His hand didn't pause in my hair. "You can tell me anything."
"I called you Daddy." I forced myself to say it plainly, without flinching, though my cheeks burned and my heart hammered against my ribs. "I know what that means. I know what it is. I was never anyone's Little. I just watched. I wanted—" My voice cracked and I had to stop, had to press my forehead against his chest and breathe through the sharp, aching want that was so much bigger than I knew how to carry. "I wanted it. I've always wanted it. And I know that me saying that right now, in this condition, after what happened I know it's probably just trauma and chemicals and my brain grabbing for whatever makes it feel safe, and I'm not—" She swallowed. "I'm not trying to manipulate you or make this into something it's not. You might be disgusted—"
"Molly." His voice cut through my spiraling with the same quiet authority he'd used on the rooftop. Not sharp. Just certain. Like a hand reaching into churning water and pulling me to the surface. "Stop."
I stopped.
"Look at me."
I tilted my head back. His face was close to mine. Close enough to see the individual stubble hairs along his jaw, the tiny scar bisecting his left eyebrow, the dark circles under his own eyes that told me he hadn't slept at all. But it was his expression that stopped the air in my lungs. Not pity. Not discomfort. Not the careful, clinical neutrality I'd been bracing for.
Tenderness. Raw, unguarded, devastating tenderness, like I'd peeled back a layer of him he hadn't meant to show and now it was just there, exposed, and he wasn't trying to hide it.
"You didn't manipulate me," he said. "You called out for what you needed, and I answered. That's not manipulation. That's trust."
My breath hitched. Then stopped. Then started again with a shudder that had nothing to do with withdrawal and everythingto do with the way his eyes held mine—unwavering, unafraid, like he'd looked directly at the most terrifying thing I could offer him and decided to step closer instead of away.
"You don't know me," I whispered. "You don't know who I was before. What if I'm not—what if they broke the parts of me that could be that? What if I can't be anyone's Little because they turned me into—into nothing?"
"They didn't turn you into nothing." His voice was so sure. How was he always so sure? "They tried. They tried their damnedest, and they failed, because the woman who crawled through an air duct and climbed onto a roof rather than spend one more second in a cage is not nothing. She's everything." His forehead dropped to mine, and the contact was so intimate, so unbearably close, that I could feel his breath on my lips and count his eyelashes and see the way his pupils dilated when he looked at me. "And I don't need to know who you were before. I'm right here with who you are now.”
Chapter Five
Molly
A week later, I was sitting upright.
It didn't sound like much. In the grand catalog of human achievements,woman sits up in bed without assistanceranks somewhere belowtoddler stacks three blocksand aboveman remembers to put toilet seat down.But for me, on that Tuesday morning—Xavier had told me it was Tuesday, had started anchoring me to days of the week like tent pegs driven into soft ground—sitting upright without the room tilting sideways felt like planting a flag on Everest.
I was propped against the headboard with two pillows behind me and a third in my lap that I was pretending I didn't need to hold. Xavier had gone to the kitchen to make me oatmeal, actual oatmeal, with brown sugar and a sliver of banana that he'd cut into pieces so small they were practically molecular, because Doc had said my stomach needed to relearn portion sizes the way a baby learns to crawl. One thing at a time. One tiny piece at a time.
I could hear him moving around out there. Cabinet doors opening and closing. The clink of a spoon against ceramic. The low murmur of his voice as he talked to someone—Doc, probably, or maybe Gideon, who'd been in and out of the house like a very large, very quiet ghost. The sounds of a life happening around me rather than to me, and every single one of them was a small miracle I was trying not to take for granted.
The withdrawal had eased. Not gone completely as my hands still trembled when I held the broth mug, and the nights were still a gauntlet of cold sweats and the kind of dreams that made me wake up clawing at the sheets, but the worst of it had passed. Doc had tapered the medication with meticulous precision, adjusting doses based on my symptoms, always telling me what he was doing and why, always giving me the choice to say stop. I hadn't needed to say it yet. Not because I was brave, but because Xavier was always there, narrating, translating, turning the clinical into the comprehensible.
Xavier.
Even thinking his name did something to the inside of my chest—a warm compression, like a hand gently squeezing a heart that had forgotten it could feel anything other than fear. Seven days. I'd known this man for seven days, and already his heartbeat was more familiar to me than my own. Already the sound of his boots in the hallway made something in me settle, the way a tuning fork stops vibrating when you press it againsta surface. Already the wordDaddylived in my mouth like a second language I'd been studying my whole life and was only now being given permission to speak. The first time I’d met Katya, I’d tumbled down that rabbit hole on my laptop with an insane sort of jealousy and surfaced knowing exactly what I wanted.
We hadn't talked about it again. He hadn't pushed. Hadn't brought it up. But the dynamic had shifted between us in ways that didn't need naming to be felt. The way he checked in before touching me, always before, never assuming. The way he saidgood girlwhen I finished my broth or took my medication or let Doc check my vitals without flinching, and the way those two words rewired my entire nervous system every single time, flooding me with a warmth that the withdrawal couldn't touch. The way he'd started calling mesweetheartin the space between waking and sleeping, when his guard was down and mine was too, and the word settled over me like a blanket I never wanted to crawl out from under.
I knew it was too fast, too fragile, too tangled up in trauma and gratitude and the chemical chaos of withdrawal to be trusted entirely. The rational part of my brain—the part that was slowly, painstakingly reassembling itself from the wreckage—kept reminding me that intensity born in crisis wasn't the same as intimacy built over time. That what I felt might be a survival response dressed up in onesies. That the man who held me through the shaking and the vomiting and the nightmares might not be the same man who existed in the ordinary world, where there were no rooftops and no rescue missions and no broken women who needed him to breathe for them.
But then he'd walk into the room with fruit cut into baby-sized pieces and that look on his face—the one that was half soldier and half something infinitely softer—and the rational part of my brain would go very quiet, and the rest of me would justwant.
I was in the middle of this particular spiral when I heard the front door open.
Not the careful, operator-quiet way Gideon entered. This was a normal door opening. A knock first, then the sound of Xavier's voice in the entryway, and then other voices. Female voices. Familiar ones.
My body did two things simultaneously: it went rigid with the Pavlovian terror of unexpected visitors, and it lurched forward with a recognition so visceral it bypassed my brain entirely.
"Katya?" I breathed.
Footsteps in the hallway. Xavier appeared in the doorway first—always first, always the barrier between me and anything I hadn't been prepared for—and his expression was carefully neutral in a way that I'd learned meant he was managing something.
"You've got visitors," he said, leaning against the doorframe. "Katya Sidorov and her cousin Maria. They've been asking to see you since the night we brought you home. I told them you needed time, but Katya called this morning and I wasn't expecting them this early." He paused, reading my face with that preternatural attentiveness that made me feel simultaneously seen and exposed. "I can send them away. Say the word."
"No." The answer was immediate. Surprising, even to me. "No, I want to see Katya. She must have been—"
