Imposing.
I looked down at my hands—still trembling, still wrapped in the gauze Doc had applied this morning to the raw skin on my wrists where the restraint marks were healing. I was sitting in a man's bed, wearing a man's t-shirt because I preferred them to my own clothes. I was tethered to a fluid bag hanging from a coat hook. I hadn't showered without someone standing outside the bathroom door in case I collapsed. I couldn't sleep without his heartbeat under my ear.
Imposing.
Of course I was imposing. What else would you call this? A grown woman who couldn't function without a man she'd known for two days holding her hand and calling her good girl and cutting her banana into pieces the size of a pinky nail. A woman who called him Daddy and clung to him like a child because the alternative was facing the vast, howling emptiness of what had been done to her with no one standing between her and the void.
He'd signed up to rescue me. Not to become my nursemaid. Not to sleep sitting up for two nights straight because I couldn't let go of him long enough for him to lie flat. Not to hold a basin while I vomited and wiped my face and tell me I was brave when we both knew I was anything but. Was Maria right? Should I be staying here?
Chapter Six
Xavier
I heard every word.
The house wasn't that big, and I'd spent twenty years in environments where the ability to listen through walls was the difference between going home and going home in a box. Doc had left so I didn't have him as a distraction. I didn't need to press my ear to the door. I just stood in the hallway outside the bedroom where I'd retreated to give them privacy—because Molly deserved time with people who loved her, and hovering in the doorway like a possessive gargoyle wasn't going to help herheal—and I heard Maria Volkov plant a landmine in the middle of the fragile ground Molly had only just started to stand on.
You must feel like you're imposing.
My jaw clenched so hard I felt the pressure in my temples. I braced one hand against the hallway wall and breathed the way the Army shrink had taught me after Bagram, when the rage came in waves so big they blotted out rational thought. The breathing helped. Marginally. Enough that I didn't walk back into that room and tell Maria Volkov exactly what I thought of a woman who visited someone fresh out of captivity and managed to make the conversation about her childcare situation within two minutes.
But I couldn't say anything. That was the thing that burned. I couldn't call her out, couldn't correct the record, couldn't stand in front of Molly and dismantle every poisoned syllable Maria had just fed her, because doing it in front of Maria would turn it into a confrontation, and confrontation was the last thing Molly's nervous system could handle right now. And doing it in front of Katya would put Katya in the impossible position of choosing sides within her own family, which wasn't fair to a woman who'd spent eight weeks sick with worry and was clearly already fighting the urge to throttle her cousin herself.
I heard Katya's voice, low and sharp, saying something in Russian that I didn't understand but whose tone translated perfectly:shut up, Maria.And Maria's answering laugh—light, airy, the laugh of a woman who'd just lobbed a grenade and was pretending she'd thrown a tennis ball.
The visit lasted another twenty minutes. I stayed in the hallway for most of it, close enough to hear the shift in Molly's voice. The way it had gone smaller after Maria's comment, the way her responses shortened from sentences to single words, the way the warmth that had flooded her voice when she'd first heard Katya's name had cooled into something careful andwithdrawn. I cataloged every change the way I'd catalog terrain features on a patrol route, mapping the damage so I'd know where to step carefully when it was time to rebuild.
When they finally emerged, Katya came first. She stopped in the hallway and looked up at me with those enormous blue eyes, and I saw everything in them—fury at her cousin, grief for Molly, gratitude toward me, and a fierce, protective love that reminded me so much of Abuela it made my chest ache.
"She needs you," Katya said quietly. "Please don't let her—"
"I won't," I said.
Katya searched my face for a moment, then nodded once. A single, decisive motion that carried the weight of trust being transferred. She touched my arm briefly, her fingers light as a bird landing, and then she was moving toward the front door. “I’ll tell Boris she’ll be staying here.”
Maria followed, her heels clicking against the hardwood with the metronomic precision of someone who was never in a hurry because the world could wait. She paused when she reached me, tilting her head with that photogenic smile.
"Thank you again for taking care of her," she said, and her tone was warm and genuine and completely, utterly calculated. "I know this must be such an imposition on your normal routine. If there's anything I can do to help transition her back to her own space—"
"There's no imposition." I kept my voice even. Civil. The voice I used in briefings with people whose security clearance didn't entitle them to the full picture. "She's staying here for the foreseeable future, under the care of our physician who has experience with similar situations. Her recovery is the only priority."
Maria's smile held, but something shifted behind it—a recalculation, the quick mental arithmetic of a woman reassessing how much force it would take to move an obstacleshe'd initially underestimated. "Of course. I just meant that eventually—"
"Eventually is a long way off." I met her eyes and held them, and I let her see just enough of what lived behind my professional exterior to understand that this particular conversation had a shelf life of about three more seconds. "The children are welcome to send drawings. Katya is welcome anytime. Molly will reach out when she's ready."
Thewhen she's readyhung between us like a gate swinging shut. Maria heard it. Her smile thinned at the edges, almost imperceptibly, and then she patted my arm the way you'd pat a large dog whose temperament you weren't entirely sure of.
"You're very dedicated," she said, and it sounded like a compliment the way a silk scarf sounds like a gift when it's being used to tie your hands. "Molly's lucky to have such a thorough rescuer."
She walked out. The front door closed behind her, Katya, and their bodyguards with a soft click, and I stood in the hallway and let the silence settle before I moved.
Then I went to the kitchen. I made a fresh mug of broth, with a little extra salt the way she'd started to prefer it, though she didn't know I'd noticed the way her face relaxed fractionally more with the saltier batches. I set it on a small tray next to the oatmeal that had gone cold during the visit and would need to be remade, and I carried the broth down the hallway to the bedroom.
She was exactly where I'd expected her to be. Curled on her side, facing away from the door, the pillow clutched to her chest, her knees drawn up so tightly she was almost folded in half. The posture of someone trying to take up as little space as possible. The posture of someone who'd just been reminded that she was taking up too much.
I set the tray on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed. Didn't touch her. Not yet. Gave her the space to feel me there without the pressure of contact, the way you sit near a fire and let someone choose to move closer to the warmth.
"She's wrong," I said.
