At that moment, the sound of that voice did something to Cora that nothing else in the entire nightmare of that evening had managed to do.
It broke her.
Not in the way that Lovi had been trying to break her all night - not through fear or humiliation or the crushing weight of impossible choices - but in an entirely different way. In the way that relief breaks a person who has been holding themselves together through sheer force of will for so long that the arrival of safety feels almost indistinguishable from collapse.
The tension drained from her body all at once, like something physical being physically removed, and she felt her legs go momentarily unsteady beneath her as the men holding her arms seemed suddenly less solid, less immovable, less absolute in their grip than they had been just one second before.
And then, without quite deciding to, she felt tears.
