The toddler finally stops fighting me when I hand him back to his mother.
She grabs my wrist suddenly.
“Thank you,” she whispers, tears streaming down her face.
“It will be over soon,” I say firmly. “Our warriors are the best.”
I do not know if that is entirely true tonight, but they need to believe it.
I turn and run back upstairs.
The courtyard is still chaos, but the crowd is thinning now as more people make it inside.
Madison is trying to push through the last of them, but she is shoving people out of her way and yelling like the world owes her something.
She gets knocked down hard.
For a split second, I consider leaving her.
She has never had a kind word for me.
Not once.
But then someone nearly steps on her hand.
I curse under my breath and push through the crowd to her.
