Chapter Ten
Xavier
I heard her laugh before I saw her.
It came through the kitchen door like something smuggled out of a better world, bright and startled and real in a way that stopped me three steps into the house with my keys still in my hand and my chest cracking open along fault lines I hadn't known existed until that sound hit them.
Molly was laughing. Not the thin, waterlogged almost-laughs I'd been coaxing out of her for two weeks like a man trying to start a fire with wet wood.
This was the real thing. Full-bodied. Unguarded.
The laugh of a woman who'd forgotten, for at least a few seconds, that the world was unfair.
Maddox nearly walked into my back.
"Move, Moreno," he said, but his voice was quiet because he'd heard it too, and Maddox, for all his tactical bluster and three-legged-dog-smuggling chaos, understood exactly what that sound meant coming from a woman who'd been caged for eight weeks.
He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed once. Said nothing else. Didn't need to.
Dion came in behind us, closing the kitchen door with the silent precision that was as much a part of him as his heartbeat.
His eyes swept the kitchen, but finding nothing but Doc's teacup in the sink and a plate with sandwich crusts that had been trimmed off with surgical accuracy according to my specifications, he allowed himself the barest fraction of a nod. Safe. Secure. Carry on.
"Sounds like the girls are having fun," Maddox said, toeing off his boots because he'd learned—the hard way—that boots on carpet was a capital offense in Little-occupied spaces.
I set my keys on the counter. My hands were steady. The rest of me was less certain.
The morning had been hell. Not operational hell, as the briefing on Penny's case had been productive, the intelligence solid, the team sharp.
The hell had been internal. Three hours of sitting in a room that didn't have Molly in it, listening to updates and reviewing surveillance footage and mapping network connections, while a part of my brain that had been rewired over weeks of constant proximity to her heartbeat kept pinging like a proximity alarm.
Is she okay. Is she eating. Is she breathing.
Did the nightmare come. Did she call. Check the phone. Check it again.
She hadn't called. Not once. And I didn't know if that was a good sign that she was coping without me, or a devastating one.
Then there was this morning.
The kiss.
I'd felt it coming the way you felt a storm system building on the horizon.
The shift in atmospheric pressure, the charge in the air.
The way she'd risen up on her toes with her fingers curled in my henley, her face tilted up and her eyes half-closed, and everything in me had screamed yes and everything else in me had screamed not yet, and the not yet had won by a margin so thin it could have been measured in microns.
I'd turned my head. I'd kissed her forehead.
I'd said be good like she was six years old and I was dropping her off at a goddamn birthday party, and I'd walked out of that house and sat in my truck in the driveway for four full minutes with my forehead against the steering wheel and my hands shaking, actually shaking, the way hers shook.
The way they'd been shaking for four weeks because the taste of almost was worse than anything I'd endured in over fifteen years of military service.
I wanted to kiss her so badly it was rewriting my DNA.
I wanted to kiss her with the same desperate, consuming certainty that I wanted to breathe, and every single day that want grew larger and more impossible to contain.
Every single day I shoved it back down behind the barricade of she's not ready and you don't get to want this yet and what if she wakes up healed and whole and realizes you were just the life raft, not the shore.
Gideon had noticed. Of course Gideon had noticed.
The man read people the way most people read street signs, automatically and with complete comprehension.
He'd pulled me aside after the briefing, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes doing that thing where they saw straight through every layer of operational composure to the raw, bleeding thing underneath.
His hand had tightened. "Don't burn yourself down trying to be noble, Xavier. I've watched good men do that. It doesn't end the way they think it will."
I hadn't answered. Because Gideon was right, and being right didn't change the fact that Molly was four weeks out of captivity, and her endocrine system was in freefall, and she'd called me Daddy during withdrawal, and I had no way—no way—to know if any of it would survive the transition from crisis to ordinary life.
And if she healed and looked at me and saw not a partner but a crutch she'd outgrown, the destruction wouldn't be theoretical.
It would be the kind of damage that didn't heal.
Not for me. And I refused to let it damage her.
So I'd turned my head. And I'd hated every microsecond of it.
Now I was standing in my kitchen, listening to her laugh, and the sound was doing things to my chest that should have required medical intervention.
"You going in there or are you going to stand in the kitchen communing with the countertop until Christmas?
" Maddox asked, already moving toward the living room with the particular energy of a man whose Little was on the other side of a wall and whose patience for separation had a half-life of approximately forty-five seconds.
"Give me a minute," I said.
Dion leaned against the counter beside me, arms crossed, saying nothing.
Dion's silences were their own form of communication—dense, layered, calibrated to the situation with the same precision he brought to everything.
This particular silence said: I know what's happening inside you right now, and I'm not going to make you talk about it, but I'm also not going to let you pretend it isn't happening.
"She tried to kiss me this morning," I said, keeping my voice very low. I didn't know why I said it. The words just came out.
Dion's expression didn't change. "And?"
"And I turned my head like a coward and kissed her forehead and told her to be good."
"That's not cowardice. That's discipline."
"It felt like cowardice."
"Most discipline does." Dion uncrossed his arms and listened as Doc’s gruff voice joined the others coming from the living room. "You did the right thing, Xavier. You know you did. She's barely past acute withdrawal. Her hormonal panels are still—"
"I know what her panels are. I have the numbers memorized.
I could recite her cortisol levels in my sleep.
" I pressed both palms flat against the counter and stared at my hands, broad, scarred, steady.
The hands that held her every night. The hands that had turned her face away from mine this morning with a gentleness that had cost me more than any op I'd ever run.
Dion looked at me with those dark, unreadable eyes that had seen things neither of us talked about anymore—the failed rescues, the wounds that had redirected the entire trajectory of his life. When he spoke, his voice was low enough that it wouldn't carry past the kitchen.
"The problem would be if you didn't want her, if you were going through the motions of care without the feeling underneath. That would be obligation. What you're describing is something else entirely."
"What if she doesn't—" I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't make my mouth form the words that lived in the darkest part of the fear: what if she heals and doesn't want me anymore.
"Then you'll survive it," Dion said, without hesitation, without softness, with the brutal clarity of a man who'd survived things that should have killed him and knew that survival was possible even when it didn't feel like it.
"But Zee—" He stepped closer, and his hand gripped the back of my neck the way it had on a dozen extraction points, a dozen rooftops, a dozen moments where the only thing keeping one of us upright was the other's refusal to let go.
"I've watched you sleep sitting up that first week because she needs your heartbeat under her ear.
And I've watched her. The way she tracks you across a room.
The way her breathing changes when you walk in.
The way she says your name." His grip tightened.
"That's not a trauma response, brother. That's a woman falling in love with the man who caught her, and the fact that the catching happened during a crisis doesn't make the love less real.
It just means you're going to have to be patient enough to let her prove it. "
I exhaled. Long and slow and shaking, the way I'd taught Molly to breathe through the panic. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," Dion said and released my neck. And just like that, the moment was over, folded away into the space between us where all the important things lived. Unspoken, unfinished, but understood.
From the living room, I heard Emily's voice rise in theatrical outrage: "The otters were NOT cheating, and I will die on this hill—"
Maddox's low laugh rumbled underneath it, and I could picture Clare probably already in his lap or tucked against his side.
“Come on,” Dion said, and I followed him through. The living room looked like a craft store had been hit by a small, joyful tornado. Doc was sat in the corner grinning like a proud grandad.