"Easy." His voice. Xavier's voice. Low and steady, a bass rumble I could feel in his chest before I heard it with my good ear. "We're at my house. That's all. My house, not a facility, not a warehouse. You're going to see a front door and a hallway and a kitchen and a bedroom. Regular things. Safe things."
I wanted to believe him so badly that it felt like swallowing glass.
He carried me inside, and I kept my face pressed against his neck, breathing him in—sweat and gunpowder residue, and underneath that, something clean, like cedar. The sounds around me were wrong for a prison. No buzzing lights. No echoing concrete. Instead, the soft click of a door that didn't lock with a deadbolt from the outside, the hush of carpet underfoot, the distant hum of a refrigerator. Normal sounds. Human sounds.
But normal had become a foreign language I wasn’t able to translate.
He took me down a hallway and into a room that smelled like clean linen and him. A bedroom. His bedroom, I thought, though thinking was like wading through wet sand, slow and exhausting and unreliable. He tried to set me down on the bed and my hands locked around his neck with a force that should have been impossible given how little strength I had left.
"No." The word tore out of me like something with claws. "No, don't—if you leave, I won't know if this is real, I won't know if I'm still in the room and this is just another—sometimes they gave me things and I'd dream, I'd dream I was out, and then I'd wake up and I was still there—"
"I'm not leaving." He said it like a fact. Like gravity. Like something that simply was and couldn't be argued with. Then he gently laid me down. "Scoot over."
I blinked. My fingers were still locked behind his neck, and I could feel the tendons in his shoulders, the impossible solidity of him. "What?"
"I said scoot over." And then he did something I didn't expect. He loosened then kicked off his boots. I heard them thud against the carpet, one then the other, and he unstrapped his tactical vest one-handed, the other arm still cradling me against him like I was something precious rather than something broken. The vest hit the floor with a heavy clatter of equipment and then he was lowering both of us onto the mattress, settling back against the headboard with me still curled against his chest, his legs stretched out alongside mine.
The bed was soft. So soft that my body didn't know what to do with it. For eight weeks I'd slept on a thin mattress over a metal frame that dug into my hip bones—hip bones I hadn't had before they took me—and the sensation of sinking into actual pillows, actual sheets that smelled like laundry detergent instead of bleach, was so overwhelming that a sound came out of me that I couldn't control. Half laugh, half sob, all unhinged.
"It's soft," I said stupidly.
"Yeah." His hand was on the back of my head again, fingers resting against my skull without pressure, just warmth. "It's a bed. A real one. In a real house. And you can stay in it as long as you want."
I pressed my ear against his chest and listened to his heart. Still there. Still steady. Still real.
"I can't let go of you," I whispered, and I meant it as an apology, because some distant, functioning part of my brain understood that I was a stranger clinging to this man like a barnacle and that was probably not normal behavior. But the larger part of me, the part that had been Subject Six for eight weeks, that part didn't care about normal. That part only cared about the heartbeat.
"Then don't."
I felt the vibration of his words and only seeing his lips move did I understand them. Two words. He said them so simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and something inside me cracked a little wider. Not breaking—I was already broken. This was something else.
A knock at the bedroom door sent ice water through my veins. I jerked so hard that my elbow caught Xavier in the ribs, and he grunted but didn't let go, didn't even flinch beyond that, just tightened his arm around me and turned his head toward the door.
"That's Doc Atkins," he said, his mouth close to my good ear, his voice pitched low enough that it bypassed the panic centers in my brain and went straight to something older, something that remembered what it felt like to be soothed. "He's a doctor who works with my team. He's been with us for years. He's going to want to check you over, make sure you're hydrated, make sure whatever they were giving you is clearing your system safely. That's all. And I will be right here the entire time."
"I don't want anyone to touch me." My voice came out small and wrecked, and I hated it, hated how they'd taken the steel out of me and left this trembling, flinching creature in its place. I used to be brave. I used to march up to dangerous people innightclubs because it was the right thing to do. That girl felt like someone I'd read about in a book.
"I know." His thumb traced a slow arc against my temple, brushing matted hair away from my face. "How about this—Doc talks to me, I tell you everything he wants to do before he does it, and if at any point you say stop, we stop. No arguments. No 'just one more thing.' Stop means stop. Deal?"
I considered this. The negotiation of it, the way he handed me the power like it was mine to hold. They hadn't given me choices. Not once. Not what I ate, not when I slept, not what they injected into my arm while Ruby took notes on her clipboard and Clive checked his watch like I was an inconvenience on his schedule.
"Deal," I rasped.
Xavier called out to the door. "Come in. Slowly."
The door opened and a man stepped through, older than Xavier, maybe sixties, with silver hair and kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He carried a large medical bag and moved with the unhurried calm of someone who'd been briefed extensively on what he was walking into. He didn't come toward the bed immediately. Instead, he set his bag down on the dresser across the room and pulled up a chair, sitting down in it like he had all the time in the world.
"Hi, Molly," he said. His voice was gentle without being patronizing, and I noticed he positioned himself so he was in my line of sight easily. "I'm Doctor Atkins. Most people call me Doc. I'm not going to come any closer until you tell me it's okay."
My fingers tightened in Xavier's shirt—at some point I'd released his neck and fisted the soft cotton of the black t-shirt he wore under his gear, and I wasn't letting go of that either. I could feel Xavier's chest expand with each breath beneath my cheek, steady as a metronome.
"He needs to look at the IV site on your hand," Xavier murmured against the top of my head. "You tore it when you pulled away. Might need to be cleaned up. Is that okay?"
I looked down at my hand. The back of it was smeared with dried blood, the skin around the torn insertion point already bruising purple. I hadn't even felt it.
"He can look at my hand," I said. Doc nodded like I'd just given him the most reasonable answer in the world and brought his bag with him but set it on the nightstand rather than the bed, and he pulled on a pair of latex gloves with deliberate, visible movements. No surprises. Nothing hidden.
"I'm going to sit on the edge of the bed now, on your left side," he said. "That way you can see everything I'm doing. Okay?"
