Chapter Sixteen
Molly
I was awake because I hadn’t really slept when Katya’s name flashed on my screen. "Molly? Are you awake?"
"I'm here," I answered her.
"Sorry to call." Katya's voice was hushed in the way that meant Boris was either sleeping nearby or she was calling from the bathroom again—the marble-tiled sanctuary she retreated to when she wanted to have conversations that didn't get filtered through the Pakhan's security apparatus.
I could hear the faint echo that confirmed it.
Bathroom. Probably sitting on the edge of that absurd soaking tub that could have doubled as a small swimming pool.
"I'm awake," I repeated, which was the understatement of the century.
I'd been awake for the entire night, lying in my new sheets that smelled like nothing and staring at the ceiling that was the wrong ceiling, counting breaths that nobody was counting with me.
The coloring book on the nightstand had been my only companion, its glossy cover catching the ambient light from the street in a way that made the rabbit look vaguely judgmental, as if even a cartoon woodland creature could see the dark circles forming under my eyes. "What time is it?"
"It’s almost six. I would not call so early except—" She paused. The particular pause of a woman choosing her words with the care of someone who'd learned that information was currency and spent it accordingly. "Gregor told me something, and I think you should know."
My stomach dropped. Gregor was Boris's head of security—a man built like a refrigerator with the conversational warmth to match—and anything Gregor told Katya at six in the morning was either very bad or very complicated, and in my experience, those categories overlapped more often than not.
"Is everyone okay?" The question came out fast, automatic, and the everyone meant one person and we both knew it.
"Everyone is fine. Everyone is—" Another pause. A soft exhale that sounded suspiciously like a laugh being suppressed. "Molly, Xavier was outside your building last night."
I sat up. The sheets pooled at my waist, the cool air of the apartment hitting my bare arms, and I barely noticed because my brain had snagged on the sentence and was turning it over and over like a pair of dice you were about to throw.
"What do you mean, outside my building?"
"I mean outside. In his truck. Parked across the street.
Gregor's cameras picked him up around eight thirty.
He walked around the building—" She definitely laughed this time, a quiet, musical sound that carried all the affection and exasperation of a woman who'd been married to a man whose concept of boundaries was similarly elastic.
"Six times, Molly. He walked around the building six times.
Like he was doing a perimeter check. Gregor almost sent a team because he thought someone was—how did he say it—conducting pre-breach reconnaissance. "
I pressed my hand over my mouth. Not to stifle a sob, even though there was one in there, but because the image was so vivid and so Xavier that it hit me like a physical blow.
Him in that truck. In the dark. Circling my building like a sentinel who'd been relieved of duty but couldn't bring himself to leave the post. Checking the fire escape.
Testing the back door. Running the same operational patterns he'd run in war zones, except the thing he was protecting wasn't a forward operating base or a government high-value target.
It was me. Asleep—or not asleep—on the other side of a wall he'd promised not to cross.
"Gideon called him," Katya continued. "Made him go home. But Gregor says—and this is the part I wanted to tell you—Gregor says he didn't leave. After the call. He sat in the truck just... sitting. Looking at your window."
The tears came without warning. Not the controlled, therapeutic tears I'd managed on the phone with Anna, or the fierce, defiant tears I'd shed in Xavier's bedroom.
These were something else—hot and messy and immediate, the tears of a woman who'd spent the worst night of her life convincing herself she'd done the right thing and had just been handed proof that the man she'd left was spending his worst night in exactly the same way.
Not sleeping. Not okay. Not handling it with the stoic, military discipline she'd attributed to him in the dark hours when her own resolve had wavered.
Just sitting in his truck outside her building, staring at her window, unable to leave.
"Molly?" Katya's voice gentled. "Are you crying?"
"No," I said, crying.
"He loves you very much. This is not news, I think. And he didn’t leave despite whatever threats my husband delivered."
"It's not news." I wiped my face with the back of my hand—a graceless, inefficient gesture that Xavier would have replaced with a tissue produced from somewhere, because the man had tissues in every room and every pocket and probably every tactical vest he'd ever worn, as if preparedness for tears was as critical as preparedness for combat.
"Katya, I have to go. I have to—I need to do something before work. "
"You are going to Maria's today, yes? For the children?"
"Yes." My first day back. The thought sat in my stomach like lead. "I start at nine."
"Good. The children miss you. Sasha asks about you every day. He tells Anya that you are on vacation, which is—" She made a sound that was half laugh, half sigh. "—the kindest lie a seven-year-old has ever told."
We said goodbye. I sat in bed for another minute, holding my phone against my chest the way I'd held the coloring book last night, and I let the image settle: Xavier in his truck, in the dark, watching my window.
Not coming in. Not knocking. Not overriding my decision or breaking down the door or doing any of the hundred things his training and his instincts and the raw, howling need I'd heard in his voice when he said don't go would have made easy.
Just sitting there. Being close. Being miserable.
Being brave in the only way he knew how, which was to stand guard over something he loved and let it choose its own path, even when the path led away from him.
He'd matched me. That was the thing that cracked me open all over again, sitting in my bed with the morning light turning the new window into a rectangle of pale gold.
I'd spent the night on my floor, then in my bed, then pacing, then back in bed, fighting the urge to call him with everything I had, and he'd spent the same night in his truck, fighting the urge to come to me with everything he had.
We'd been ten feet apart, separated by brick and glass and Boris's locks and the stubborn, agonizing mindset of two people trying to love each other well enough to let it hurt.
I got out of bed.
My legs were steadier than they'd been last night.
Not steady—I wasn't going to pretend the night hadn't extracted its toll, and the face that stared back at me from the bathroom mirror looked like it had been assembled from spare parts by someone working in bad lighting—but steadier.
Functional. Anna's word. They work, Molly. Trust them.
I brushed my teeth with the mint toothpaste I'd chosen myself.
Washed my face. Pulled my hair back into the simple braid that had become my default, and my fingers hesitated for just a moment at the end, where a ribbon would go if I were using one.
Abby's ribbons were in the suitcase. The pink one.
The lavender one that matched the set Abby wore in her own pigtails, the one she'd pressed into my hands with the shy, earnest gravity of a woman offering a piece of herself.
For when you're ready, she'd said. No rush.
Why hadn't I allowed myself? Because being what I wanted felt like surrender?
I left my hair plain. Not because I wasn't ready but because today wasn't about ribbons.
Today was about coffee. One specific coffee, for one specific man, delivered by a woman who was proving she could walk toward him from a position of strength instead of falling toward him from a position of need.
I dressed quickly. Jeans and a blouse that was professional enough for Maria's but soft enough that it didn't feel like armor.
Shoes that were mine. A jacket that was mine.
Everything mine, everything chosen, everything carrying no trace of cedar except the trace that lived in my memory and wouldn't wash out no matter how many times I laundered myself.
The coffee shop was three blocks from my apartment It was called Morrow's, and it was run by a woman named Delilah who had opinions about pour-over technique and a chalkboard menu that changed daily based on what she described as "vibes and bean availability." I'd been a regular once. Before.
The bell above the door chimed when I walked in, and the sound was so ordinary, so utterly mundane that it almost undid me.
Ordinary things had a weight now that they hadn't carried before.
The smell of fresh grounds. The hiss of the espresso machine.
The murmur of early-morning customers who were tired and uncaffeinated and blissfully unaware that the woman standing in line behind them had spent the last eight weeks learning how to eat solid food and breathe without assistance and sleep next to a man she loved without being able to kiss him.