Page 12 of The Captain
I hated that part of me warmed to the competence. “They don’t talk to my interns unless I tell them to,” I said. “And if someone lifts a phone while we’re moving a patient, they make that person’s day very inconvenient.”
Ryker’s mouth showed teeth for the first time—amused, not kind. “Consider their day ruined.”
“Private permits,” I reminded Pincense. “Today.”
Atlas’s gaze slid to him, slow and unblinking. “You heard the doctor.”
Pincense’s smile thinned and then returned as if he’d just remembered how. “Before evening tide,” he said. “Of course.”
We wrapped at 5:57, the three-minute mark feeling like a cliff. McGuire gathered printouts. Pincense extended a hand. I took it because I was done donating dignity for free today.
“Thank you for your time,” he said, as if time were a thing he had a cellar full of.
“Send the list,” I said. “And keep your people off my shelf.”
I turned, and Atlas was already moving to open the door. He didn’t do it like a butler; he did it like a man who’d decided the room needed a new arrangement and this was the next logical step. Ryker fell in step on my other side without crowding, and for a moment I had the disorienting sense of being escorted by weather systems—one hot, one cold, both capable of drowning you.
“Dr. Allard,” Atlas said quietly as we reached the hall, “if you say no to the detail, say it to me. I’ll stand them down.”
“And put them farther out where I can’t see them,” I said, not a question.
A beat of acknowledgment in his eyes. “You’ll be safer that way,” he said without apology.
“I’ll be honest,” I told him. “Novelty for the hour.”
His beard twitched—almost a smile. “Honesty is the cheapest luxury we can afford.”
Ryker’s phone vibrated. He checked the screen with a look that read a paragraph, then slid it away. “Portico,” he said. “We’ll walk you.”
I wanted to say I knew which way the door opened. I wanted to say I didn’t need men bracketed around me like parentheses. I let it go. The hour had its limits.
Dawn had finally found the harbor when we stepped outside—pale light laying itself down in long strips across the water, gulls beginning their mean gossip, the air already heavy with the promise of heat. The portico’s stone breathed cool at my back.
And then a black Jeep nosed up the drive, quiet and sure. The engine cut. The door opened.
He climbed out like gravity did what he told it to.
Suit, no tie. Hair damp. A nick under his jaw where a razor had argued with haste. He looked bigger in daylight and more dangerous.
Jacob.
He didn’t expect me. I watched that truth flicker across his face in the second before he contained it—the stilling, the narrowing, the way the pupils kicked wider and then tightened like a camera choosing a shot. Recognition wasn’t a flare. It was a heat that settled, low.
My body remembered him.
The three men around me changed nothing and changed everything. Atlas and Ryker stood like they had stitched themselves into the stone. They didn’t look at Jacob. They didn’t have to.
Jacob’s gaze cut to Atlas and Ryker for half a beat—clocking, cataloguing, a professional making a note he’d decide what to do with later—then returned to me. Something like a bruise colored his voice when he spoke, low and even.
“Early,” he said, as if the word held all last night and this morning with room to spare.
“Some of us start work before sunrise,” I answered, and let my mouth curve, a lean little thing I didn’t give to anyone who hadn’t earned it.
The corner of his tore into something like a mirror of mine. “Some of us don’t stop.”
The innuendo slid over my skin like heat. If Atlas noticed—if Ryker did—they didn’t show it.
“Where’d you get the Jeep?”
