Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Xavier
Daddy?
But I dismissed it. She was in shock, still working the sedatives out of her system. Slip of the tongue.
I waited until her breathing evened out—really evened out, not the shallow, hitching rhythm of someone pretending to sleep because unconsciousness felt too much like surrender.
It took almost forty minutes. Forty minutes of my fingers in her hair, my voice low and steady, telling her about Abuela's restaurant and the stray cats and the way San Antonio smelled in August like hot asphalt and blooming jasmine.
Forty minutes of her body releasing its grip on wakefulness one muscle at a time, like a fist slowly uncurling.
When she finally went under, it was sudden.
One moment her fingers were still twisted in my shirt with that white-knuckled desperation, and the next they went slack, her hand falling open against my chest like a flower that had exhausted itself blooming.
Her breathing deepened. Her face, pressed into the hollow of my throat, lost that pinched quality—not all of it, not even most of it, but enough that I could see the ghost of the woman she'd been before. Softer. Younger than twenty-three.
I didn't move. Didn't shift her weight, didn't adjust the arm that was going numb beneath her, didn't do a single thing that might register in whatever fragile place her sleeping brain had found to rest. I just lay there in the dark with her heartbeat fluttering against my ribs like a trapped bird, and I memorized the weight of her.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I extracted it with the kind of slow, surgical precision that would have made my Ranger instructors proud, tilting the screen away from her face.
Gideon: ETA 15. Need to talk.
I typed back one-handed: She's asleep. If anyone wakes her up, I will end them.
Three dots appeared, then: Understood. Tell Doc.
I sent a text to Doc in the living room—Gideon incoming, kitchen, fifteen minutes—and then set the phone on the nightstand and went back to watching Molly breathe.
Thirteen minutes later, I heard the front door open and close with the kind of deliberate quiet that only operators managed.
No fumbling with keys, no heavy footfalls.
Just the soft displacement of air and the nearly inaudible click of the latch.
Gideon moved through spaces the way water moved through cracks—finding the path of least resistance without conscious effort.
I gave it another two minutes, listening to Molly's breathing for any change.
Steady. Deep. The fluid bag was about a third empty, the slow drip doing its work.
Her skin was still too cool against mine, but the gray pallor I'd seen on the rooftop had warmed slightly, and the hand resting against my chest had lost its deathlike chill.
Moving her off me was an operation unto itself.
I slid a pillow into the space my body occupied, easing her down by millimeters, redistributing her weight so gradually that her sleeping brain wouldn't register the absence.
When her fingers found the pillow instead of my shirt, they clutched at it immediately, dragging it against her chest with the same ferocity she'd used on me.
Something about that—the blind, unconscious need to hold on to something, anything—put a crack in my chest that I knew wasn't going to heal anytime soon.
I tucked the blanket around her shoulders, checked the fluid line, and stood there for a long moment looking down at her.
In sleep, without the terror animating her features, I could see the damage more clearly.
The weight loss was severe—her collarbones jutted out beneath the scrub top, and her wrists were so thin I could have circled them with my thumb and forefinger.
The bruising was extensive, most of it in various stages of healing, which meant it hadn't been a single incident but an ongoing pattern.
Restraint marks ringed both wrists like bracelets made of violence.
I turned away before the rage could settle in, because if it settled in, I wasn't going to be able to sit in a kitchen and have a civilized conversation.
I was going to get in my truck and drive back to that warehouse and find the guards we'd zip-tied and introduce them to every technique the U.S.
Army had taught me about inflicting maximum pain with minimum evidence.
Later. Not now. Now she needed me functional, but most of all here.
I left the bedroom door open—wide open, so she could see the hallway if she woke up, so she'd know she wasn't locked in—and padded down the hall in my socks to the kitchen.
Gideon was leaning against my counter with a mug of coffee he'd clearly made himself, because the man had never met a kitchen he wouldn't commandeer.
He looked like he always looked after an operation—sharp-eyed and coiled, the adrenaline metabolized into a controlled alertness that could sustain him for another forty-eight hours if necessary.
Doc sat at the kitchen table with his own coffee, his medical bag open beside him, and a look on his face that I recognized from too many field debriefs.
"How is she?" Gideon asked, keeping his voice at a level that wouldn't carry down the hall.
"Asleep. Finally." I poured myself coffee.
Black, no sugar, the way I'd been drinking it since basic, and leaned against the opposite counter so I had a sightline to the hallway.
If she so much as shifted in that bed, I'd hear it and be back in there before she woke.
"First real sleep she's had in God knows how long. Her body just shut down."
Gideon nodded, studying me over the rim of his mug with those dark eyes that missed exactly nothing.
I knew what he was seeing. I knew what the look on my face was telling him, because Gideon had known me for nine years and could read me the way most people read street signs, automatically, without effort.
"The other women?" I asked.
"All five are at the clinic. Katya's people have translators en route for the ones who don't speak English.
Two are Brazilian, one's Guatemalan, one's Ukrainian, and one's from the Philippines.
All pregnant, ranging from fourteen to thirty-two weeks.
All showing signs of prolonged captivity and forced medical intervention.
" His jaw worked beneath his beard. "Clive Owens and Ruby O'Keefe are in federal custody.
FBI took the handoff from us clean. Dion's contact at the field office made sure of it, and there’s no record of Molly. "
"Good." The word came out flat and insufficient, because good didn't begin to cover what I wanted for Clive Owens and Ruby O'Keefe. What I wanted for them wasn't something the federal justice system was equipped to provide.
Gideon set his mug down and crossed his arms. Here it comes, I thought.
"Boris called."
And there it was.
Boris Sidorov. The Pakhan. The man who'd hired us to find Molly in the first place—not out of the goodness of his heart, because Russian crime lords didn't traffic in goodness, but because Molly was a friend of his wife and an employee, which meant she was under his protection, and an abduction on his territory was a personal affront that demanded resolution.
We'd taken the job because the money was significant and because finding kidnapped women was what we did, regardless of who was footing the bill.
The moral calculus was simple: Molly needed saving, Boris was paying, and the reasons behind the payment were his problem, not ours.
But Boris Sidorov didn't stay in his lane. He never had.
"What does he want?" I asked, though I already knew.
"He wants Molly transferred to his people.
His doctors, his facility, his security.
" Gideon's tone was the diplomatic one; the one he used when he was relaying information he fundamentally disagreed with but was presenting without editorializing so I could form my own response.
"He's not happy she's here. He considers her recovery to be under his jurisdiction since it was his contract. "
"His jurisdiction." The word tasted like acid.
"She's not a piece of evidence. She's not a territory.
She's a woman who spent eight weeks being treated like livestock, and if Boris Sidorov thinks I'm handing her over to another group of strangers in another facility with locked doors and medical staff she's never met—"
"Xavier." Gideon's voice cut through mine with the quiet precision of a scalpel. Not loud. Never loud. Just absolute. "I'm telling you what he said. I'm not telling you to do it."
I exhaled through my nose and unclenched my jaw. The coffee in my mug rippled from the tension in my grip. "What exactly did you tell him?"
"That she was extracted safely, that she's receiving medical attention, and that her current psychological state makes any transfer inadvisable." Gideon picked up his mug again. "He wasn't satisfied with that answer. He wants a call in the morning."
"He can want a lot of things."
"He can also make our lives considerably more complicated if we don't manage this carefully.
" Gideon's eyes held mine. Not a warning, exactly.
More like a map of the terrain ahead, laid out for me to study.
"We took his money, Zee. We used his intel to find the warehouse.
That creates an obligation, whether we like it or not, and Boris is the kind of man who keeps a very detailed ledger. "
I knew that. I knew it the way I knew the weight of my sidearm and the distance from my bedroom to the front door, information that lived in my bones rather than my brain.
Boris Sidorov operated on a system of debts and favors that predated capitalism, and in his world, the person who paid for the rescue owned a piece of the outcome.