He paused, and the kitchen felt smaller.
"Given that this operation's purpose was forced pregnancy, I believe they were also administering a hormonal protocol. Likely a combination of gonadotropins and progesterone supplements—fertility drugs, essentially. The kind used in IVF treatments to stimulate ovulation and prepare the uterine lining for implantation." His voice was steady, but I could see the muscle jumping in his jaw. "They were sedating her to keep her compliant and simultaneously pumping her full of hormones to maximize the chances of conception."
The mug in my hand cracked. A clean fracture right down the side, coffee seeping through the fissure and running over my knuckles. I set it down on the counter and stared at the dark liquid pooling on the granite. I didn't trust myself to speak.
Gideon's expression hadn't changed, but his stillness had taken on a different quality—the coiled, predatory stillness of a man who'd spent twenty years in special operations and knew exactly how many ways there were to make someone suffer without leaving marks.
"The benzodiazepine withdrawal alone is going to be a process," Doc continued, his tone clinical in the way that meant he was compartmentalizing his own fury to do his job. "Depending on the dosage and duration, we could be looking at anxiety, insomnia, seizures in a worst-case scenario. I'll need to taper her carefully. But the hormonal component—" He shook his head. "Pumping a woman full of fertility drugs without proper monitoring is medical malpractice on the most generous interpretation and assault on the accurate one. Her endocrine system is going to go haywire. Mood swings, physical discomfort, irregular cycles—possibly for months. And that's assuming they didn't succeed in—"
"Did they?" The words came out of me like ground glass.
Doc met my eyes. "I don't know yet. I didn't want to push for a full examination tonight—she's too fragile, and a pelvic examwould be deeply retraumatizing in her current state. So would getting her to pee on a stick. I'll need to do bloodwork in the morning. HCG levels will tell us definitively."
The kitchen went very quiet. The clock on the wall ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Down the hall, the silence from my bedroom held steady, and I clung to that the way Molly had clung to my heartbeat—as proof that something was still okay, still intact, still worth protecting. Doc looked me square in the eye. "None of the other women were raped. It was all artificial insemination."
I felt myself visibly paling. It had never occurred to me. And it should have.
"So they were sedating her," Gideon said slowly, each word measured, "to keep her docile enough to control, while simultaneously forcing her body into a state of heightened fertility, with the intention of impregnating her against her will and selling the resulting child to the highest bidder."
"That's my working theory, yes." Doc's hands were flat on the table, his fingers spread, and I noticed they were trembling. Barely perceptible. But trembling. "And they were doing it without any of the standard safeguards—no ultrasound monitoring for ovarian hyperstimulation, no bloodwork to check hormone levels, no adjustment of dosages based on response. They were treating her like—"
"Like a disposable brood mare," I finished.
The silence that followed was the kind that settles on your shoulders and dares you to carry it.
"Boris's doctors won't know any of this," Gideon said after a moment, and I could hear him shifting into strategic mode—the part of his brain that mapped contingencies the way cartographers mapped coastlines. "If we transfer her to his facility, his medical team starts from scratch. New faces, new environment, new hands on her. After what James justdescribed, that's not recovery. That's retraumatization with better lighting."
"It's not happening." I wasn't asking permission. I wasn't opening a discussion. I was stating a fact with the same certainty I'd used when I told Molly I wasn't leaving. "She stays here. Doc monitors her here. If Boris wants updates, he gets them through me, sanitized and summarized, he doesn't get access, and he doesn't get a goddamn vote in her recovery."
Gideon studied me for a long beat. I knew what he was calculating—the operational risk, the political fallout, the very real possibility that antagonizing a Russian Pakhan could have consequences for the entire team. I also knew that he'd seen Molly on the rooftop footage from Marcus's body cam, because Gideon saw everything, and I knew that somewhere behind those calculating eyes was the same white-hot fury that was currently incinerating my capacity for diplomacy.
"I'll handle Boris," he said finally. "I'll frame it as medical necessity—her condition is too unstable for transport, our physician is managing a complex withdrawal protocol, any disruption could result in a fatal seizure. It's not even a lie." He glanced at Doc, who nodded confirmation. "That buys us time. But Xavier—" He stepped closer, lowering his voice even further. "This is going to be a long road. What she's been through, the combination of physical and psychological trauma—this isn't a few days of rest and she's back on her feet. This is months. Maybe longer."
"I know."
"Do you?" His gaze was unflinching. Not unkind, but unflinching. "Because the way she was holding on to you in that ambulance, and the way you're standing in this kitchen right now looking like you'd personally dismantle a Russian crime syndicate with your bare hands—that's not professional detachment. That's personal."
I didn't insult him by denying it.
"She called me Daddy."
The words came out before I could stop them, and they hung in the kitchen air like smoke—impossible to wave away, impossible to ignore. Gideon's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes shifted. Recognition, maybe. Understanding.
Doc leaned back in his chair, his wire-rimmed glasses catching the kitchen light. "That's not uncommon in severe trauma cases, particularly in women who have experienced prolonged captivity with authority figures. The psyche reaches for whatever framework feels safest—"
"I know what it is, Doc." My voice came out rougher than I intended. "I know the clinical explanation. I also know that when she said it, something inside me locked into place like a round chambering, and I have not been able to un-chamber it since."
The clock ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Down the hall, silence.
Gideon set his mug in the sink with the careful deliberation of a man who understood that this conversation had just shifted from operational to personal, and that the two were now inextricably tangled in a way that would define everything that came after.
"I messed up with Abby and she still chose me." Gideon held my gaze. "And the woman sleeping in your bed chose you—even in her most broken, terrified state, she chose you. That's not nothing, Zee. That's not transference. That's instinct. And you and I both know that instinct, the kind that gets forged like that, doesn't lie."
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. I wasn't going to lie either. Not to Molly. And definitely not to myself.
Chapter Four
Molly
