Her fingers slid into mine. Cool and trembling and trusting despite the hurt, and the trust hit harder than the hesitation had, because trust in the face of doubt was a braver thing than trust that had never been tested.
I pulled her up gently, and she swayed, just slightly, the fatigue making her unsteady, and my other hand went to her hip to stabilize her. She leaned into me. Automatic. Gravitational. The way she always leaned, like my body was the fixed point her body organized itself around, and I let myself have that for a moment. Just the warmth of her against my side, the top of her head barely reaching my shoulder, the smell of chamomile tea and colored pencils and something underneath that was just her. Clean and sweet and achingly familiar after four weeks of sleeping with it on my skin.
"Say goodbye to your friends, little one."
The words came out in the Daddy register without conscious effort. She turned her head toward Clare and Emily, and I watched her face do something complicated and beautiful—a softening, a gratitude, a connection that had been forged in the space of a single morning.
"Thank you," she said, and her voice was thick with more than sleepiness. "For the coloring. And the otters. And the—" She gestured vaguely at the sticker-covered chaos on the coffee table. "Everything."
"Same time next week," Emily said, and it wasn't a question. It was a declaration. The kind of statement that drew a line into the future and dared the universe to erase it. "I'm bringing glitter glue. Consider yourself warned."
"God help us all," Dion murmured, and Emily elbowed him in the ribs without looking. I didn’t even question picking Molly up, loving the way she curled into me like she weighed nothing, which to my arms she practically didn't. Seven pounds gained back was a victory, but she was still light enough that carrying her felt less like effort and more like holding something precious that the wind might steal.
She tucked her face into my neck. Her breath was warm and slow against my pulse point, and her arm looped around my shoulders with the boneless trust of someone who'd already started falling asleep between the living room and the hallway. I carried her down the corridor with the measured, even gait I'd perfected over two weeks of transporting a woman whose nervous system interpreted sudden movements as threats, and behind me I heard the low murmur of Maddox and Dion coordinating the departure.
I laid her on the bed. She made a sound when I set her down, a soft, protesting noise, the sound of a body that had been warm and held and was now being asked to be neither. Her fingers tightened on my shirt before releasing, a reflex she was still learning to override.
"I'm right here," I said. "Not going anywhere."
I pulled the weighted blanket over her, and she burrowed into it with a sigh that came from somewhere deeper than her lungs. I sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced my boots, setting them on the floor with the careful quiet of a man who'd learned that the sound of boots hitting hardwood could jolt her out of sleep and into a flashback in under a second. Then I stretched out beside her, on top of the covers because the barrier mattered. Anotherboundary, another line I held even when every cell in my body wanted to crawl under the blanket with her and pull her against my chest and never let go.
She found me anyway. Even half-asleep, even through the weighted blanket, her body migrated toward mine with the unerring accuracy of something magnetized. Her head settled against my shoulder. Her hand found my chest, palm flat over my heart, fingers curling slightly into the fabric of my shirt. The position we'd assumed every night for four weeks, her ear over my heartbeat, my arm along her back, the two of us arranged like a lock and key that had been designed for each other by someone who understood that safety wasn't just a concept.
Her breathing slowed. Deepened. The small, rhythmic exhales that meant she was sliding under, the conscious mind releasing its white-knuckle grip on wakefulness and letting the body have what it needed.
I waited. Counted her breaths the way I'd counted them every night. Steady and even and trusting, each exhale a small act of faith that I would still be here when she surfaced.
At breath twenty, I was sure she was asleep.
And that was when the words came. The way they always did in the dark, in the quiet, in the space where she couldn't hear them and I didn't have to be careful. The words I couldn't say to her face because saying them to her face would be a confession that carried weight, and I refused to put weight on ground that was still shaking.
"I'm falling in love with you," I said.
Barely a whisper. Less than a whisper. I said them to the top of her head, to the messy brown hair that smelled like chamomile and colored pencils, to the woman who'd colored a rabbit and laughed like the world was new and called me Daddy in a voice that had rearranged every molecule of who I was.
"And it terrifies me." My hand moved along her back in slow, absent strokes, a comfort gesture that had become so automatic I did it even when she was unconscious. "Not because of what I feel. What I feel is the clearest, most certain thing I've ever known. Clearer than any mission. Clearer than any oath I've ever taken. You are—" My voice caught. I swallowed around it. "You are the thing I didn't know I was looking for, and now that I've found you, the idea of losing you is worse than any scenario I've ever trained for."
Her breathing didn't change. Steady. Even.Twenty-five. Twenty-six.
"But I can't tell you that. Not yet. Because you're only days out of hell, and your body is still fighting battles I can't see, and every time you look at me with those gorgeous eyes I can't tell if what I'm seeing is love or survival. And if it's survival—if I'm just the warm body and the steady heartbeat and the voice that talks you through the dark—then telling you I love you would be the most selfish thing I've ever done. Because you'd feel obligated to return it, and you’re not ready.”
And it was slowly killing me.
Chapter Eleven
Molly
I’d been nearly asleep until he started talking, and not because he’d been loud, but because my body didn’t want to miss a thing. His voice was barely there, almost a breath given shape, a confession meant for the dark and the silence and the version of me that couldn't hear it. But I heard every word.
I'm falling in love with you.
My heart was hammering so hard I was certain he'd feel it through the blanket, through his shirt, through the hand I'd pressed flat against his chest. I kept my breathing even by sheer force of will. The same force that had kept me sane,the same stubbornness that had kept me alive when everything in that warehouse was designed to make me disappear. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The rhythm he'd taught me, weaponized against him, used now to maintain the fiction of sleep while he cracked himself open and showed me what was inside.
I can't tell if what I'm seeing is love or survival.
And there it was. His fear laid bare in the dark where he thought no one was listening. Not cruelty. Not indifference. Not the rejection I'd spent all day convinced of. Fear. The bone-deep, marrow-level terror of a man who'd found something precious in the wreckage and couldn't trust that it was real because the wreckage was still smoking.
He kept talking. His hand moved along my spine in those slow, hypnotic strokes, and his voice dropped even lower and he told me things I knew he'd never say to my waking face. That he'd memorized the way my nose scrunched when the coffee was too hot.
