"I'm not stubborn. I'm stupid. I walked up to two human traffickers in a club like I was going to—what? Give them a stern talking-to?"
"I don’t know what happened."
“I had bad ear infections as a child, and one foster home, the mom was deaf and could lip read, so she taught me. I loved Rachel, but she got breast cancer and I had to go back to the home." It was something I got better at in college. “I saw them talking about looking for a girl. Being dismissive, almost insulting. I thought it was someone they knew, not that they were responsible. Ruby brushed me off. I don’t really remember what happened next.” It was like looking through fog.
The fluid bag dripped. The clock ticked. Xavier's fingers moved through my hair, and slowly, so slowly I didn't notice it happening, my body began to unclench. Not all at once. Not completely. But the rigid terror that had kept every muscle locked since the rooftop began to loosen, degree by degree, like ice melting at the edges. "My eyes are closing," I said, and there was panic in it, a thin wire of fear threaded through the exhaustion.
"Let them."
"What if I wake up and—"
"Then you'll wake up right here. In this bed. And I'll tell you where you are and who you are and that you're safe, as many times as you need to hear it. Every time, Molly. I will be in this house every single time you open your eyes."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to fight the pull of sleep the way I'd fought everything else, with my fists and my teeth and the ragged scraps of defiance I had left. But my body had reached some limit that willpower couldn't override, and the combination of warmth and safety and the slow rhythm of his breathing was doing something to my nervous system that eight weeks of hypervigilance couldn't withstand.
Take care of me, I thought, half-delirious, already sliding. Please. I just want someone to take care of me. I want—
I want a Daddy.
The thought surfaced unbidden, raw and honest in the way that only the space between waking and sleeping allowed, and I was too far gone to crush it this time. It just floated there, luminous and terrifying, as Xavier's hand settled warm and heavy against the curve of my skull, cradling me like I was something worth holding together.
"I've got you," he murmured, and his lips brushed my forehead so lightly I might have imagined it. "Go to sleep, little one."
“Yes, Daddy.”
Chapter Three
Xavier
Daddy?
But I dismissed it. She was in shock, still working the sedatives out of her system. Slip of the tongue.
I waited until her breathing evened out—really evened out, not the shallow, hitching rhythm of someone pretending to sleep because unconsciousness felt too much like surrender. It took almost forty minutes. Forty minutes of my fingers in her hair, my voice low and steady, telling her about Abuela's restaurant and the stray cats and the way San Antonio smelled in August like hot asphalt and blooming jasmine. Forty minutes of herbody releasing its grip on wakefulness one muscle at a time, like a fist slowly uncurling.
When she finally went under, it was sudden. One moment her fingers were still twisted in my shirt with that white-knuckled desperation, and the next they went slack, her hand falling open against my chest like a flower that had exhausted itself blooming. Her breathing deepened. Her face, pressed into the hollow of my throat, lost that pinched quality—not all of it, not even most of it, but enough that I could see the ghost of the woman she'd been before. Softer. Younger than twenty-three.
I didn't move. Didn't shift her weight, didn't adjust the arm that was going numb beneath her, didn't do a single thing that might register in whatever fragile place her sleeping brain had found to rest. I just lay there in the dark with her heartbeat fluttering against my ribs like a trapped bird, and I memorized the weight of her.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I extracted it with the kind of slow, surgical precision that would have made my Ranger instructors proud, tilting the screen away from her face.
Gideon:ETA 15. Need to talk.
I typed back one-handed:She's asleep. If anyone wakes her up, I will end them.
Three dots appeared, then:Understood. Tell Doc.
I sent a text to Doc in the living room—Gideon incoming, kitchen, fifteen minutes—and then set the phone on the nightstand and went back to watching Molly breathe.
Thirteen minutes later, I heard the front door open and close with the kind of deliberate quiet that only operators managed. No fumbling with keys, no heavy footfalls. Just the soft displacement of air and the nearly inaudible click of the latch. Gideon moved through spaces the way water moved through cracks—finding the path of least resistance without conscious effort.
I gave it another two minutes, listening to Molly's breathing for any change. Steady. Deep. The fluid bag was about a third empty, the slow drip doing its work. Her skin was still too cool against mine, but the gray pallor I'd seen on the rooftop had warmed slightly, and the hand resting against my chest had lost its deathlike chill.
Moving her off me was an operation unto itself. I slid a pillow into the space my body occupied, easing her down by millimeters, redistributing her weight so gradually that her sleeping brain wouldn't register the absence. When her fingers found the pillow instead of my shirt, they clutched at it immediately, dragging it against her chest with the same ferocity she'd used on me. Something about that—the blind, unconscious need to hold on tosomething, anything—put a crack in my chest that I knew wasn't going to heal anytime soon.
I tucked the blanket around her shoulders, checked the fluid line, and stood there for a long moment looking down at her. In sleep, without the terror animating her features, I could see the damage more clearly. The weight loss was severe—her collarbones jutted out beneath the scrub top, and her wrists were so thin I could have circled them with my thumb and forefinger. The bruising was extensive, most of it in various stages of healing, which meant it hadn't been a single incident but an ongoing pattern. Restraint marks ringed both wrists like bracelets made of violence.
I turned away before the rage could settle in, because if it settled in, I wasn't going to be able to sit in a kitchen and have a civilized conversation. I was going to get in my truck and drive back to that warehouse and find the guards we'd zip-tied and introduce them to every technique the U.S. Army had taught me about inflicting maximum pain with minimum evidence.
