Chapter Twelve
Xavier
I waved off my last interviewee. I liked Kathy.
Smart, sharp, and eager. I was lucky she’d just moved near Tampa after a divorce, because she’d been an assistant manager of a huge nightclub in Miami.
Evening hours suited her perfectly, and coupled with the cheaper living costs here and being close to her elderly parents, it worked out well for both of us.
At least something was working.
It had been nearly another four weeks since the kiss.
A week of awkward silences where I was convinced she was going to leave, but then I’d started going back to work a few hours at a time.
The girls had come around more, and she’d met Abby and Lottie, and the five of them together terrified all of us.
She saw the same therapist, Anna, that the other girls had used, and that seemed to be going well.
I was glad she’d been in touch with her college and agreed to take the rest of the year off.
I wasn’t happy she was going back to work at Maria’s tomorrow.
But it was her life. At least she was still here.
I’d heard Katya tell her the apartment wasn’t a problem because apparently the landlord owed Boris a favor, and he’d decided to remodel that floor, including hers.
But that meant I was on borrowed time because I was convinced as soon as it was ready, she’d be gone.
She was doing exactly what I’d wanted for her—getting her life back—except I knew that this life wouldn’t have me in it.
Because she was shedding our life. She’d stopped calling me Daddy.
She still colored with the others but hadn’t shown any interest in any of the things Abby liked.
The clothes she wore screamed adult. Her hair was in a simple braid, but she didn't use any of the colored ribbons Abby had brought her.
I had a list of things I was desperate to buy for her including a blue teddy I was certain she'd adore, but I daren't get any of it.
I was convinced my worse fear was happening before my eyes. That she’d confused protection and gratitude with love and reacted accordingly. She wasn’t just letting me go, she was finding out she didn’t want to be a Little either.
The house was too quiet when I walked through the kitchen door.
Not the comfortable quiet of Molly napping under the weighted blanket while Doc read in the study.
Not the productive quiet of her coloring at the coffee table while I worked on reports at the counter.
This was a different quiet—an absence quiet.
The kind of silence that had shape and weight and pressed against the walls like something had been subtracted from the air itself.
"Molly?"
No answer. The kitchen was empty. Her chamomile mug wasn't out.
The coffee maker was cold. The small signs of habitation that I'd learned to read like terrain markers—her slippers by the couch, the coloring book left open on the coffee table, the throw blanket she dragged everywhere like a security object—were missing.
Not missing. Put away. Tidied. The living room looked like a photograph of itself, staged and lifeless, every cushion in place, every surface cleared.
My heart rate spiked so fast the edges of my vision darkened.
"Molly."
Louder now. I was moving through the house with a speed that was pure operational instinct, clearing rooms the way I'd cleared buildings in Fallujah—systematic, efficient, terrified.
Living room: empty. Study: empty. The guest bathroom: door open, lights off, nobody.
The direct-line phone was still in the kitchen where I'd left it this morning, and the sight of it sitting there—unused, abandoned—sent a bolt of ice through my chest so violent I had to brace myself against the doorframe.
She was gone. She'd finally done what Maria had been angling for, what the apartment renovation was preparing for, what every step toward independence had been building toward.
She'd packed her things and walked out while I was interviewing Kathy and thinking about staffing schedules, and she hadn't even called to say—
The sound came from the other end of the house. Faint. The groan of old pipes, the particular percussion of water draining through the plumbing in the master bath.
I nearly ran to the bedroom.
The bedroom door was closed—not all the way, because we didn't do closed doors, but pulled to the way I'd pull it when I wanted privacy but not separation.
I didn't knock. I didn't think. I didn't do anything except push the door open with a force that sent it swinging into the wall because my brain was still running the she's gone scenario and every rational circuit had been overridden by something older and more desperate than reason.
Molly was three steps out of the ensuite bathroom, haloed in steam, her skin flushed pink from the heat, her damp hair clinging to her neck and shoulders in dark ribbons, and she was wearing nothing but a towel.
A small towel. The hand towel, not the bath sheet—the one that barely covered the distance between her chest and her upper thighs, clutched in one fist at her sternum, her knuckles white against the terrycloth, her eyes enormous and startled and locked on mine.
We stared at each other.
The steam curled between us like a living thing, drifting through the doorway in lazy tendrils that caught the late-afternoon light from the bedroom window and turned it golden.
Water droplets tracked down her collarbones, following the shape of bones that were less prominent now than they'd been eight weeks ago—seven pounds regained, then another four, and the difference was written across her body in curves that hadn't been there before, in the softness returning to her cheeks and her arms and the places where captivity had carved her down to the bone.
She was beautiful.
Her chest rose and fell rapidly. The flush on her skin deepened—not from the bath anymore, but from something else entirely, something I recognized because I could feel the same heat climbing my own neck, spreading across my chest, pooling low in my stomach with a heaviness that was impossible to misidentify.
"I heard you come in," she said. Her voice was steady. Steadier than mine would have been if I'd tried to speak, which I hadn't, because my throat had closed around every word I'd ever known and was refusing to release a single one. "I called out, but you were already—"
"I thought you'd left." The words tore out of me, raw and unprocessed, bypassing every filter I owned. "I came in and the house was quiet and your things were put away, and the phone was—I thought—"
Understanding moved across her face like light crossing water. "I was cleaning. I took a bath. Xavier, I wouldn't just—"
"I know." I didn't know. That was the problem.
Every day she got stronger was a day she was closer to the door, and I'd been bracing for the sound of it closing behind her with the same grim anticipation I'd brought to every mission where the odds were bad and the extraction uncertain.
"I know. I'm sorry. I should have—the door, I just—"
I was babbling. Xavier Moreno, who'd delivered briefings under mortar fire without a tremor in his voice, was standing in his own bedroom babbling at a woman in a towel because the thirty seconds of believing she was gone had broken something open that I couldn't close back up.
Molly looked at me. Not the way she'd looked at me for the past four weeks, carefully, from a measured distance, with the studied neutrality of a woman who was building something she didn't want me to see until it was finished.
She looked at me the way she'd looked at me that morning she tried to kiss me.
She let go of the towel.
It didn't fall dramatically. It slipped.
Sliding down her body with a whisper of fabric against damp skin, pooling at her feet in a small, pale heap.
And then there was nothing between us. Nothing at all.
Just Molly, standing in the steam and the golden light, naked and trembling and looking at me with eyes that held no confusion.
"Molly." Her name came out like a warning. My hands were fists at my sides. Every muscle in my body had locked, the way they locked when I was resisting a force greater than my training had prepared me for, and the force of her—bare and brave and standing three feet away with her chin lifted and her shoulders back despite the trembling—was greater than anything I had ever been trained for. I was moving before I’d consciously registered it. Three strides. The same three strides that had carried me to the bed every time she screamed and I wasn’t already holding her.
Three strides was the distance between discipline and surrender, and I crossed it like a man stepping off a cliff with my eyes open, fully aware of the fall, choosing it anyway.
My hands found her face first. Cupping her jaw, my thumbs against her cheekbones, her skin damp and impossibly warm under my palms. She was shaking, or I was. Maybe both.
I gazed at her, taking everything in. The way her brown eyes held mine without flinching.
The way her breathing had quickened but her gaze hadn't wavered.
The way she stood in front of me, bare and exposed and choosing to be both, not because she was fragile but because she was brave enough to be vulnerable with a man she trusted not to break her.
"Tell me to stop," I said, and my voice was wrecked with gravel and smoke and something underneath that shook. "Tell me to stop and I will. I'll walk out of this room and I'll—"