Chapter 2 #2
"Tell me first," I said, and my voice sounded like someone else's, small and defensive and nothing like the woman who used to sing off-key in the shower and argue with baristas about oat milk.
"He's telling you right now," Xavier said, and there was something in his tone, patient and firm and impossibly gentle all at once, that made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "He's going to clean the cut on your hand. It's going to sting a little. I'm right here."
The way he narrated everything for me. The way he translated the world into small, manageable pieces and handed them to me one at a time like he understood instinctively that the whole picture was too much, that I could only process fragments.
That's what a Daddy does, whispered something in the back of my mind.
Something from before—from watching online after meeting Katya, from watching the Daddy Doms with their Littles in the playroom, from the ache I'd carried around for years.
The longing for someone who would hold the world at bay and make everything small enough to survive.
I crushed the thought immediately. Flattened it. I wasn't that girl anymore. That girl had wants and dreams and the luxury of craving softness. This creature pressed against Xavier's chest was just trying to remember how to breathe.
Doc cleaned the wound with saline and gauze, his movements narrated by Xavier in that low, steady murmur that I was quickly becoming addicted to.
Now he's wiping away the dried blood. Now he's applying the closure strips.
Now he's wrapping it with gauze. Each step announced before it happened, each one giving me the chance to brace or refuse.
I did neither. I just listened to Xavier's voice and his heartbeat and let them braid together into something that felt almost like safety.
"Good girl," Xavier said when Doc finished, and the words hit me somewhere below my sternum with the force of a defibrillator.
My whole body went still. Not the rigid stillness of fear, something else entirely.
Something warm and liquid that spread outward from my center like ink in water, and for one disorienting second I was back at my computer, watching a Daddy brush his Little's hair while she colored, and wanting it so badly that my teeth ached.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
"Molly?" Xavier's hand stilled on the back of my neck. "You okay? Did that hurt?"
"No," I said quickly. Too quickly. "I'm fine. It's fine."
He didn't push. He just resumed those slow circles against my nape, and I pressed my face deeper into his chest and tried to will away the flush crawling up my neck.
Doc had retreated, giving me space, and was writing something on a small notepad.
"Xavier, I'd like to check her vitals more thoroughly.
Blood pressure, temperature, pupil response.
I'd also like to draw blood to check for whatever sedatives they were administering—it'll help me manage the withdrawal more safely. "
"Molly." Xavier's lips were close to my good ear again, and I could feel the shape of my name in his breath. "Doc wants to check your blood pressure and temperature. That means a cuff on your arm and a thermometer. Can you do that for me?"
For me. Not for the doctor. Not because you have to. For me. Like I'd be doing him a favor. Like my compliance was a gift he was asking for rather than a requirement he was enforcing.
The tender manipulation of it should have made me angry. Instead, it made my eyes burn with fresh tears because nobody had asked me for anything in eight weeks. They'd just taken.
"Okay," I whispered. "But don't move."
"I'm a statue," he said, and there was the ghost of warmth in his voice, not quite humor, nothing so careless as that, but something adjacent.
Something that suggested the man underneath the tactical exterior might know how to smile.
"An incredibly handsome statue," he teased, "but a statue nonetheless. "
A sound escaped my throat. Tiny, strangled, barely there. It took me a moment to recognize it as the beginning of a laugh, rusty and broken like an engine turning over after sitting idle in the cold, but a laugh anyway. It startled me so badly that I pressed my hand against my mouth.
Xavier's arm tightened around me. He didn't comment on it. But I felt his chin rest against the top of my head, and his exhale stirred my hair, and the tenderness of it was so acute it was almost unbearable.
Doc approached again with a blood pressure cuff and a digital thermometer, and Xavier talked me through every single step.
The cuff inflating around my arm—it's going to squeeze, just pressure, nothing sharp—the thermometer under my tongue—thirty seconds, that's all, I'm counting with you—the penlight in my eyes that made me flinch so hard I nearly headbutted Xavier's jaw.
"Sorry," I gasped, gripping his shirt.
"I've taken worse hits," he said mildly. "You should see what Maddox did to me during sparring last week. Man fights dirty."
There it was again, that almost-warmth, that careful offering of normalcy and trusting me to follow when I was ready.
Each small comment a reminder that a world existed outside the rooms, outside the fluorescent lights and Ruby's clipboard and the slow drip of whatever they'd been pumping into my veins.
Doc stepped back and reviewed his notes, his expression professionally neutral in a way that told me the numbers weren't good.
"Blood pressure's low. Temperature's slightly elevated.
Pupils are reactive but sluggish, consistent with a tapering sedative, likely a benzodiazepine class.
" He looked at Xavier over the top of his glasses.
"She needs fluids tonight. I can do a subcutaneous infusion instead of an IV.
It's slower, but it's a small needle, and once it's placed, she won't feel it. "
Xavier relayed this to me, word for word, his hand never leaving the back of my neck. I focused on the way his thumb pressed gently into the tight muscle at the base of my skull, working at a knot I hadn't even known was there.
"One needle," I said. "One. And then no more tonight."
"One needle," Xavier confirmed. "And I'll hold your hand while he does it. You can squeeze as hard as you want. I've been told I have an unreasonably high pain threshold."
Doc prepared the subcutaneous line with the same slow, narrated precision, and when the needle slid into the skin of my upper arm I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste copper and crushed Xavier's fingers in mine.
He didn't wince. Didn't flinch. Just squeezed back with exactly the right amount of pressure, firm and grounding and real, and said, "There you go. All done. You did so good."
There it was again. That phrase. That tone. The one that bypassed every defense I had left and sank straight into the hollow, aching place at my center that I'd been pretending didn't exist since long before the warehouse.
Doc taped the line in place and connected a small bag of fluid that he hung from a hook Xavier produced from somewhere.
"I'll be in the living room," Doc said, gathering his things with that same unhurried calm. "I want to monitor her through the night, check in every couple of hours. But she needs sleep more than anything right now. Real sleep, not sedation. Her body needs to remember how to do it on its own."
He directed this at Xavier, not me, and I should have bristled at being talked about like I wasn't in the room. I didn't. I was too tired to bristle. Too tired to do anything except exist against the solid wall of Xavier's chest and listen to the steady metronome of his heart.
The door clicked shut behind Doc, and the room went quiet.
Not the oppressive, suffocating quiet of the rooms, not the kind of silence that pressed in on you until you started talking to yourself just to prove you still had a voice.
This quiet was different. It was soft. Inhabited.
The tick of a clock somewhere down the hall.
The gentle rush of forced air through a heating vent.
The slow drip of the fluid bag doing its work.
And Xavier's heartbeat. Always that.
"You should sleep," he said.
"I can't." The response was automatic, reflexive.
Sleep meant vulnerability. Sleep meant waking up and not knowing where you were, not knowing what they'd done to you while you were under, not knowing if the needle marks on your arm were from the IV or from something else entirely.
"I can't sleep. If I close my eyes, I'll be back there. "
"You won't." His voice was so certain. How was he so certain? "You're in my bed, in my house, with a security system that would make the Pentagon jealous and a very grumpy doctor camped out in my living room. Nothing is getting through that door that I don't allow through it."
My house. My bed. The possessiveness of those words should have frightened me. After eight weeks of belonging to someone else, of being owned, cataloged, numbered, the last thing I should have wanted was another person laying claim to the space around me.
But it didn't feel like a cage. It felt like a perimeter. Like the difference between walls that lock you in and walls that keep the monsters out.
"Tell me something," I said, and I didn't know where the request came from. Some desperate, grasping part of me that needed his voice more than the fluids dripping into my arm. "Anything. Just talk. So I know you're still here."
He was quiet for a moment. Not the hesitation of someone who didn't know what to say, but the thoughtful pause of someone choosing carefully.