to know.

I grabbed her arm, yanked hard, and pulled her off balance. She went down fast, and I went with her, getting on top of her before she could recover. I didn’t think. I just swung.

My fist connected with her face, and the laugh stopped.

Silence.

Then the sound of scrambling and scratching and tangled hair and two girls fighting like the world had narrowed down to just this , who was going to come out on top. She clawed at me. I grabbed back. Neither of us was particularly graceful about it, but I was angrier, and that counted for something.

"Vito, they’re fighting!"

The voice came from the side of the room. I barely registered it in the blur of the moment , a small boy, maybe five or six, holding a yogurt drink and watching us with enormous eyes, like this was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

"I know," Vito said.

Yael took a long sip from his bottle and then looked down at it, suddenly sad. "I want more."

"Yael, that’s enough for today." Vito’s voice was patient in a way that felt almost absurd given what was happening three feet away from him. "Be a good boy and go back to your room. I’ll come for a bedtime story." He put a hand on the small boy’s head, and Yael nodded and skipped off, pausing once at the doorway to look back at us with a thoughtful expression , girls can only do catfights written clearly on his little face , before disappearing around the corner.

By the time Vito stepped in and pulled us apart, we were both a mess. My hair clip had snapped in half, my hair was everywhere, and I could feel the sting of scratches on my cheek. Wisteria looked just as wrecked , face scratched, hair wild, nothing of that earlier composure left. He had clearly not expected either of us to be quite this feral about it.

"That’s enough," he said, putting himself between us.

Wisteria kicked out. He blocked it without looking like it cost him anything. The energy rolling off him in that moment , the ease, the quiet authority of someone who had never once doubted that people would listen to him , sent a chill through me that had nothing to do with the cold floor.

"Why are you protecting her?" Wisteria snapped. "She’s a Sander."

"We need her right now," Vito said evenly. "Look at yourself. Go clean up."

"You’ll pay for this," Wisteria said, and she was looking at me when she said it, her eyes sharp and cold beneath the scratches.

"Bring it on," I said back, because I had nothing left to lose in that moment and she needed to know it.

She left. The room went quiet, and it was just me and Vito.

He took a step toward me, and I took one back, putting space between us. My instincts were screaming , something about him felt different from the others, more layered, harder to read, and that was almost more frightening than someone who was simply cruel.

"I thought you were a fighter," he said.

"Are the two of you working together?" I demanded. My voice was steadier than I felt.

"Yes."

The single word landed like a door closing. I had half hoped he’d deny it.

"What do you want from me?" I asked. "My family doesn’t have money. We can’t pay a ransom. Whatever you think we are, you’re wrong." I understood now, fully, that I had been taken. Whatever had happened in the water, whatever chaos had led me here , this had been the destination all along. "So what is it? What do you want?"

He reached toward my face , gently, the way you might reach for something fragile , and I flinched back hard, pain flaring where Wisteria had scratched me.

"Don’t touch me."

It came out small. Like a threat that didn’t quite have the size to match its intention. I knew it. He knew it. We stood there looking at each other for a long moment, and then he stepped back, and that was somehow worse than if he’d pushed forward.

He left. And I found a cabinet in the corner of the room and climbed inside, pulling my knees to my chest, and held the two pieces of my broken hair clip in both hands.

It had come in a pair. I’d lost the other one in the water. My sister had the matching one. I turned the broken piece over and over in my fingers and tried very hard not to think about what that might mean , where she was, if she was scared, if anyone had found her.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I stopped being able to hold everything in. When the tears came, they came quietly, which was somehow worse than sobbing. Just wet cheeks and burning eyes and the weight of a day that had been entirely too much for someone who was not yet six years old.

I must have fallen asleep like that, because the next thing I knew I was on someone’s back, being carried. The warmth of it seeped through my clothes, and in the heavy fog between sleeping and waking, I thought I knew who it was.

"Jake," I whispered.

The person carrying me went very still.

Then I felt it , a small tremor, just one, moving through the arms that were holding me. Something in the quality of the silence changed. I didn’t wake up enough to understand it. I just let myself be carried, my face pressed against a shoulder that wasn’t my brother’s, and slipped back into sleep.

He cleaned the scratches on my face while I was under. I felt it distantly , the cool sting of antiseptic, the careful press of cotton , and my face crumpled in my sleep without quite waking me.

When morning came, the first thing I felt was hunger so sharp it had its own heartbeat.

"Mom, I want barbecue ribs," I said, before I’d even properly opened my eyes.

No one answered.

I blinked. The ceiling was wrong. The floor beneath me was a rug, not my mattress, and there was a blanket tucked around me that I didn’t remember getting. Everything came back in a rush , the cold corridor, the room, Wisteria’s face, Vito’s steady eyes. My head throbbed. My throat felt raw. My skin was too warm.

"You’re flushed," said a small voice.

I turned my head. Yael was sitting nearby, a fresh bottle in his arms, watching me with large, clear eyes and the genuine concern of a child who doesn’t yet know how to hide what he feels.

I reached out and touched his cheek without thinking. He let me.

Then the door banged open.

Wisteria came in first, two adults behind her, her face still carrying the marks from the night before and her expression carrying something much colder. Her eyes found me immediately.

"There she is."

I pulled the blanket up over my head.

"Drag her out," Wisteria said, her voice smooth and sweet and utterly without mercy. "Break her limbs."

Under the blanket, in the dark, I gripped the broken hair clip as hard as I could. I told myself what my parents had always told me: don’t let the fear show. Don’t hand them the lever. But I was not yet six, and I was very, very alone, and the footsteps were already crossing the room toward me.