Chapter 1 #2
"I've got you," I murmured into the tangled mess of her hair, one hand cradling the back of her skull, the other wrapped around her birdlike shoulders.
I could feel her ribs through the thin scrub top.
Every single one. "I've got you, and nobody's ever putting you in one of those rooms again. Not while I'm breathing."
She made a sound against my chest—a keening, broken thing that vibrated through the Kevlar and into my bones and took up permanent residence there.
Her body shook with tremors so violent my teeth rattled, and I just held on.
Held on the way I wished someone had held on to me when I'd woken up screaming in that field hospital, alone, one of the only ones left.
"X, what's your status?" Gideon's voice came through the comms, careful and measured.
I keyed the mic with one hand, never loosening my hold on her.
"I have her. She's alive. She needs medical. Dehydration, malnutrition, possible sedation withdrawal. I’ll bring her down for the medics but tell them to approach slowly.
She's been through hell, and she's not going to trust anyone in a uniform. "
"Copy. Medics en route. Ambulances are staged two blocks out." Not the official ones, anyway. Ones that worked for us. We couldn’t involve the cops when we took the job initially for the Pakhan.
Maddox had moved closer, but only barely, hovering at the periphery with the good sense God gave him. I caught his eye and shook my head once. He nodded and backed toward the stairwell door to help if we needed.
Molly's grip on my vest hadn't loosened. If anything, her fingers had dug in deeper, like she was trying to anchor herself to something real. Her breathing was ragged and shallow, hitching every few seconds in a way that told me she was fighting to stay conscious.
"You're real," she said, and it wasn't a statement. It was a question. A desperate, fractured question from someone who'd probably hallucinated rescue a hundred times in that cell, only to wake up and find herself still trapped. "You're—this is—"
"I'm real." I shifted her slightly so I could look at her face.
Up close, the damage was worse than I'd thought.
The bruise on her jaw had company—faded marks on her neck, needle tracks in the crook of her elbow, raw skin around her wrists where she'd clearly been restrained at some point.
My vision went red at the edges, and I had to close my eyes for a three-count to push the rage down somewhere it couldn't touch her. "Feel my heartbeat?"
I pressed her palm flat against my chest, right over my sternum where the vest didn't cover.
Her fingers were ice-cold. She went still—completely, utterly still—and I felt the moment she registered the steady thud beneath her hand.
Her lips parted. Her eyebrows drew together in something that looked like confusion, as if the concept of another person's living warmth had become foreign to her.
"That's real," I said quietly. "I'm real.
The team downstairs is real. The five women we found are being loaded into ambulances right now, and every last one of them is going to a hospital, not back into a cell.
And you—" I swallowed around the knot in my throat.
"You are going to be safe. I give you my word, Molly. "
“They took everything from me,” she whispered.
"Then we start by giving it back." I tucked a strand of matted hair behind her ear with a gentleness that surprised even me.
Hands that had broken doors and dislocated jaws moving with the delicacy of handling blown glass.
"Your name is Molly Gilbertson. You were born in Cedar Rapids.
You work with kids, and you're the bravest goddamn person I've ever met because you saw two people planning to hurt someone and you walked right up and tried to stop them.
That's who you are. Not a number. Not a subject. You."
Something shifted behind her eyes. A flicker, barely there, like a pilot light trying to catch in a cold furnace. Her lower lip trembled, and then—
Then the tears came.
Not the dry, heaving sobs from before. Real tears, streaming down her hollowed cheeks in tracks that cut through the grime, and she curled into me like a child seeking shelter from a storm, pressing her face into the curve of my neck where the tactical collar met bare skin.
I felt the wet heat of her tears against my throat, and something cracked open inside my chest that I'd kept sealed shut since Bagram.
Something I'd armored over and buried under discipline and duty and the carefully maintained fiction that I was fine, that I'd moved on, that the ghosts didn't follow me anymore.
She cried, and I held her, and the rooftop wind carried the sound away into a sky that was just beginning to lighten at the edges with the first gray promise of dawn.
"I thought no one was coming," she choked out between sobs. "I thought—every day I thought—and then I stopped thinking it because hoping hurt worse than—"
"I know." My arms tightened around her. "I know exactly what that feels like. And I'm sorry it took so long. I'm so sorry, Molly."
The rooftop door opened and the medics appeared, moving cautiously the way I'd instructed. I felt her stiffen instantly, every muscle going rigid, her fingers clawing into my vest again.
"It's okay." I angled my body so I was between her and the approaching medics, a wall of flesh and Kevlar. "They're paramedics. They're going to help you. And I'm not going anywhere. You hear me? I'm staying right here."
She looked up at me then, really looked, and I saw the moment the realization happened behind those haunted hazel eyes, the weighing of risk against the unbearable weight of fighting alone for one more second.
Her gaze dropped to where her hand still rested against my chest, feeling my heartbeat, and something in her expression shifted from terror to the most fragile, tentative thing I'd ever witnessed.
Trust.
Not much. A splinter of it. A hairline fracture in the wall she'd built to survive. But it was there, and it was aimed at me, and I felt the responsibility of it settle across my shoulders like a mantle I would sooner die than shrug off.
"Don't leave," she whispered.
"Not a chance," I said. "Not a single chance in this world or any other."
She let the paramedics approach, but she wouldn’t let go of me, and in the end, I simply picked her up and carried her down to the waiting ambulance.
She let them wrap a blanket around her shoulders and start an IV line in her hand, flinching at the needle but holding still because I was holding her other hand in mine, my thumb tracing slow circles against her frozen knuckles.
She let them take her vitals and shine a light in her eyes and ask her questions she answered in a voice like crushed gravel, never once releasing her grip on me.
When they moved to load her onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance, everything fell apart.
One of the medics—a guy named Torres who I'd worked with a dozen times and who was good at his job, genuinely good—reached for her arm to guide her toward the open doors, and Molly came unglued.
She ripped her hand out of his grip so violently that the IV tore halfway out, a thin line of blood running down the back of her hand, and the sound she made wasn't a scream.
It was worse than a scream. It was the sound of an animal caught in a snare, that high, airless keen of pure, distilled terror.
"No—no, no, no, not the van, please not the van, that's how they moved us, they put us in the van and we didn't know where—" She was scrambling backward, her bare feet slipping on the wet asphalt, and she would have gone down hard if I hadn't already been moving.
My arms caught her before her knees hit the ground, and she twisted into me with a ferocity that drove the breath from my lungs, burying herself against my chest like she was trying to climb inside my ribcage.
Torres held up both hands and stepped back immediately, to his credit. The other medic—a woman whose name I couldn't remember—did the same, her face a careful mask of professional calm that couldn't quite hide the shine in her eyes.
I looked at the ambulance. White. Windowless in the back. Double doors that closed from the outside. Of course. Of course she couldn't get in that thing. To her it was just another locked room on wheels, another box they'd seal her inside while she screamed into the dark.
I didn't hesitate.
"We're not doing the ambulance," I said, loud enough for Torres and his partner and anyone else within earshot to hear.
My tone left zero room for negotiation. "I'm taking her home.
Get Doc on the line and tell him to meet us at my place.
Full kit—fluids, nutrition panel, sedation withdrawal protocol, the works. I want him there before we arrive."
Torres opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded. He'd worked with our team long enough to know that when one of us used that voice, the conversation was over. "Copy. I'll call it in. But Xavier—that IV needs to go back in. She's dehydrated as hell."
"Doc can do it at the house." I was already moving, carrying Molly toward my truck parked at the staging area half a block away.
She weighed so little that the tactical vest on my chest was heavier than the woman in my arms, and that thought made something behind my sternum twist in a way that was going to leave a permanent mark.
"She's had enough needles from strangers. "
"Don't put me in a box," Molly whispered against my neck, her voice threadbare and distant.
“Never,” I promised.