We ate. The sandwiches were perfect—soft and simple and exactly the right size for a stomach still learning its capacity, and I ate two whole triangles and three apple slices before the fullness hit, which was a record that would have made Xavier do that thing where his eyes went soft and proud simultaneously. I washed it down with a glass of water Doc had brought alongside the plate, and the ordinary domesticity of the moment—eating lunch with friends while coloring pages lay on the coffee table—made the day so much brighter.
After lunch, Emily pulled out a card game with illustrated animals on the front that she called "Little Zoo," which turned out to be a simplified version of rummy where each suit was a different animal family and the goal was to collect complete families before anyone else. The rules were simple enough that my still-recovering brain could track them without strain, and complex enough that I had to actually think, which meant I couldn't simultaneously spiral about the kiss or Maria or the fact that Xavier was across the city doing important things while I sat on his couch matching cartoon penguins.
Clare won the first round. I won the second, and the surge of satisfaction that came with laying down my completed otter family was so disproportionate to the achievement that I actuallygasped, and Emily threw her remaining cards in the air in mock outrage and declared the otters were cheating.
"Otters can't cheat," I said, gathering my cards to my chest with both hands like they were treasure. "Otters are pure."
"Otters are vicious," Emily countered. "They hold hands while they sleep so they don't drift apart, which sounds cute until you realize it's actually a deeply codependent survival strategy, and honestly? Relatable."
I was laughing, the kind that came from my belly and shook my shoulders and made my eyes water for reasons that had nothing to do with grief, when the yawn hit. It ambushed me mid-giggle, enormous and jaw-cracking, the kind of yawn that starts in your toes and commandeers your entire body on its way to your mouth. I tried to cover it with my hand, but it was too late. Clare had already seen it, and her expression shifted from playful to gently knowing with the speed of someone fluent in the body language of Littles who'd hit their limit.
"Someone's crashing," she said, not unkindly.
"I'm fine," I said automatically, which was blatantly untrue and made us all laugh again, just as we heard the kitchen door open and my heart jumped because I knew Daddy was home.
Chapter Ten
Xavier
I heard her laugh before I saw her.
It came through the kitchen door like something smuggled out of a better world, bright and startled and real in a way that stopped me three steps into the house with my keys still in my hand and my chest cracking open along fault lines I hadn't known existed until that sound hit them. Molly was laughing. Not the thin, waterlogged almost-laughs I'd been coaxing out of her for two weeks like a man trying to start a fire with wet wood. This was the real thing. Full-bodied. Unguarded. The laugh ofa woman who'd forgotten, for at least a few seconds, that the world was unfair.
Maddox nearly walked into my back.
"Move, Moreno," he said, but his voice was quiet because he'd heard it too, and Maddox, for all his tactical bluster and three-legged-dog-smuggling chaos, understood exactly what that sound meant coming from a woman who'd been caged for eight weeks. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed once. Said nothing else. Didn't need to.
Dion came in behind us, closing the kitchen door with the silent precision that was as much a part of him as his heartbeat. His eyes swept the kitchen, but finding nothing but Doc's teacup in the sink and a plate with sandwich crusts that had been trimmed off with surgical accuracy according to my specifications, he allowed himself the barest fraction of a nod. Safe. Secure. Carry on.
"Sounds like the girls are having fun," Maddox said, toeing off his boots because he'd learned—the hard way—that boots on carpet was a capital offense in Little-occupied spaces.
I set my keys on the counter. My hands were steady. The rest of me was less certain.
The morning had been hell. Not operational hell, as the briefing on Penny's case had been productive, the intelligence solid, the team sharp. The hell had been internal. Three hours of sitting in a room that didn't have Molly in it, listening to updates and reviewing surveillance footage and mapping network connections, while a part of my brain that had been rewired over weeks of constant proximity to her heartbeat kept pinging like a proximity alarm. Is she okay. Is she eating. Is she breathing. Did the nightmare come. Did she call. Check the phone. Check it again.
She hadn't called. Not once. And I didn't know if that was a good sign that she was coping without me, or a devastating one.
Then there was this morning.
The kiss.
I'd felt it coming the way you felt a storm system building on the horizon. The shift in atmospheric pressure, the charge in the air. The way she'd risen up on her toes with her fingers curled in my henley, her face tilted up and her eyes half-closed, and everything in me had screamed yes and everything else in me had screamed not yet, and the not yet had won by a margin so thin it could have been measured in microns.
I'd turned my head. I'd kissed her forehead. I'd said be good like she was six years old and I was dropping her off at a goddamn birthday party, and I'd walked out of that house and sat in my truck in the driveway for four full minutes with my forehead against the steering wheel and my hands shaking, actually shaking, the way hers shook. The way they'd been shaking for four weeks because the taste ofalmostwas worse than anything I'd endured in over fifteen years of military service.
I wanted to kiss her so badly it was rewriting my DNA.
I wanted to kiss her with the same desperate, consuming certainty that I wanted to breathe, and every single day that want grew larger and more impossible to contain. Every single day I shoved it back down behind the barricade of she's not ready and you don't get to want this yet and what if she wakes up healed and whole and realizes you were just the life raft, not the shore.
Gideon had noticed. Of course Gideon had noticed. The man read people the way most people read street signs, automatically and with complete comprehension. He'd pulled me aside after the briefing, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes doing that thing where they saw straight through every layer of operational composure to the raw, bleeding thing underneath.
His hand had tightened. "Don't burn yourself down trying to be noble, Xavier. I've watched good men do that. It doesn't end the way they think it will."
I hadn't answered. Because Gideon was right, and being right didn't change the fact that Molly was four weeks out of captivity, and her endocrine system was in freefall, and she'd called me Daddy during withdrawal, and I had no way—no way—to know if any of it would survive the transition from crisis to ordinary life. And if she healed and looked at me and saw not a partner but a crutch she'd outgrown, the destruction wouldn't be theoretical. It would be the kind of damage that didn't heal. Not for me. And I refused to let it damage her.
So I'd turned my head. And I'd hated every microsecond of it.
Now I was standing in my kitchen, listening to her laugh, and the sound was doing things to my chest that should have required medical intervention.
