Black-Belt Cop Choked a Nurse in Sparring — Then Her Navy SEAL Past Made Him Regret It
Chapter 14
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"Quinn," she said."Yeah?""He went after my job."It wasn't a question, and she wasn't sure exactly what she wanted from him in response to it. Maybe just to say it to someone who understood what it meant: not as a legal tactic or a step in a pattern, but as a thing that had happened to her specifically, to something she had built and cared about."I know," he said. "That's what men like that do when they feel the ground shifting. They look for the thing that matters most to you, and they go for it.""It won't work," she said."No," he agreed. "It won't."She turned off the engine. The street was quiet. "I need to ask you something, and I need a straight answer," she said."Okay.""How bad is this going to get before it gets better?"A long pause. Not the pause of someone who didn't know, but of someone who was deciding how honest to be. "It's going to get significantly worse before the board convenes," he said. "Rork has more levers than we've found yet. And Captain Hensley is going to know by next week that this has moved beyond the gym. When that happens..." He stopped. "When that happens, we need to be ready for things to get loud."She nodded to herself in the dark car. "Okay.""You're still in?""Yes," she said. "I told Sandoval I was in. I don't go back on things like that."She heard something in the line—not quite a sigh, not quite a sound, more like the absence of the held breath he'd been carrying. "Good," he said.She went inside. She ate the same leftover soup she'd had two nights ago. She sat on her couch with her documentation email from Sandoval already forwarded to Dr. Fitch's hospital address, and her written statement printed and signed and sitting in an envelope on her kitchen table. She was not afraid, exactly; she was the opposite of afraid in the way that wasn't bravery, but was something more like clarity: the place you got to when you'd been carrying a weight long enough that you'd finally stopped pretending it wasn't there.She fell asleep on the couch at 11:30 with the television on and her phone face up on the cushion beside her.At 2:47 in the morning, it lit up.The message was from an unknown number, no area code she recognized. Four words, and nothing else:Back off or else.She stared at it for a moment, wide awake now, the television casting blue light across the room. She took a screenshot. She sent it to Sandoval. She sent it to Quinn.Then she set the phone down and lay in the dark and thought about all the ways that message was stupid: how it created evidence, how it confirmed everything Sandoval had been building toward, how it was the move of someone who was running out of controlled options and had reached for an uncontrolled one.