Maddox froze. I held up a hand to him—don't move, don't speak—and took one slow, careful step forward.
"Molly."
Her head snapped toward me. In the blue-white wash of the rooftop security lights, I could see the dark circles under her eyes, the hollows in her cheeks, a bruise yellowing along her jaw. Something inside me came unmoored. Something savage and ancient that wanted to go back downstairs and put every single one of those guards through a wall.
But she needed me here. She needed mecalm.
"That's not my name anymore," she spat, and I could see her swaying slightly, her balance precarious on that narrow ledge. "You call me Six. Subject Six. So if you're here to take Six back to her room, you can go fuck yourself off this roof."
"Nobody's taking you back to any room." I kept my voice low, steady, the way my abuela used to talk to the feral cats that lived behind her restaurant in San Antonio, soft and sure and endlessly patient. I took another step. "My name is Xavier Moreno. I'm with a rescue team sent by Katya and Boris Sidorov. We've already secured the building. The guards are in custody. Clive and Ruby are being arrested as we speak."
Her eyes darted between me and Maddox, calculating, weighing. I recognized that look. I'd seen it in the mirror for two years after I'd come home from deployment—the look of someone who'd learned the hard way that promises were just sounds people made before they hurt you.
"Prove it," she whispered, but her voice wavered. "They—" Her left foot slipped on the ledge, and my heart stopped.
It juststopped.
She caught herself, arms windmilling, and I closed the distance in three explosive strides that I didn't consciously decide to take. My hand closed around her wrist, so impossibly thin, I could feel every tendon and bone, and Ipulled.
She came off the ledge and into my chest with a strangled cry that didn't sound human, more like something torn from the throat of a wounded thing that had forgotten what gentleness felt like. Her fists came up immediately, pounding against my tactical vest with every ounce of fight she had left in her, which wasn't much but was fierce enough to split the skin on her knuckles against the Kevlar plates.
"Let me go! Let mego! I won't—I'm not going back, you can't make me—"
"I'm not letting go," I said, and I meant it in ways that went far deeper than the rooftop. I wrapped both arms around her, pinning her flailing fists between us, absorbing every blow she landed against my chest like penance. "I'm not letting go, and I'm not taking you back to any room. You're out, Molly. It's over."
"Don't—I'm not—you don't—"
Her legs gave out.
Just like that. Like someone had cut her strings. She went boneless against me, and I caught her full weight—which was nothing, she weighed nothing, and that fact alone made me want to burn this building to the foundation—and sank downto the rooftop with her cradled against my chest. Her fingers, which had been striking me moments before, now twisted into the fabric of my vest with a grip that turned her knuckles white, holding on like I was the last solid thing in a world that had been liquid beneath her feet for eight weeks.
"I've got you," I murmured into the tangled mess of her hair, one hand cradling the back of her skull, the other wrapped around her birdlike shoulders. I could feel her ribs through the thin scrub top. Every single one. "I've got you, and nobody's ever putting you in one of those rooms again. Not while I'm breathing."
She made a sound against my chest—a keening, broken thing that vibrated through the Kevlar and into my bones and took up permanent residence there. Her body shook with tremors so violent my teeth rattled, and I just held on. Held on the way I wished someone had held on to me when I'd woken up screaming in that field hospital, alone, one of the only ones left.
"X, what's your status?" Gideon's voice came through the comms, careful and measured.
I keyed the mic with one hand, never loosening my hold on her. "I have her. She's alive. She needs medical. Dehydration, malnutrition, possible sedation withdrawal. I’ll bring her down for the medics but tell them to approach slowly. She's been through hell, and she's not going to trust anyone in a uniform."
"Copy. Medics en route. Ambulances are staged two blocks out." Not the official ones, anyway. Ones that worked for us. We couldn’t involve the cops when we took the job initially for the Pakhan.
Maddox had moved closer, but only barely, hovering at the periphery with the good sense God gave him. I caught his eye and shook my head once. He nodded and backed toward the stairwell door to help if we needed.
Molly's grip on my vest hadn't loosened. If anything, her fingers had dug in deeper, like she was trying to anchor herself to something real. Her breathing was ragged and shallow, hitching every few seconds in a way that told me she was fighting to stay conscious.
"You're real," she said, and it wasn't a statement. It was a question. A desperate, fractured question from someone who'd probably hallucinated rescue a hundred times in that cell, only to wake up and find herself still trapped. "You're—this is—"
"I'm real." I shifted her slightly so I could look at her face. Up close, the damage was worse than I'd thought. The bruise on her jaw had company—faded marks on her neck, needle tracks in the crook of her elbow, raw skin around her wrists where she'd clearly been restrained at some point. My vision went red at the edges, and I had to close my eyes for a three-count to push the rage down somewhere it couldn't touch her. "Feel my heartbeat?"
I pressed her palm flat against my chest, right over my sternum where the vest didn't cover. Her fingers were ice-cold. She went still—completely, utterly still—and I felt the moment she registered the steady thud beneath her hand. Her lips parted. Her eyebrows drew together in something that looked like confusion, as if the concept of another person's living warmth had become foreign to her.
"That's real," I said quietly. "I'm real. The team downstairs is real. The five women we found are being loaded into ambulances right now, and every last one of them is going to a hospital, not back into a cell. And you—" I swallowed around the knot in my throat. "You are going to be safe. I give you my word, Molly."
“They took everything from me,” she whispered.
"Then we start by giving it back." I tucked a strand of matted hair behind her ear with a gentleness that surprised even me. Hands that had broken doors and dislocated jaws moving withthe delicacy of handling blown glass. "Your name is Molly Gilbertson. You were born in Cedar Rapids. You work with kids, and you're the bravest goddamn person I've ever met because you saw two people planning to hurt someone and you walked right up and tried to stop them. That's who you are. Not a number. Not a subject. You."
Something shifted behind her eyes. A flicker, barely there, like a pilot light trying to catch in a cold furnace. Her lower lip trembled, and then—
