Later. Not now. Now she needed me functional, but most of all here.
I left the bedroom door open—wide open, so she could see the hallway if she woke up, so she'd know she wasn't locked in—and padded down the hall in my socks to the kitchen.
Gideon was leaning against my counter with a mug of coffee he'd clearly made himself, because the man had never met a kitchen he wouldn't commandeer. He looked like he always looked after an operation—sharp-eyed and coiled, the adrenaline metabolized into a controlled alertness that could sustain him for another forty-eight hours if necessary. Doc sat at the kitchen table with his own coffee, his medical bag open beside him, and a look on his face that I recognized from too many field debriefs.
"How is she?" Gideon asked, keeping his voice at a level that wouldn't carry down the hall.
"Asleep. Finally." I poured myself coffee. Black, no sugar, the way I'd been drinking it since basic, and leaned against the opposite counter so I had a sightline to the hallway. If she so much as shifted in that bed, I'd hear it and be back in there before she woke. "First real sleep she's had in God knows how long. Her body just shut down."
Gideon nodded, studying me over the rim of his mug with those dark eyes that missed exactly nothing. I knew what he was seeing. I knew what the look on my face was telling him, because Gideon had known me for nine years and could read me the way most people read street signs, automatically, without effort.
"The other women?" I asked.
"All five are at the clinic. Katya's people have translators en route for the ones who don't speak English. Two are Brazilian, one's Guatemalan, one's Ukrainian, and one's from the Philippines. All pregnant, ranging from fourteen to thirty-two weeks. All showing signs of prolonged captivity and forced medical intervention." His jaw worked beneath his beard. "Clive Owens and Ruby O'Keefe are in federal custody. FBI took thehandoff from us clean. Dion's contact at the field office made sure of it, and there’s no record of Molly."
"Good." The word came out flat and insufficient, becausegooddidn't begin to cover what I wanted for Clive Owens and Ruby O'Keefe. What I wanted for them wasn't something the federal justice system was equipped to provide.
Gideon set his mug down and crossed his arms. Here it comes, I thought.
"Boris called."
And there it was.
Boris Sidorov. The Pakhan. The man who'd hired us to find Molly in the first place—not out of the goodness of his heart, because Russian crime lords didn't traffic in goodness, but because Molly was a friend of his wife and an employee, which meant she was under his protection, and an abduction on his territory was a personal affront that demanded resolution. We'd taken the job because the money was significant and because finding kidnapped women was what we did, regardless of who was footing the bill. The moral calculus was simple: Molly needed saving, Boris was paying, and the reasons behind the payment were his problem, not ours.
But Boris Sidorov didn't stay in his lane. He never had.
"What does he want?" I asked, though I already knew.
"He wants Molly transferred to his people. His doctors, his facility, his security." Gideon's tone was the diplomatic one; the one he used when he was relaying information he fundamentally disagreed with but was presenting without editorializing so I could form my own response. "He's not happy she's here. He considers her recovery to be under his jurisdiction since it was his contract."
"Hisjurisdiction." The word tasted like acid. "She's not a piece of evidence. She's not a territory. She's a woman who spent eight weeks being treated like livestock, and if Boris Sidorov thinksI'm handing her over to another group of strangers in another facility with locked doors and medical staff she's never met—"
"Xavier." Gideon's voice cut through mine with the quiet precision of a scalpel. Not loud. Never loud. Just absolute. "I'm telling you what he said. I'm not telling you to do it."
I exhaled through my nose and unclenched my jaw. The coffee in my mug rippled from the tension in my grip. "What exactly did you tell him?"
"That she was extracted safely, that she's receiving medical attention, and that her current psychological state makes any transfer inadvisable." Gideon picked up his mug again. "He wasn't satisfied with that answer. He wants a call in the morning."
"He can want a lot of things."
"He can also make our lives considerably more complicated if we don't manage this carefully." Gideon's eyes held mine. Not a warning, exactly. More like a map of the terrain ahead, laid out for me to study. "We took his money, Zee. We used his intel to find the warehouse. That creates an obligation, whether we like it or not, and Boris is the kind of man who keeps a very detailed ledger."
I knew that. I knew it the way I knew the weight of my sidearm and the distance from my bedroom to the front door, information that lived in my bones rather than my brain. Boris Sidorov operated on a system of debts and favors that predated capitalism, and in his world, the person who paid for the rescue owned a piece of the outcome.
But Molly wasn't an outcome. She was a woman sleeping in my bed with a pillow clutched to her chest because her body had learned that if she didn't hold on to something, everything would be taken away.
"I'll talk to him," I said. "Tomorrow. Not tonight. Tonight she sleeps."
Gideon nodded, accepting that, and turned his attention to Doc. "Doc. What are we looking at?"
Doc removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. A gesture I'd seen him make exactly twice in the years I'd known him, both times preceding news that nobody wanted to hear. He opened a folder he'd been compiling since his examination and spread several pages across the kitchen table.
"Physically, she's in rough shape but nothing immediately life-threatening. Dehydration is significant but manageable with the subcutaneous fluids. She's lost approximately twenty to twenty-five pounds from what I'd estimate her baseline weight to be, which on a woman her size is alarming, and makes zero sense with what they wanted. That kind of caloric deficit over eight weeks suggests they were feeding her just enough to maintain basic function and nothing more, which given they wanted these women pregnant as I said is insane." He tapped one of the pages. "The bruising pattern is consistent with physical restraint—wrists, upper arms, ankles. Some of it's weeks old, some of it is fresh. She was being held down regularly."
My fingers tightened around the mug until the ceramic threatened to crack.
"But here's what concerns me most." Doc put his glasses back on and fixed both of us with a look that had lost every trace of the gentle bedside manner he'd shown Molly. This was the Doc who'd served as a combat medic with the 75th before joining our team—the one who delivered hard truths without anesthesia. "The needle marks in her antecubital fossae—the crooks of her elbows—aren't from a single drug. I counted at least four distinct injection sites in various stages of healing on each arm. Based on her pupil response and the symptom profile I'm seeing, I believe they were administering a benzodiazepine for sedation—likely lorazepam or midazolam—but that's not all."
