She barely got the words out, breath catching between each one. "But he can't just, leave? Why can he reach me and not get himself out? Dimitri, what's happening to him? What is this Mist? Is it hurting him? Is he?"
Dimitri's jaw went rigid against the top of her head. She felt it in the shift of muscle, the pause that told her he was weighing how much of the truth she could carry. But he gave it to her anyway.
"I don't know." Three words, and the grief packed into them nearly matched her own.
"None of us do. That's the honest answer, Bug. So we find out, what the Mist actually is, how it's holding him, whether we can haul him loose from our side instead of waiting for him to claw his way out from his." He made a loose fist in her hair, not tight, just possessive, his thumb tracing slow lines along her scalp.
"But I will not sit on my hands over this. We dig. We hunt. I'll turn every last team upside down and shake them till answers fall out. I am not leaving him in there."
