Chapter 8 #3
My free hand found the hem of the sweater, rubbing the soft cashmere between my fingers in a soothing rhythm. Safe textures, safe sounds, safe smallness. Everything Dr. Maya Cross couldn't be, wouldn't let herself be, because being small got people killed and—
No. That thought belonged to Big Maya, and she wasn't here right now. Wasn't welcome in this soft space where Bluey's dad was being silly and making his children laugh.
I existed like that—suspended in Little space, thumb in mouth, tablet clutched close—while the sun tracked across the sky outside my window. Time meant nothing. The world meant nothing. There was just this: being small, being quiet, being allowed to not carry anything at all.
For once, for this blessed moment, I didn't have to be strong. Didn't have to be smart. Didn't have to be anything but a little girl watching cartoons while the monsters stayed locked outside the door.
The door opened so quietly I didn't notice.
Lost in the tablet's glow, thumb in my mouth, I'd stopped tracking the world beyond the cocoon of Sophie's sweater.
Bluey's dad was doing something ridiculous with a pool noodle, and I was completely absorbed, the way only Little space allowed—total focus on something gentle while everything else ceased to exist.
The mattress dipped.
That's what broke through. The shift in weight, the warmth of another body near mine, the particular way gravity changed when Konstantin entered any space. My awareness crashed back like cold water flooding a dream.
He was there. Right there. Sitting on the edge of my bed with that careful stillness he used around frightened things. And he was looking at me—really looking, taking in every damning detail.
My thumb in my mouth like a baby. The tablet playing children's cartoons.
Sophie's sweater pulled over my knees, the chewed hole visible where I'd worried it larger.
My face wet with tears I hadn't realized were still falling.
Curled in the fetal position like I wanted to disappear into the molecules of the mattress.
The full picture of my pathetic regression, laid out for his inspection.
Shame hit like a physical blow, hot and immediate, flooding my system with enough adrenaline to jump-start a corpse.
I ripped my thumb from my mouth so fast I scraped it against my teeth, tasting blood.
The tablet clattered away as I scrambled upright, words already tumbling out—explanations, excuses, the clinical terminology that made this sound less devastating.
"Regression is a common trauma response, it doesn't mean anything, I'm not actually—"
"Please." His voice was quiet but absolute, cutting through my panicked rambling like a scalpel through skin.
He reached out, slow enough that I could track the movement, and his hand cupped my jaw with impossible gentleness.
His thumb brushed across my cheekbone, catching tears I was still producing. "You don't hide from me."
"You don't understand—" My voice cracked, raw from crying I didn't remember doing.
"I understand that you're exhausted. That you've been carrying too much for too long.
That your mind needed somewhere safe to rest." His thumb kept moving, soothing, while his gray eyes held mine with an intensity that made breathing difficult.
"I understand that we kissed and it’s really fucking confusing.
I understand that you're embarrassed, and I'm telling you not to be. Not with me. Not ever with me."
The words didn't compute. I'd been caught in the most shameful possible position—a grown woman, a doctor, sucking her thumb and watching cartoons—and he was looking at me like I was precious instead of pathetic.
"This is—" I had to force the words past the shame choking my throat. "This is the thing that ruined my career. Someone I trusted saw me like this and told everyone. Used it to prove I was unstable, unfit—"
"Then he was a fool and a coward." Konstantin's voice went hard as granite, and something dangerous flickered in his eyes—not directed at me, but at the phantom of whoever had hurt me. "And if I ever meet him, I'll break every bone in his hands for touching what wasn't his to judge."
The violence in his words should have frightened me.
Should have sent me scrambling away from this dangerous man who solved problems with his fists.
Instead, something warm bloomed in my chest—a feeling I couldn't name but that might have been safety.
Protection. The novel sensation of being defended instead of destroyed.
"It was my ex," I whispered, the confession scraping my throat raw. "Marlon. We were both up for the same fellowship—cardiac surgery at Cleveland Clinic. He knew I regressed sometimes, had seen me like this after bad shifts. Told me it was cute, that he loved taking care of me when I was small."
Konstantin's hand was still on my face, thumb still moving in that soothing rhythm, but I felt him go still in that particular way that meant violence was being calculated.
"He told the review board," I continued, needing to get it out now that I'd started.
"During his interview. Made it sound like concern for patient safety.
Said he'd found me sucking my thumb after difficult surgeries, that he worried about my ability to handle pressure. They thanked him for his honesty."
"He weaponized your vulnerability." Not a question. A statement of fact delivered in a tone that suggested Marlon might want to consider witness protection.
"I got rejected. He got the fellowship." The laugh that escaped was bitter enough to corrode metal. "Later, when I confronted him, he said it wasn't personal. Just professional concern. Like exposing the softest part of me to a room full of strangers was some kind of public service."
Konstantin's other hand joined the first, framing my face between his palms. His hands were so large they made me feel small in a different way—protected instead of diminished.
"Listen to me," he said, and there was something in his voice that demanded not just attention but belief. "What he did was not about you. It was about him being too weak to compete fairly, too pathetic to succeed without destroying you first. Your regression isn't weakness, Maya. It's survival."
"It's shameful—"
"It's human. You think I don't understand needing to escape?
Needing to be something other than what the world demands?
" His thumb caught another tear. "I feed kittens at three in the morning because if I don't, the violence in me has nowhere soft to go.
We all have our escapes. Yours just happens to be more honest than most."
I stared at him, this massive enforcer with blood under his fingernails and gentleness in his hands, and felt something crack open in my chest. Not breaking—blooming. Like maybe, possibly, I'd found someone who could see all of me and not run.
"I can't control it," I admitted, the words barely audible. "When things get too hard, I just . . . go somewhere else. Somewhere smaller. It's shameful and childish and—"
“Sophie’s a Little.”
“She is?” I was shocked.
“Yes. Nikolai talks to me about it sometimes. It’s something that I find . . . beautiful, I think.”
My heart was pounding. Sophie was a Little? Nikolai was a Daddy Dom?
His hands shifted, one sliding into my hair while the other moved to my neck, thumb resting against my pulse point. "You need someone to take care of you when you're like this. Someone to make sure you're safe while you rest. Someone to bring you back when you're ready."
My breath caught, heart hammering against my ribs hard enough to hurt. "And you want to be that someone?"
His eyes darkened, and for a moment, I saw everything—the want, the need, the possessive protection that had been building since that first night in the basement clinic. It should have terrified me. Instead, it made me feel claimed in the best possible way.
"I want to be everything you need," he said simply, like it wasn't a declaration that rewrote the laws of physics. Like it wasn't the most dangerous promise anyone had ever made to me.
The tablet was still playing Bluey somewhere in the sheets, tinny Australian voices talking about feelings and family. My thumb throbbed where I'd scraped it. The world outside this room was still full of sixty-three people whose organs had been stolen.
But in this moment, with Konstantin's hands holding my face and his eyes holding my secrets, none of that mattered. I'd been seen—fully, completely, devastatingly seen—and I hadn't been destroyed.
I'd been protected.
He moved with the deliberate care of someone approaching a wounded animal.
Not sudden, nothing that might startle, just a slow rearrangement of his massive frame until he was properly on the bed, back against the headboard.
The mattress dipped and reformed around his weight, creating a valley that gravity wanted to pull me into.
"Come here," he said softly. Not a command exactly, but not quite a request either. Something in between—an invitation wrapped in inevitability.
I should have maintained distance. Should have rebuilt walls, reasserted boundaries, protected myself from this dangerous intimacy. Instead, I moved toward him like I was magnetized, my body making decisions my brain hadn't authorized.
His arm came around me as soon as I was close enough, drawing me against his chest with a gentleness that belied his capacity for violence.
I fit against him like I'd been carved from his negative space—my head tucked perfectly under his chin, my body aligned with his from shoulder to hip.
His other arm completed the circle, and suddenly I was held, contained, surrounded by warmth and strength and the particular scent that was uniquely him—gun oil and expensive soap and something darker, wilder underneath.