Chapter Six
Xavier
I heard every word.
The house wasn't that big, and I'd spent twenty years in environments where the ability to listen through walls was the difference between going home and going home in a box.
Doc had left so I didn't have him as a distraction.
I didn't need to press my ear to the door.
I just stood in the hallway outside the bedroom where I'd retreated to give them privacy—because Molly deserved time with people who loved her, and hovering in the doorway like a possessive gargoyle wasn't going to help her heal—and I heard Maria Volkov plant a landmine in the middle of the fragile ground Molly had only just started to stand on.
You must feel like you're imposing.
My jaw clenched so hard I felt the pressure in my temples.
I braced one hand against the hallway wall and breathed the way the Army shrink had taught me after Bagram, when the rage came in waves so big they blotted out rational thought.
The breathing helped. Marginally. Enough that I didn't walk back into that room and tell Maria Volkov exactly what I thought of a woman who visited someone fresh out of captivity and managed to make the conversation about her childcare situation within two minutes.
But I couldn't say anything. That was the thing that burned.
I couldn't call her out, couldn't correct the record, couldn't stand in front of Molly and dismantle every poisoned syllable Maria had just fed her, because doing it in front of Maria would turn it into a confrontation, and confrontation was the last thing Molly's nervous system could handle right now.
And doing it in front of Katya would put Katya in the impossible position of choosing sides within her own family, which wasn't fair to a woman who'd spent eight weeks sick with worry and was clearly already fighting the urge to throttle her cousin herself.
I heard Katya's voice, low and sharp, saying something in Russian that I didn't understand but whose tone translated perfectly: shut up, Maria. And Maria's answering laugh—light, airy, the laugh of a woman who'd just lobbed a grenade and was pretending she'd thrown a tennis ball.
The visit lasted another twenty minutes.
I stayed in the hallway for most of it, close enough to hear the shift in Molly's voice.
The way it had gone smaller after Maria's comment, the way her responses shortened from sentences to single words, the way the warmth that had flooded her voice when she'd first heard Katya's name had cooled into something careful and withdrawn.
I cataloged every change the way I'd catalog terrain features on a patrol route, mapping the damage so I'd know where to step carefully when it was time to rebuild.
When they finally emerged, Katya came first. She stopped in the hallway and looked up at me with those enormous blue eyes, and I saw everything in them—fury at her cousin, grief for Molly, gratitude toward me, and a fierce, protective love that reminded me so much of Abuela it made my chest ache.
"She needs you," Katya said quietly. "Please don't let her—"
"I won't," I said.
Katya searched my face for a moment, then nodded once. A single, decisive motion that carried the weight of trust being transferred. She touched my arm briefly, her fingers light as a bird landing, and then she was moving toward the front door. “I’ll tell Boris she’ll be staying here.”
Maria followed, her heels clicking against the hardwood with the metronomic precision of someone who was never in a hurry because the world could wait. She paused when she reached me, tilting her head with that photogenic smile.
"Thank you again for taking care of her," she said, and her tone was warm and genuine and completely, utterly calculated. "I know this must be such an imposition on your normal routine. If there's anything I can do to help transition her back to her own space—"
"There's no imposition." I kept my voice even.
Civil. The voice I used in briefings with people whose security clearance didn't entitle them to the full picture.
"She's staying here for the foreseeable future, under the care of our physician who has experience with similar situations. Her recovery is the only priority."
Maria's smile held, but something shifted behind it—a recalculation, the quick mental arithmetic of a woman reassessing how much force it would take to move an obstacle she'd initially underestimated. "Of course. I just meant that eventually—"
"Eventually is a long way off." I met her eyes and held them, and I let her see just enough of what lived behind my professional exterior to understand that this particular conversation had a shelf life of about three more seconds.
"The children are welcome to send drawings.
Katya is welcome anytime. Molly will reach out when she's ready. "
The when she's ready hung between us like a gate swinging shut. Maria heard it. Her smile thinned at the edges, almost imperceptibly, and then she patted my arm the way you'd pat a large dog whose temperament you weren't entirely sure of.
"You're very dedicated," she said, and it sounded like a compliment the way a silk scarf sounds like a gift when it's being used to tie your hands. "Molly's lucky to have such a thorough rescuer."
She walked out. The front door closed behind her, Katya, and their bodyguards with a soft click, and I stood in the hallway and let the silence settle before I moved.
Then I went to the kitchen. I made a fresh mug of broth, with a little extra salt the way she'd started to prefer it, though she didn't know I'd noticed the way her face relaxed fractionally more with the saltier batches.
I set it on a small tray next to the oatmeal that had gone cold during the visit and would need to be remade, and I carried the broth down the hallway to the bedroom.
She was exactly where I'd expected her to be.
Curled on her side, facing away from the door, the pillow clutched to her chest, her knees drawn up so tightly she was almost folded in half.
The posture of someone trying to take up as little space as possible.
The posture of someone who'd just been reminded that she was taking up too much.
I set the tray on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed. Didn't touch her. Not yet. Gave her the space to feel me there without the pressure of contact, the way you sit near a fire and let someone choose to move closer to the warmth.
"She's wrong," I said.
Molly didn't move. But her breathing changed—a tiny hitch, a catch in the exhale that told me she was listening and also that she was very close to crying again and was trying desperately not to.
"I know you heard what Maria said, and I know what your brain is doing with it right now.
I know because I've got the same kind of brain.
The kind that takes one poisoned sentence and builds an entire case out of it, with evidence and witnesses and a closing argument that always ends with you don't deserve this. "
Still nothing. But her fingers had tightened on the pillow.
"So I'm going to say something, and I need you to hear it with the part of you that trusts me, not the part that Maria just got her hooks into.
" I reached out and rested my hand on her ankle—the lightest possible contact, just my palm against the thin cotton of the sweatpants Katya had brought her, warm and undemanding.
"You are not imposing on me. You are not a burden I'm tolerating out of obligation.
You are not an inconvenience I'm too polite to mention.
And this—" I gestured at the room, the fluid bag, the coat hook, the dent in the mattress where my body had been for two nights straight.
"This is not a favor I'm doing for Boris Sidorov or Katya or anyone else. This is exactly where I want to be."
She made a sound. Small. Wounded. The sound of someone who wanted to believe something so badly that the wanting itself was painful.
"Maria needs a nanny," I continued, keeping my voice in that low register that I'd learned could reach her even when the panic couldn't. "Maria walked into this room and saw your recovery as a timeline she needed to accelerate so she could get her childcare back.
That's not concern. That's logistics wearing a dress and heels. "
A wet, startled sound escaped her. A half sob, half something that could have been a laugh if it had been given enough room to breathe. Her shoulders shook once.
"I'm not going to tell you how to feel about her," I said "because you're a grown woman and your relationships are yours to navigate. But I am going to tell you what I see, because you asked me seven days ago to tell you when things are real, and I take my promises seriously."
I moved my hand from her ankle to her calf, a slow slide upward that stopped well short of anything but comfort. Giving her the chance to pull away. She didn't.
"What I see is a woman who survived something unsurvivable.
What I see is someone whose body is fighting its way back from chemical dependency one hour at a time, who ate a third of a mug of broth this morning and kept it down, who sat up on her own for the first time only a day ago and didn't even realize what a victory that was because she was too busy worrying about whether she was taking up too much space in my bed.
" My voice roughened on the last few words, and I didn't try to smooth it out.
She needed to hear that this wasn't a speech I'd rehearsed.
This was the truth scraping its way out of me with all its jagged edges intact.
"What I see is a woman who is worth every single second of sleep I haven't gotten, and I would trade every second of sleep I will ever get for the privilege of being the person she holds on to. "
She rolled over.