"The Little they're looking for," he said finally. "Her name is Penny. She's twenty-two. She aged out of foster care three years ago, and six months ago she was recruited by what she thought was a job placement program. It wasn't."
"You need to find her," I said. It wasn't a question.
"The team needs to find her. And the team is very good at what they do. They don't need me physically present for that operation."
“But they might need Walker,” I said pointedly, “except he’s doing your job because you’re here.” He met my gaze.
"Go," I said. "Go to work tomorrow. Do the briefing. Help find Penny." I set my mug down and looked at him, really looked, the way he'd taught me to look at things by narrating them into manageable pieces. "I'll be here when you come back. In your bed. Probably holding the pillow hostage. Katya’s always asking to visit, and Maddox says Clare wants to come again when I’m ready."
He crossed the kitchen in three strides, the same three strides that carried him to the bedroom every time I woke up screaming,and his hands cupped my face with a tenderness that made my breath stutter.
"If I go," he said, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones, "I'm setting up a direct line. Phone, earpiece, whatever you want. You call me and I answer. No delay. No 'I'll call you back.' I answer."
"Okay."
"And Doc stays. All day. In the house."
"Actually," I paused. “What if ClareandEmily come?” I’d met them once when I was too out of it to talk. His eyebrows rose. Not much, because Xavier's eyebrows operated on a scale of millimeters, but enough that I knew the suggestion had surprised him.
"Clare and Emily," he repeated, like he was tasting the names, testing them for structural integrity. "Dion's Little and—"
"Maddox's Little. Yes." I twisted my fingers together in my lap, a nervous habit I'd developed somewhere in the last two weeks to replace the fist-clenching that Doc said was contributing to the tension headaches. "I’d like to meet them properly.” Meet people that might understand what I was feeling.
"Please," I said. "Call them. For tomorrow. And go to work."
He studied me for a long moment in that deep, searching way that always made me feel like he was reading a page of me that I hadn't known was written. Then he lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to my knuckles, right over the scars from where I'd split them on his Kevlar plates, and the gesture was so achingly tender that my vision blurred.
"Yes, baby girl," he murmured against my skin, and the warmth of his breath on my fingers followed me for the rest of the day, like a handprint left in sunlight.
The next morning, Xavier left for work.
It was the hardest thing I'd done since the rooftop, and I wasn't even the one leaving.
He'd prepared for it like a military operation—because of course he had. Doc was stationed in the living room with his medical bag and a novel he was pretending to read until Clare and Emily got here, then he’d leave. "People" would be stationed outside. The direct line was set up on a phone Xavier had placed on the nightstand, pre-programmed with his number and Gideon's and Doc's and Katya's. He’d left me a note propped to it.
Your name is Molly Gilbertson. You are in my house. It's Wednesday. I'll be home by 1. The banana pieces in the fridge are NOT too small. - Daddy
I laughed when I read it. Then I cried. Then I laughed again, which was becoming a pattern that Doc probably had a clinical term for but that I'd started thinking of as justthe way I work now.
Xavier stood in the bedroom doorway in clothes I'd never seen him wear—not the tactical gear of the rescue or the soft T-shirts and sweats of the past two weeks, but actual work clothes. Dark jeans. A charcoal shirt that stretched across his shoulders in a way that made my brain short-circuit in a manner entirely unrelated to trauma.
"Come here."
I set the mug down and went to him, and he folded me against his chest the way he always did, completely, like he was trying to surround me with himself. His chin rested on top of my head, and I breathed him in. Cedar. Coffee. The faint, sharp scent of whatever soap he used. The scent profile of everything I needed in the world.
"Be brave for me," he murmured. "Just for today. Just until one."
Chapter Eight
Molly
I rose up on my toes and kissed him.
Or tried to. I aimed for his mouth—a real kiss, the kind I'd been thinking about for days in the quiet spaces between panic attacks and hormone surges, the kind that would tell him without words that what I felt wasn't just gratitude or dependency or a trauma response in a soft package.
And Xavier turned his head.
Not sharply. Not with revulsion or surprise. With a smoothness so practiced, so seamless, that my lips landed on his cheek instead, the rough stubble of his jaw, warm and familiarand absolutely, devastatingly not his mouth. He pressed a kiss to my forehead in the same motion, like a redirect so graceful it could have been choreographed. Like he'd anticipated it and already had the countermove planned.
