Chapter Five
Molly
A week later, I was sitting upright.
It didn't sound like much. In the grand catalog of human achievements, woman sits up in bed without assistance ranks somewhere below toddler stacks three blocks and above man remembers to put toilet seat down.
But for me, on that Tuesday morning—Xavier had told me it was Tuesday, had started anchoring me to days of the week like tent pegs driven into soft ground—sitting upright without the room tilting sideways felt like planting a flag on Everest.
I was propped against the headboard with two pillows behind me and a third in my lap that I was pretending I didn't need to hold.
Xavier had gone to the kitchen to make me oatmeal, actual oatmeal, with brown sugar and a sliver of banana that he'd cut into pieces so small they were practically molecular, because Doc had said my stomach needed to relearn portion sizes the way a baby learns to crawl.
One thing at a time. One tiny piece at a time.
I could hear him moving around out there.
Cabinet doors opening and closing. The clink of a spoon against ceramic.
The low murmur of his voice as he talked to someone—Doc, probably, or maybe Gideon, who'd been in and out of the house like a very large, very quiet ghost. The sounds of a life happening around me rather than to me, and every single one of them was a small miracle I was trying not to take for granted.
The withdrawal had eased. Not gone completely as my hands still trembled when I held the broth mug, and the nights were still a gauntlet of cold sweats and the kind of dreams that made me wake up clawing at the sheets, but the worst of it had passed.
Doc had tapered the medication with meticulous precision, adjusting doses based on my symptoms, always telling me what he was doing and why, always giving me the choice to say stop.
I hadn't needed to say it yet. Not because I was brave, but because Xavier was always there, narrating, translating, turning the clinical into the comprehensible.
Xavier.
Even thinking his name did something to the inside of my chest—a warm compression, like a hand gently squeezing a heart that had forgotten it could feel anything other than fear.
Seven days. I'd known this man for seven days, and already his heartbeat was more familiar to me than my own. Already the sound of his boots in the hallway made something in me settle, the way a tuning fork stops vibrating when you press it against a surface. Already the word Daddy lived in my mouth like a second language I'd been studying my whole life and was only now being given permission to speak. The first time I’d met Katya, I’d tumbled down that rabbit hole on my laptop with an insane sort of jealousy and surfaced knowing exactly what I wanted.
We hadn't talked about it again. He hadn't pushed.
Hadn't brought it up. But the dynamic had shifted between us in ways that didn't need naming to be felt.
The way he checked in before touching me, always before, never assuming.
The way he said good girl when I finished my broth or took my medication or let Doc check my vitals without flinching, and the way those two words rewired my entire nervous system every single time, flooding me with a warmth that the withdrawal couldn't touch.
The way he'd started calling me sweetheart in the space between waking and sleeping, when his guard was down and mine was too, and the word settled over me like a blanket I never wanted to crawl out from under.
I knew it was too fast, too fragile, too tangled up in trauma and gratitude and the chemical chaos of withdrawal to be trusted entirely.
The rational part of my brain—the part that was slowly, painstakingly reassembling itself from the wreckage—kept reminding me that intensity born in crisis wasn't the same as intimacy built over time.
That what I felt might be a survival response dressed up in onesies.
That the man who held me through the shaking and the vomiting and the nightmares might not be the same man who existed in the ordinary world, where there were no rooftops and no rescue missions and no broken women who needed him to breathe for them.
But then he'd walk into the room with fruit cut into baby-sized pieces and that look on his face—the one that was half soldier and half something infinitely softer—and the rational part of my brain would go very quiet, and the rest of me would just want.
I was in the middle of this particular spiral when I heard the front door open.
Not the careful, operator-quiet way Gideon entered. This was a normal door opening. A knock first, then the sound of Xavier's voice in the entryway, and then other voices. Female voices. Familiar ones.
My body did two things simultaneously: it went rigid with the Pavlovian terror of unexpected visitors, and it lurched forward with a recognition so visceral it bypassed my brain entirely.
"Katya?" I breathed.
Footsteps in the hallway. Xavier appeared in the doorway first—always first, always the barrier between me and anything I hadn't been prepared for—and his expression was carefully neutral in a way that I'd learned meant he was managing something.
"You've got visitors," he said, leaning against the doorframe.
"Katya Sidorov and her cousin Maria. They've been asking to see you since the night we brought you home.
I told them you needed time, but Katya called this morning and I wasn't expecting them this early.
" He paused, reading my face with that preternatural attentiveness that made me feel simultaneously seen and exposed. "I can send them away. Say the word."
"No." The answer was immediate. Surprising, even to me. "No, I want to see Katya. She must have been—"
I couldn't finish the sentence because Katya was already pushing past Xavier with the unstoppable force of a very small Russian woman who had decided where she was going, and Xavier, to his credit, simply stepped aside and let the force of nature through.
"Molly." Katya's voice broke on my name.
She was tiny—shorter than me, which was saying something—with white-blonde hair pulled into a braid and enormous blue eyes that were currently swimming with tears.
She stopped at the edge of the bed like she'd hit an invisible wall, her hands clasped in front of her, her whole body vibrating with the effort of not launching herself at me. "Oh, Molly. Oh, myshka."
Little mouse. Which was funny coming from her. "Hi," I said, and my voice wobbled, but I opened my arms.
She was on the bed in a heartbeat, her arms around me with a careful tenderness that told me someone—Xavier—had briefed her on my physical state.
She smelled like expensive perfume and something sweet, like vanilla, and her embrace was so different from Xavier's, smaller, softer, the hug of someone who understood fragility from the inside, that a different kind of tears came.
Not the desperate, drowning tears of the first night.
These were warmer. Quieter. The tears of being found by someone who'd been looking.
"I'm sorry," Katya whispered against my hair. "I'm so sorry we didn't find you sooner. Boris tore this city apart, Molly. He had every person he knew searching. When Gideon's team found the warehouse—" She pulled back, her hands on my shoulders, her blue eyes fierce and bright.
"I'm okay," I said, which was such an absurd lie that Katya's expression told me exactly what she thought of it. "I'm getting there. Xavier's been—"
"I know." Her eyes flicked to the doorway where Xavier still stood, arms crossed, watching.
Something passed between them, almost an acknowledgment, a sizing up, the silent negotiation of two people who both considered me theirs in different ways.
Katya was Boris's Little. She understood the dynamic I was stumbling into with Xavier in a way that most people couldn't, and the look she gave him was equal parts gratitude and warning.
Thank you for keeping her safe. Hurt her and I will end you in ways my husband hasn't invented yet.
Xavier, for his part, simply inclined his head. Message received.
"You look thin," Katya said, turning back to me with the kind of blunt honesty that only someone who genuinely loved you could deliver without it stinging. Her fingers found mine and squeezed. "But you look alive. And you're sitting up. That's—" Her voice hitched.
"I'm here," I said, squeezing her fingers back. "I'm here, and I'm getting better."
The sound of heels on hardwood announced the second visitor before she appeared in the doorway, and the contrast between Katya's entrance and Maria's was the kind of thing that told you everything you needed to know about two people without a single word being spoken.
Where Katya had stopped at the edge of the bed and waited for permission, Maria Volkov swept into the room like she was entering a restaurant where she had a standing reservation.
She was taller than Katya, darker-haired, with the kind of angular beauty that photographed well and the kind of wardrobe that itemized cost more than most people's monthly rent.
Her smile was immediate and wide and perfectly calibrated.
The smile of a woman who had mastered the art of looking concerned while simultaneously cataloging every detail of a room for later use.
"Molly, oh my God." She pressed a hand to her chest, her manicured nails catching the light. "Look at you. We've been absolutely sick with worry. The children have been asking about you every single day. Sasha drew you a picture, I have it in my bag somewhere."