༺ RIPPLES ON STILL WATER THREE ༻
CW: dark content, unreliable narrator, Stockholm syndrome, grooming, kidnapping, neglectful parents, psychological manipulation, non consensual sedation
The gates are iron.
Not the decorative, curled kind people bolt onto the fronts of estates so magazines can photograph them in autumn. These swing open on hydraulic press with weighty bars as thick as your wrist (- once things enter, they need permission to leave- )
You notice that first.
Not the estate beyond them. Not the lake glimpsed through the trees, flat and silver under the cloud cover. The gates.
The car rolls through, gravel popping beneath the tires. You watch the gates in the side mirror until the trees close over them like water over a dropped stone and there is nothing left to watch, birch trunks swallowing them whole.
Your throat tightens once. You look forward and you keep your face blank.
You’re good at keeping your face blank.
You learned how early in life at dinner tables with one chair empty, your mother's eyes going somewhere distant, sour wine on her breath, and then snapping back, the practiced smoothing of her expression, the smile arriving a half second too late, and you watched, understanding without being taught that some feelings are only safe on the inside. That the outside is for other people. That you keep the real thing somewhere dark and quiet where no one has to manage it but you. (Your father apologizing with money instead of presence. Empty seats at recitals. Forgotten pickups. The strange, humiliating instinct children have to protect the adults failing them-)
You keep your face blank now.
Outside, birch trees stripe past in the grey light, and the sun bleeds through in a pale strobing rhythm, white and black and white and black and white and- and you breathe through the pressure in your chest that doesn't have a feeling yet, that you are not going to try and figure out, not here, not in this car with Makarov’s shoulder warm against yours and his thumb moving in slow idle circles across your knuckles (- like you are something he has already decided belongs to him- )
He knew your uncle's name.
That thought keeps surfacing quietly enough that it keeps making it past your defenses.
You told him about your parents because lonely girls always do that. You'd told him about the bottles and the forgotten birthdays and the feeling of being a child shaped load bearing wall in a house that was slowly, quietly collapsing. You told him about sometimes forgetting what your father looked like and about the time your mother once stared at a wall for three hours straight and you sat next to her at fourteen years old trying to figure out if this counted as an emergency.
You'd told him all of that on a balcony above London with cognac warming your belly and the city glittering below you. You told him because he listened with total attention and nothing else in the world existed to him while you were speaking.
You did not tell him about Simon.
Not once.
And yet.
“Your uncle Simon.”
The birch trees stripe past. Your hands stay folded. You breathe.
The estate appears out of the treeline, stone and wood, like one of those pictures on pinterest of old money houses tucked into forests in the moutain. Beyond it is a lake, flat and grey and very still, the surface of it unbroken, not a ripple, not a bird, nothing moving on it in any direction as far as you can see.
How wide. The thought whispers in the back of your mind before you can smother it. How far to the opposite bank. How far from the bank to a road. What’s the average temperature this time of the year-
You shove it down automatically, some childish fear that Makarov can read your mind and thoughts like that are dangerous right with him next to you in the car. There is a place you are keeping things now, a cabinet somewhere behind your sternum, things sliding in to place one by one. Simon’s name. The lake. The birds that aren’t there. The fact that Makarov’s heartbeat never changed while yours did.
Makarov's thumb traces your knuckle again. "Beautiful, da?" he says, and his voice is warm, the same warmth since the cafe, since the first cup of coffee, since the moment you realized he possessed the ability to make attention feel chemically similar to safety. "In summer, light stays almost until midnight. You will see this."
You will see this.
Your lungs expand carefully.
“It’s beautiful,” you say, because beautiful is safer than truthful and admiration is often interpreted as compliance.
Inside, an older woman takes your coat. Her eyes move across you once, not unkindly, not curious, just… recognition without surprise. Someone who adjusted her moral framework around survival a long time ago.
And then she is gone with your coat and you are standing in a flagstone entry hall with a staircase curving up to the left and flowers on the side table.
White lilies. Fresh.
Your gaze catches there and stays.
You look at them. You look at the stems cut recently and the petals not yet opened all the way, bought somewhere in the last twenty four hours and arranged and set here, and the nauseating realization that someone purchased these flowers knowing you’d walk through the doorway today and see them there, lands in your stomach like stepping onto a stair that isn't there.
Something cold slips beneath your ribs.
Understanding.
You look away. You breathe.
You are fine, you tell yourself, the same way you did at two in the morning when your mother had gone boneless on the sofa and you were pouring the rest of the vodka down the sink. The same tone you used while sitting on your bed pretending exhaustion wasn’t panic. You are fine and you are going to figure this out and right now you just need to keep your face still.
"Come," Makarov says, and his hand finds the small of your back, and you move with him. (- Because the alternative is not moving and you don't know yet what the price of not moving is and you are not ready to find out-)
The room is on the second floor.
Large windows overlook the lake. Grey light stretched over water like (- skin pulled taut over bone- ) and you walk towards the glass automatically, while behind you drawers open and close in smooth muted thumps.
“You will have everything you need,” he says.
You nod.
The water is father than it looked from below. The treeline is farther still. Distances between furniture. Objects heavy enough to break glass if necessary-
"You are thinking," Makarov says right behind you.
Your spine locks. The skin across your shoulder blades goes very tight, a full body flinch that you swallow before it reaches the surface, shoving it down into the cabinet with everything else, suppressing it fast enough to keep it from becoming visibible. (- When did he get there, you didn’t hear him move-)
His reflection appears over your shoulder in the glass. Dark eyes and a mild expression. The ease of him, that’s the thing, the thing your nervous system keeps snagging on, the way he takes up space like a man who has never once had to justify being exactly where he is.
"The lake," you say and your voice sounds normal. You’re proud of that. "It's beautiful."
He hums. His hands settle on your shoulders from behind and you watch them do it in the glass, watch his thumbs find the line of your shoulder blades, and your pulse climbs one slow rung and stays there.
“Is very private here,” he says. “Very quiet.” His eyes meet yours in the reflection and hold. “No one comes to this place without invitation from me.”
Your stomach drops one clean inch.
Because there it is.
The lake is private. The gate is locked.
No one comes here without him allowing it.
You understand him perfectly.
"It must be wonderful in summer," you say.
Something shifts in his expression then, small, almost invisible. Approval maybe. Or amusement at the fact that you’re still pretending that this is a normal conversation.
“Come. Eat,” he says eventually. “After, you will think more clearly.”
The dinner waiting downstairs is your favorite.
You never told him your favorite.
The realization is slow enough to hurt.
You eat it anyway because refusing would mean acknowledging the game out loud and right now both of you are still pretending there is a game at all.
You sit across from him and you answer his questions and he watches you with his chin resting lightly against one hand, listening completely when you speak. Not interrupting. Not distracted.
Your father never listened to you like this.
Your mother listened selectively, through fog and exhaustion and whatever chemical elixir she was surviving that month.
Makarov listens (- like predators watching tall grass-) and something inside of you, something humiliatingly young and half starved, responds before your fight or flight can intervene.
Because being seen and being hunted activate frighteningly similar parts of the nervous system.
You lower your gaze to your plate. You pick up your fork. You take a bite. You breathe through the stinging behind your eyes.
Across the table he rests his chin on his knuckle and watches you with that mild, attentive warmth, and then he reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, fingertip tracing the shell of it on the way back, and you hold very still.
"Хорошая девочка," he says softly. “Good girl.”
It sounds warm.
It sounds like approval.
Underneath both of those things, underneath the warmth and the approval, sewn into the lining of them where you have to press close to feel it, is something else entirely. Something that finds the cabinet behind your sternum and rests a hand flat against it. Not pushing. Just… present. Just making sure you know it knows where everything is.
I see you, it says. Not the London version. Not the you lonely girl, you pretty sad thing. Different. The same words in a different tone entirely. I see what you're doing. I see the face you're making. I see the counting and the thoughts and the cabinet. I see all of it and I am not concerned.
Your smile arrives at exactly the right moment.
"Thank you for dinner," you say. "It was lovely."
He shows you the room again at the end of the night.
Again, as if repetition makes it gentler. As if a room becomes less of a holding place when you have already seen it once in daylight, when the lake was grey instead of black, when the trees still had individual trunks and gaps between them.
The wardrobe has things in it now. You notice it when you turn your head. A sleeve visible through the narrow opening. Cream knit. Dark wool. A dress with the tag still attached. Day clothes. Night clothes. Comfortable. Fancy. Shoes lined beneath. Your size.
Nothing you chose.
The bathroom has things now too. Tooth brush in a porcelain cup. Hairbrush. Shampoo and conditioner and body wash. Products lined along the marble sink. Too many. More than you would ever use, more than anyone would buy unless you (- were staying here for a long time-) showering here. Sleeping here. Standing barefoot on the heated tile with your pulse in your throat and nowhere to put your hands.
Your face remains neutral because your face is for other people and the rest is yours. Mild. Tired, perhaps (jetlagged) if someone wanted to be generous. You pulse skips once in your wrist, one hard irregular strike against bone, and then goes smooth again.
Makarov lingers in the doorway.
Not… blocking it. That would be too obvious and he does not seem to enjoy obvious things. He stands just to the side, one shoulder near the frame, the hallway visible enough for you to understand that visibility is not the same thing as access. The hallways is lit in low amber. Somewhere downstairs, something clicks into place- the heating, the wood (- a lock sliding into place- )
"You need something,” he says, “you ask Irina. She speaks English enough.”
Not… enough to become a person in the room with you. Enough to bring food. Enough to communicate practicalities. Enough to become another locked door with a human face.
His gaze moves over you once, unhurried. "My men are outside. This place, it is very remote. Sometimes animals come from wood, close to house.” His mouth curves. “Better you do not wander at night, da? For your safety."
Animals in the wood.
"Of course," you say, hands loose at your sides and your eyes firmly on his face and not on the window. "Thank you."
The thank you is nearly perfect. Soft at the edges. Polite in the way girls are taught to be polite when (danger has not yet done anything but has begun to arrange itself around them with interest.)
He looks at you. Just a moment. Just long enough for something to pass between you that has no language because words would cheapen it. He knows you know. He knows you understand. You know he knows you understand. Both of you, for separate reasons, allow the conversation to remain intact on the surface.
Then- "Sleep well, зайка." Warm. The cafe voice. The London voice. The voice that had made loneliness feel briefly less humiliating (it’s obscene how easily he does that) "Tomorrow I show you the lake."
The door closes.
You stand in the center of the room and listen.
One second. Two. Three.
His footsteps move away down the hall, slow and even, absorbed by the carpet before it can echo properly. You keep counting long after you stop being able to hear them because stopping feels like an act of faith and faith has never been one of your stronger survival instincts. At twenty seven seconds, somewhere on the first floor, a door opens and closes. At thirty four, a man’s voice murmurs in Russian. At forty one, silence fills the air.
Only then do you move.
The window shows the lake, flat and black now, not a ripple, a depthless sheet of ink. (Even the moonlight seems reluctant to touch it for long.) The treeline beyond it is a solid dark mass, shapeless, the spaces between the trees swallowed completely.
No phone.
No map.
No one knows exactly where you are. Not your mother. Not your father. Not your uncles or your aunt.
Your father's number lives in the back of your mind. Ten digits. Drilled in at six years old, recited before bed during his rare stretches home, while he crouched in front of you before bed making you repeat it until he was satisfied, like a safety net, like the thing you would never need because needing it would mean-
Your jaw locks.
“Again, sweetheart. If you ever need me.”
As though need were a neat thing. As though he had not already taught you with consistency, that a number can be memorized perfectly and still not summon anyone home.
You step away from the window.
You sit down on the edge of the bed and press your hands between your knees, anchoring them there before they can do something embarrassing like tremble. Reach for a phone that isn’t there. Cover your mouth. Become the hands of a frightened girl instead of someone thinking.
You force back the tears pressing on the back of your eyes because crying happens on the outside and the outside is not safe, not now, not ever. You learned that early too. Tears create witnesses. Tears create leverage. Tears require a response and nobody has ever responded.
You think instead.
You think about the gates and the flowers and the clothes in the wardrobe in your size and you think about no one comes here without my invitation delivered warm and mild into the glass of a window while his thumbs traced your shoulder blades, and you think about good girl with something behind it like a hand resting flat against a door.
You think about Irina’s (adapted) eyes.
You think about your mother waking to an empty house.
It comes on too quickly, too violently, and for one second the cabinet behind your sternum is useless. For one second you are not here in this expensive room above a dead still lake. You are home, watching your mother call your name up the stairs into an answerless room, her voice thin with irritation first, then uncertainty, then the beginning of something too large for her to hold without pouring it into a glass first.
She will be alone. Completely alone. No one to tip the bottles down the sink at midnight. No one to lie to the neighbors. No one to stand between her and the deep echoes in her own head.
You left her. You walked out the same way he always does- you, John Price's daughter, who has spent years hating him for leaving- and you left her alone, walked out of the house, and became another empty chair at the table. Another person she could not keep. Another set of footsteps leaving.
Like father, like daughter.
The thought is so ugly your stomach contracts. Your throat closes. Your hands press harder against your knees until your knuckles pop.
You breathe in through your nose.
You lie down. You pull the covers up. You stare at the ceiling and you think, in the morning there will be something I haven't thought of yet. There is always something. I just need to get to morning.
There is always something. Something overlooked. Some human error. Some gap between what a man controls and what he assumes he controls because no one has punished him for the difference.
You are your father's daughter even when you hate him for it.
You only have to get to the morning.
Outside, the lake remains perfectly still.
You don't sleep.
***
Six Months Later…
Six months teaches a man what hope is like when it starts to rot.
It sounds, Price has learned, like phones ringing out into nothing. Like satellite images loading square by square until every grey roof becomes a possible coffin. Like Gaz saying, “False lead,” in a voice stripped flat from saying it too many times. Like Soap punching another wall, this time hard enough to break two knuckles and then wrapping his hand himself because no one had anything left to give him except silence. Like Ghost sitting across from Price in one safehouse after another, mask still on, eyes unblinking, because one of them has to keep watch while the other one slowly teaches himself how not to die from guilt.
Six months.
One hundred and eighty three days since the penthouse.
One hundred and eighty three days since white satin sheets and your phone on the dresser and a note translated into three words that had burrowed into Price’s skull and rotted there.
Too slow, Captain.
He hears it now, marrow deep, a second pulse, as he stands in the belly of the transport with Nikolai’s coordinates glowing on the tablet in Gaz’s hand.
Too slow when you walked out.
Too slow when the photos came through.
Too slow when the penthouse was empty.
Too slow through Warsaw, Prague, Minsk, Antalya, Marseille. Too slow through every contact who vanished before they could talk, every bank account burned clean, every smuggler found dead with their tongue cut out.
Too slow, always, until now.
Nikolai had sent the coordinates with no greeting, no explanation, no softening of the blow. Just a latitude and a longitude. A grainy overhead image of an estate tucked into forest and water. One line beneath it.
She is there. Move before he knows I know.
Price had stared at the message until the numbers burned themselves into his mind.
Now the transport rocks beneath his boots and the others are checking weapons in practiced quiet, bodies moving through familiar numing preparations while Price stands motionless in the center of it all with his hands curled around his rifle.
“Cap.” Soap’s voice is low.
Price looks up.
Soap is watching him with that careful expression he has worn more and more often these past few months, the one that tries to be steady without becoming pity. (- It doesn’t suit him. Soap was built for laughter, for movement, for the reckless warmth of men who can still believe a room will be better because they entered it. Six months of looking for you has taken that from him in narrow strips- )
“We get her tonight,” Soap says.
Price nods once.
He does not trust himself with words.
Words are where things break. Words are how he found out his daughter had been carrying a household on her back while he played soldier with men who knew him better than his own blood. Words are how you told him he was a coward. Words are how Makarov wrote himself into the space Price left empty.
The estate appears in the distance as a darker shape in darker woods, lake black beside it, the whole property cut off from the world in a way that makes Price’s teeth ache.
Ghost studies the satellite image Kate sent them hours ago one last time. “Minimal visible patrol. Outer cameras. Two men by the east access road. Heat signatures inside, but not many.”
Not many.
Price’s brain tries to make something hopeful out of that and fails. Hope has become a dangerous substance inside him, volatile when exposed to air. He's learned not to touch it directly.
“What about her?” he asks.
Gaz’s jaw tightens. “One heat signature upstairs. West facing room. Stationary.”
Stationary.
-sleeping, maybe-
-injured, maybe-
-dead, maybe-
Price’s stomach does the same thing it has done every day for six months: drops, twists, folds inward around an image he has nightmares about. Your body in a bed. Your body on a floor. Your body wrapped carefully in a sheet because Makarov is the kind of monster who would stage death beautifully, who would make grief look composed, who would leave Price just enough of you to identify and not enough to forgive himself.
“Price.”
Ghost this time.
Not Cap. Not John. Price.
The correction pulls him back by the scruff of the neck.
Ghost is looking at him, and there is something brutal in the steadiness of his gaze. A warning. A tether. A hand shoved into the machinery before the gears can take the whole arm.
“We go quiet,” Ghost says. “We get her out. We do not chase him through the house if he’s gone.”
If he’s gone.
The alternative sits there with them.
If he isn’t.
Price nods again.
Inside, something smiles with all its teeth and then they're moving.
The approach is silent and yet Price hears everything. His own heartbeat. Soap’s controlled exhale behind him. The whisper of fabric against armor. Gravel shifting beneath boots. Somewhere in the trees, an animal moves and stops moving.
They remove the outer guards without gunfire. A hand over a mouth. A blade. A body lowered before it can hit the ground.
Then the side entrance. The lock gives under Ghost’s hands in less than ten seconds and the door opens inward, and for one suspended second Price sees again the penthouse door blowing open before dawn, sees white satin, your phone, the note.
Too slow, Captain.
He steps inside.
The house smells wrong compared to what he's been imagining the past six months. He'd been braced for rot, for blood. He'd been braced for fear and the way it gets into porous things and stays. Instead, it smells like polished wood, cold ashes, expensive soap, flowers somewhere going sweet at the edges. Beneath that, faintly, the mineral damp of lake water and old stone.
Gaz touches his shoulder and points upward and they move.
Every step on the stairs feels louder than it is. Price keeps expecting the house to wake. Expecting alarms. Makarov’s voice over some hidden speaker, amused and warm and waiting. Expecting the trap to close because this has to be a trap. Six months of nothing and then coordinates. Six months of dead ends and then a room with a single heat signature. Men like Makarov do not make mistakes. Men like Makarov make offerings.
Unless Nikolai was right.
Unless they are ahead of him.
Unless, by some mercy Price has not earned and does not believe in, he has finally arrived before the ending.
The hallway upstairs is carpeted, absorbing their footfalls with obscene softness. Doors line both sides. Ghost clears one. Soap another. (Empty. Empty. Empty. He's not starting to panic, he's not-)
Then Soap says, “Cap,” barely sound at all, and Price turns.
The last door on the left is closed and noone breathes for a moment.
Gaz checks the reader. Nods. One signature.
Price’s hand goes to the doorknob.
Ghost catches his wrist.
The contact is light, but it might as well be a chain and he leans in, voice a rasp shaped carefully into something almost gentle. “Let me clear it.”
Price looks at him.
Ghost does not move away.
“Let me clear it,” he repeats.
Because if there is a body, he means. Because if Makarov left you arranged for your father to find. Because if the room is wired. Because if Price opens that door and sees what six months of nightmares have been rehearsing, there will be no captain left afterward, only a father making enough noise to bring the whole estate down on top of them.
Price forces his fingers to open.
Ghost goes in first.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Then his voice, low through comms. “Clear.”
Price enters.
The room is dark except for moonlight and the dim wash of a lamp left on near the bed. Large windows face the lake. Wardrobe against one wall. A chair near the glass. A dressing table with small bottles arranged in a perfect line. On the nightstand, a glass of water, a folded cloth, a book facedown to keep the page.
And you asleep in the bed.
For a moment, Price cannot understand what he is seeing. His brain refuses the image, rejects it. You are not on the floor. Not tied to a chair. Not bloodied. Not dead. You are asleep on your side beneath a heavy duvet, one hand tucked near your face, hair loose over the pillow, mouth slightly parted in a shape that’s so childlike that Price feels his knees nearly go.
You are alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Price steps forward.
He thought, stupidly, that seeing you would fix something.
Not all of it. He is not naive enough for all of it. But something. Some catastrophic internal bleeding stanched by the sight of your chest rising and falling under the blanket. Some pressure valve released. Some six month scream finally permitted to end.
Instead the sight of you sleeping in this room, in this house, in a bed that is not yours, dressed in soft clothes, makes the damage spread.
Because you look cared for.
Your face is fuller than it was the night you left. The hollows beneath your cheekbones softened. Your hair brushed. A faint mark at your throat, old enough to have faded yellow at the edge, half hidden by the collar of your sleep shirt. There are no chains. No visible proof of captivity except the room itself and the six months missing from the world. (- This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong-)
Price reaches the bed.
“Sweetheart,” he whispers.
Your eyelids flutter and the sound that leaves him is not fit for a battlefield. Too broken. Too human. Soap shifts behind him like he might step forward, then stops himself.
“Love,” Price says, softer, because loudness feels like it might shatter you. “It’s me.”
You wake slowly. Your brow pinches first, then your mouth. Your fingers curl into the sheet, gripping once before releasing. For half a second, your face is unguarded and young and confused, and Price sees the girl from the kitchen. The girl with stormcloud eyes and shaking hands, the one who told him to stop coming back.
Then your eyes open.
You look at him.
Price waits for the recognition to break, for relief, for horror, for tears.
For his name.
He does not know what he expects, not really. Some selfish animal part of him has imagined you reaching for him. Has imagined gathering you up while you cried into his shoulder. Has imagined you saying Daddy in a voice that forgives nothing but needs him anyway.
Instead your whole body goes rigid, terrified. Your pupils blow wide, swallowing the color of your eyes. Your breath catches, sharp enough to hurt him. You shove yourself backward so fast your shoulder cracks against the headboard, and one hand flies toward the empty space beside the pillow, searching for something that isn’t there.
“No,” you say and it’s not relief.
Price freezes.
Your gaze jerks past him to Ghost, to Soap, to Gaz. Your breathing changes. Too quick. Too shallow. Your body, Price sees with a sick lurch, has already decided what this is.
“No, no, no,” you say, louder now, and the words begin tripping over each other. “You can’t be here. You can’t- he said- ”
Price feels the sentence enter him between the ribs.
He said.
“Sweetheart,” he says carefully, raising both hands. “We’re here to take you home.”
Home.
The word does something terrible to your face.
There is no softening. No collapse. No recognition of safety. Only panic sharpening into anger.
“This is home,” you say.
Price cannot move.
“What?”
Your eyes fill with tears so fast it looks painful, but your voice hardens around them, brittle and bright. “You need to leave. If he finds you here. He’ll- he’ll think I told you, he’ll think I helped you, you have to leave.”
For a second Price hears nothing but blood. His blood. Your blood. The old dream of his daughter saying come get me folding in on itself, crushed beneath the reality of you trying to protect the man who took you.
Ghost says, very quietly, “Cap.”
Price takes one careful step closer. You flinch so hard the bedframe knocks against the wall.
He stops.
“It’s me,” he says. His voice is breaking and he cannot stop it. “It’s your Dad.”
Your expression twists. “You don’t get to say that now.”
The words are not loud. They do not need to be. They enter the room with all the terrible precision of a knife placed exactly where old scar tissue is thinnest.
You are crying now, silently, tears slipping down your cheeks while you stare at him like he is the intruder. Like he is the monster in the room. “You don’t get to come here with guns and masks and act like- like you’re saving me. You don’t know anything. You don’t know what he’s done for me. You don’t know- ”
“What he’s done?” Soap cannot stop himself, voice low, shaking with something close to rage.
You look at him and Price watches your fear convert instantly into defense. Your chin lifts. Your hand presses to the mattress, fingers digging into the sheet. “He took care of me.”
Price wishes, for one fractured second, that someone would shoot him.
“He took you,” He says.
Your mouth trembles once. “You left.”
There it is.
Not an accusation this time.
Price can see it then, not all of it, but enough. The shape of the trap. Makarov did not need chains if he had your loneliness. Did not need locked doors if he could make the world outside those doors synonymous with abandonment. Did not need to convince you your father hated you. Price had done the groundwork himself. Makarov had only moved in afterward, patient and warm, laying furniture inside the ruin.
“Love,” Price says, and it comes out ruined. “Please.”
You shake your head, already looking past him toward the door. Calculating. Not escape from the room.
Escape from them.
Ghost moves first.
He has always been the most honest among them about ugly necessities. Price sees the decision happen a fraction before the body follows: the shift of weight, the angle change, the silent closing of distance.
You see it too and you open your mouth to scream, a raw, animal sound that tears out of you and fills the room, and then Ghost’s gloved hand clamps over your mouth, sealing the sound before it can become an alarm. Your body explodes into motion beneath him, kicking, twisting, hands clawing at his wrist with a ferocity that would have made Price proud in any other circumstance
In this one, it guts him.
“No- don’t hurt her,” Price snaps, uselessly.
You bite down on the hand and Ghost grunts his eyes narrowing, but he doesn't let go.
“Easy,” Soap says, moving in. “Easy, hen, easy, we’re not- Christ, we’re not gonna hurt you.”
You do not hear him. Or you hear him and it means nothing. Your eyes are locked on Price above Ghost’s hand, wide and wet and furious, and the muffled sounds you make against leather are words trying to be born.
He does not need to hear them to know.
Leave me alone.
Gaz is at the door, listening. “Movement downstairs. We need to go.”
Price reaches for you.
You jerk away so violently Ghost has to catch your shoulder to keep your head from striking the bedpost. Soap swears under his breath, low and devastated.
“Sweetheart, listen to me,” Price says, leaning in, hands open, voice shaking with the effort of not becoming the thing you already think he is. “We are taking you out of here. You can hate me after. You can scream at me after. You can never speak to me again, but I am not leaving you in this house.”
Your eyes sharpen and over Ghost’s hand, your voice comes muffled, broken into fragments.
“Gaz,” Ghost says.
Gaz is already there, small med kit open, expression hollowed out by necessity. “Cap.”
The objection is inside the word.
Price looks at the syringe in Gaz’s hand and for one second he is back in the kitchen six months ago, telling himself you needed space. Letting you walk away because force would have made him wrong. Because he had mistaken distance for respect and pride for restraint, and the world had taken the opening with both hands.
Not again.
He looks at you and you see the decision.
Your eyes change.
That is the part that will live in him afterward. Not the scream. Not the fight. The change. The exact moment you realize your father will take you against your will because your will is no longer something he trusts to have survived intact. You make a sound behind Ghost’s hand that barely resembles language.
Price’s heart tears itself open and keeps beating anyway.
“Do it,” he says.
Gaz’s face tightens.
Then he does, plunging the needle into meat of your thigh while you scream into Ghost’s hand.
You fight harder at first.
Panic gives the body its last bright flare before chemistry begins negotiating with it. Your heels strike the mattress. Your fingers claw at Ghost’s sleeve, Soap’s forearm, Price’s wrist when he gets too close. One nail catches Price’s skin and tears a thin red line down the back of his hand.
“It’s alright,” Soap whispers, though his own voice is wrecked. He has both your ankles now, firmly enough that your kicking stops landing. “I’ve got you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, bonnie, I know. I know.”
You are crying openly, sound still trapped against Ghost’s palm. The sedative begins to take the fight out of your limbs. First the knees. Then the wrists. Then the neck, your head tipping before you catch it again with stubborn, furious effort.
Your eyes never leave Price.
That may be the worst mercy of his life.
“I hate you,” you manage when Ghost loosens his hand for half a second to adjust his grip.
It comes out slurred at the edges. Small. Devastating.
Price nods.
“I know,” he says. “I know, sweetheart.”
For six months Price imagined rescue as an ending. The door breached, his daughter found, Makarov denied. He imagined many horrors, yes, but they were clean horrors in their way. Blood. Bruises. Fear. Things he understood how to hold. Things he could kill someone for.
He had not imagined this.
You alive, warm, breathing.
And looking at him like he is the abduction.
Your eyelids droop. You fight them, stubborn even through the haze, and Price sees himself in that too. Another inheritance he wishes he could take back, and then you’re sleep because they made you sleep, because six months ago he let you leave awake and it ruined everything, because love has become indistinguishable from violence in his hands and he does not know how he is supposed to survive knowing that.
Too slow, Captain, the old voice whispers.
Price looks at you, sedated and trembling, and feels the words change shape inside him.
