I gave a jerky nod. Xavier's hand had moved from my temple to the back of my neck, his fingers resting warm and steady against the knobs of my spine, and the contact grounded me in a way that felt almost chemical, like his touch was metabolizing the panic, breaking it down into something my body could process.
Doc settled on the edge of the mattress with the care of a man lowering himself onto thin ice. He didn't reach for me. He just held out his own hand, palm up, and waited.
"Whenever you're ready," he said.
I stared at his open hand for a long moment. Then, with the kind of effort it used to take me to run a mile, I uncurled my injured hand from Xavier's shirt and placed it in Doc's waiting palm.
His fingers were cool and dry and professional. He turned my hand over gently, examining the torn IV site, the bruising, the raw skin on my knuckles where I'd split them against Xavier's Kevlar plates. His expression didn't change, but I saw his eyes tighten almost imperceptibly behind the wire-rimmed glasses.
"Xavier, I'm going to clean this up and apply a butterfly closure. No stitches needed, but she's going to need a new IV line at some point tonight. She's significantly dehydrated."
"Tell me first," I said, and my voice sounded like someone else's, small and defensive and nothing like the woman who used to sing off-key in the shower and argue with baristas about oat milk.
"He's telling you right now," Xavier said, and there was something in his tone, patient and firm and impossibly gentle all at once, that made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "He's going to clean the cut on your hand. It's going to sting a little. I'm right here."
The way he narrated everything for me. The way he translated the world into small, manageable pieces and handed them to me one at a time like he understood instinctively that the whole picture was too much, that I could only process fragments.
That's what a Daddy does, whispered something in the back of my mind. Something from before—from watching online after meeting Katya, from watching the Daddy Doms with their Littles in the playroom, from the ache I'd carried around for years. The longing for someone who would hold the world at bay and make everything small enough to survive.
I crushed the thought immediately. Flattened it. I wasn't that girl anymore. That girl had wants and dreams and the luxury of craving softness. This creature pressed against Xavier's chest was just trying to remember how to breathe.
Doc cleaned the wound with saline and gauze, his movements narrated by Xavier in that low, steady murmur that I was quickly becoming addicted to. Now he's wiping away the dried blood. Now he's applying the closure strips. Now he's wrapping it with gauze. Each step announced before it happened, each one giving me the chance to brace or refuse. I did neither. I just listened toXavier's voice and his heartbeat and let them braid together into something that felt almost like safety.
"Good girl," Xavier said when Doc finished, and the words hit me somewhere below my sternum with the force of a defibrillator.
My whole body went still. Not the rigid stillness of fear, something else entirely. Something warm and liquid that spread outward from my center like ink in water, and for one disorienting second I was back at my computer, watching a Daddy brush his Little's hair while she colored, and wanting it so badly that my teeth ached.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
"Molly?" Xavier's hand stilled on the back of my neck. "You okay? Did that hurt?"
"No," I said quickly. Too quickly. "I'm fine. It's fine."
He didn't push. He just resumed those slow circles against my nape, and I pressed my face deeper into his chest and tried to will away the flush crawling up my neck.
Doc had retreated, giving me space, and was writing something on a small notepad. "Xavier, I'd like to check her vitals more thoroughly. Blood pressure, temperature, pupil response. I'd also like to draw blood to check for whatever sedatives they were administering—it'll help me manage the withdrawal more safely."
"Molly." Xavier's lips were close to my good ear again, and I could feel the shape of my name in his breath. "Doc wants to check your blood pressure and temperature. That means a cuff on your arm and a thermometer. Can you do that for me?"
For me. Not for the doctor. Not because you have to. For me. Like I'd be doing him a favor. Like my compliance was a gift he was asking for rather than a requirement he was enforcing.
The tender manipulation of it should have made me angry. Instead, it made my eyes burn with fresh tears because nobody had asked me for anything in eight weeks. They'd just taken.
"Okay," I whispered. "But don't move."
"I'm a statue," he said, and there was the ghost of warmth in his voice, not quite humor, nothing so careless as that, but something adjacent. Something that suggested the man underneath the tactical exterior might know how to smile. "An incredibly handsome statue," he teased, "but a statue nonetheless."
A sound escaped my throat. Tiny, strangled, barely there. It took me a moment to recognize it as the beginning of a laugh, rusty and broken like an engine turning over after sitting idle in the cold, but a laugh anyway. It startled me so badly that I pressed my hand against my mouth.
Xavier's arm tightened around me. He didn't comment on it. But I felt his chin rest against the top of my head, and his exhale stirred my hair, and the tenderness of it was so acute it was almost unbearable.
Doc approached again with a blood pressure cuff and a digital thermometer, and Xavier talked me through every single step. The cuff inflating around my arm—it's going to squeeze, just pressure, nothing sharp—the thermometer under my tongue—thirty seconds, that's all, I'm counting with you—the penlight in my eyes that made me flinch so hard I nearly headbutted Xavier's jaw.
"Sorry," I gasped, gripping his shirt.
"I've taken worse hits," he said mildly. "You should see what Maddox did to me during sparring last week. Man fights dirty."
There it was again, that almost-warmth, that careful offering of normalcy and trusting me to follow when I was ready. Each small comment a reminder that a world existed outside therooms, outside the fluorescent lights and Ruby's clipboard and the slow drip of whatever they'd been pumping into my veins.
