Then the tears came.
Not the dry, heaving sobs from before. Real tears, streaming down her hollowed cheeks in tracks that cut through the grime, and she curled into me like a child seeking shelter from a storm, pressing her face into the curve of my neck where the tactical collar met bare skin. I felt the wet heat of her tears against my throat, and something cracked open inside my chest that I'd kept sealed shut since Bagram. Something I'd armored over and buried under discipline and duty and the carefully maintained fiction that I was fine, that I'd moved on, that the ghosts didn't follow me anymore.
She cried, and I held her, and the rooftop wind carried the sound away into a sky that was just beginning to lighten at the edges with the first gray promise of dawn.
"I thought no one was coming," she choked out between sobs. "I thought—every day I thought—and then I stopped thinking it because hoping hurt worse than—"
"I know." My arms tightened around her. "I know exactly what that feels like. And I'm sorry it took so long. I'm so sorry, Molly."
The rooftop door opened and the medics appeared, moving cautiously the way I'd instructed. I felt her stiffen instantly, every muscle going rigid, her fingers clawing into my vest again.
"It's okay." I angled my body so I was between her and the approaching medics, a wall of flesh and Kevlar. "They'reparamedics. They're going to help you. And I'm not going anywhere. You hear me? I'm staying right here."
She looked up at me then, really looked, and I saw the moment the realization happened behind those haunted hazel eyes, the weighing of risk against the unbearable weight of fighting alone for one more second. Her gaze dropped to where her hand still rested against my chest, feeling my heartbeat, and something in her expression shifted from terror to the most fragile, tentative thing I'd ever witnessed.
Trust.
Not much. A splinter of it. A hairline fracture in the wall she'd built to survive. But it was there, and it was aimed at me, and I felt the responsibility of it settle across my shoulders like a mantle I would sooner die than shrug off.
"Don't leave," she whispered.
"Not a chance," I said. "Not a single chance in this world or any other."
She let the paramedics approach, but she wouldn’t let go of me, and in the end, I simply picked her up and carried her down to the waiting ambulance. She let them wrap a blanket around her shoulders and start an IV line in her hand, flinching at the needle but holding still because I was holding her other hand in mine, my thumb tracing slow circles against her frozen knuckles. She let them take her vitals and shine a light in her eyes and ask her questions she answered in a voice like crushed gravel, never once releasing her grip on me.
When they moved to load her onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance, everything fell apart.
One of the medics—a guy named Torres who I'd worked with a dozen times and who was good at his job, genuinely good—reached for her arm to guide her toward the open doors, and Molly came unglued. She ripped her hand out of his grip so violently that the IV tore halfway out, a thin line of bloodrunning down the back of her hand, and the sound she made wasn't a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was the sound of an animal caught in a snare, that high, airless keen of pure, distilled terror.
"No—no, no, no, not the van, please not the van, that's how they moved us, they put us in the van and we didn't know where—" She was scrambling backward, her bare feet slipping on the wet asphalt, and she would have gone down hard if I hadn't already been moving. My arms caught her before her knees hit the ground, and she twisted into me with a ferocity that drove the breath from my lungs, burying herself against my chest like she was trying to climb inside my ribcage.
Torres held up both hands and stepped back immediately, to his credit. The other medic—a woman whose name I couldn't remember—did the same, her face a careful mask of professional calm that couldn't quite hide the shine in her eyes.
I looked at the ambulance. White. Windowless in the back. Double doors that closed from the outside. Of course. Ofcourseshe couldn't get in that thing. To her it was just another locked room on wheels, another box they'd seal her inside while she screamed into the dark.
I didn't hesitate.
"We're not doing the ambulance," I said, loud enough for Torres and his partner and anyone else within earshot to hear. My tone left zero room for negotiation. "I'm taking her home. Get Doc on the line and tell him to meet us at my place. Full kit—fluids, nutrition panel, sedation withdrawal protocol, the works. I want him there before we arrive."
Torres opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded. He'd worked with our team long enough to know that when one of us used that voice, the conversation was over. "Copy. I'll call it in. But Xavier—that IV needs to go back in. She's dehydrated as hell."
"Doc can do it at the house." I was already moving, carrying Molly toward my truck parked at the staging area half a block away. She weighed so little that the tactical vest on my chest was heavier than the woman in my arms, and that thought made something behind my sternum twist in a way that was going to leave a permanent mark. "She's had enough needles from strangers."
"Don't put me in a box," Molly whispered against my neck, her voice threadbare and distant.
“Never,” I promised.
Chapter Two
Molly
The world had shrunk to the size of a heartbeat.
Not mine. His.
That steady, stubborn thud beneath my palm was the only thing tethering me to something that wasn't the white walls, the fluorescent hum, the cold bite of a needle sliding under my skin while Ruby laughed and told me to stop being difficult. His heartbeat was different from all of that. It was warm and real, and it didn't ask anything of me, it just was, and I clung to it the way a drowning person clings to wreckage.
I didn't remember the drive. Not really. Fragments? The rumble of an engine beneath me, the smell of leather and something woodsy and male that wasn't antiseptic, wasn't the chemical tang of the rooms. The sensation of being held rather than restrained, which shouldn't have felt different but did in ways I couldn't have described even if my throat hadn't been raw from screaming. At some point I must have drifted, because the next thing I was fully aware of was a door opening and cool air rushing in and my entire body seizing up like I'd been electrocuted.
