"I got rejected. He got the fellowship." The laugh that escaped was bitter enough to corrode metal. "Later, when I confronted him, he said it wasn't personal. Just professional concern. Like exposing the softest part of me to a room full of strangers was some kind of public service."
Konstantin's other hand joined the first, framing my face between his palms. His hands were so large they made me feel small in a different way—protected instead of diminished.
"Listen to me," he said, and there was something in his voice that demanded not just attention but belief. "What he did was not about you. It was about him being too weak to compete fairly, too pathetic to succeed without destroying you first. Your regression isn't weakness, Maya. It's survival."
"It's shameful—"
"It's human. You think I don't understand needing to escape? Needing to be something other than what the world demands?" His thumb caught another tear. "I feed kittens at three in the morning because if I don't, the violence in me has nowhere soft to go. We all have our escapes. Yours just happens to be more honest than most."
I stared at him, this massive enforcer with blood under his fingernails and gentleness in his hands, and felt something crack open in my chest. Not breaking—blooming. Like maybe, possibly, I'd found someone who could see all of me and not run.
"I can't control it," I admitted, the words barely audible. "When things get too hard, I just . . . go somewhere else. Somewhere smaller. It's shameful and childish and—"
“Sophie’s a Little.”
“She is?” I was shocked.
“Yes. Nikolai talks to me about it sometimes. It’s something that I find . . . beautiful, I think.”
My heart was pounding. Sophie was a Little? Nikolai was a Daddy Dom?
His hands shifted, one sliding into my hair while the other moved to my neck, thumb resting against my pulse point. "You need someone to take care of you when you're like this. Someone to make sure you're safe while you rest. Someone to bring you back when you're ready."
My breath caught, heart hammering against my ribs hard enough to hurt. "And you want to be that someone?"
His eyes darkened, and for a moment, I saw everything—the want, the need, the possessive protection that had been building since that first night in the basement clinic. It should have terrified me. Instead, it made me feel claimed in the best possible way.
"I want to be everything you need," he said simply, like it wasn't a declaration that rewrote the laws of physics. Like it wasn't the most dangerous promise anyone had ever made to me.
The tablet was still playing Bluey somewhere in the sheets, tinny Australian voices talking about feelings and family. My thumb throbbed where I'd scraped it. The world outside this room was still full of sixty-three people whose organs had been stolen.
But in this moment, with Konstantin's hands holding my face and his eyes holding my secrets, none of that mattered. I'd been seen—fully, completely, devastatingly seen—and I hadn't been destroyed.
I'd been protected.
He moved with the deliberate care of someone approaching a wounded animal. Not sudden, nothing that might startle, just a slow rearrangement of his massive frame until he was properly on the bed, back against the headboard. The mattress dipped and reformed around his weight, creating a valley that gravity wanted to pull me into.
"Come here," he said softly. Not a command exactly, but not quite a request either. Something in between—an invitation wrapped in inevitability.
I should have maintained distance. Should have rebuilt walls, reasserted boundaries, protected myself from this dangerousintimacy. Instead, I moved toward him like I was magnetized, my body making decisions my brain hadn't authorized.
His arm came around me as soon as I was close enough, drawing me against his chest with a gentleness that belied his capacity for violence. I fit against him like I'd been carved from his negative space—my head tucked perfectly under his chin, my body aligned with his from shoulder to hip. His other arm completed the circle, and suddenly I was held, contained, surrounded by warmth and strength and the particular scent that was uniquely him—gun oil and expensive soap and something darker, wilder underneath.
"My brave little bird," he murmured into my hair, and something in my chest clenched at the endearment. Little bird—small, fluttering, fragile. Everything I'd spent years trying not to be. But from him, in that rough voice, it didn't sound like weakness. It sounded like something precious he'd decided to protect.
"I'm not brave," I whispered against his chest.
"You are." His hand moved in my hair, fingers gentle against my scalp. "You survived six months alone. You saved my life while yours was falling apart. You transcribed sixty-three cases of horror because it needed doing. That's bravery."
"That's just stubbornness."
"Same thing sometimes." I felt him smile against my hair. "But right now, you don't have to be either. Don't have to be strong or smart or together. You can just be small. I've got you."
The permission in those words—I've got you—broke something in me that had been holding rigid for months, maybe years. My body went liquid against his, all the tension I'd been carrying released in a rush that left me boneless. I pressed my face into his chest, breathing him in, and let myself be held for the first time since before everything went wrong.
His hand kept moving in my hair, a steady rhythm that made my eyes heavy. The other arm stayed firm around me, not trapping but anchoring, keeping me tethered to something solid while everything else floated away.
"The man who hurt you," he said quietly, and I felt the vibration of his voice through his chest. "Marlon. He's in Cleveland?"
