My mother, in the pitch black, crawled across a shaking floor toward the sound of my terrified brother’s voice, and reached him, and put her body around his, and told him over and over that she was there.

Commander Hayes and his people did what they had trained their whole lives to do, and they did it between us and the dark, and they got us moving toward the back of the house and away from the danger.

And in the middle of all of it, crawling through a dark hallway in the wreck of my wedding gown, with my mother’s arm around my brother ahead of me and Lucas’s hand locked around mine behind, I felt something I would never have expected to feel in such a moment.

I felt held.

Not safe — we were not safe, not yet.

But held, on every side, by people who had each, in their own way, decided that my life was worth standing in front of.