Black-Belt Cop Choked a Nurse in Sparring — Then Her Navy SEAL Past Made Him Regret It
Chapter 30
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A pause, short but dense. "Don't open your door tonight," Quinn said. "Don't go outside. I'm calling Sandoval now on the other line. Stay on with me."She backed away from the window. "Quinn," she said. "He had someone watching me.""Yes.""This morning. While I was just training.""Yes." His voice was steady in a way she recognized now as deliberate—the particular steadiness of someone suppressing urgency in order to be useful. "Savannah, listen to me: this is the move of someone who has run out of institutional options. It is also a crime. It's going on the record tonight, and it is going to be in front of the hearing board as documented evidence of ongoing harassment before the week is out." He paused. "But I need you to be inside with the doors locked until I call you back."She was already at the door, checking the lock: deadbolt thrown, chain on. She was not, technically, afraid; she was something adjacent to afraid that was more useful: the hyper-alert, extremely calm state she went into when a trauma bay went critical and everything needed to be precise."I'm inside," she said. "I'm locked in.""Good." A beat. "I'm two minutes away. I'm going to park on your block.""You don't have to.""I know I don't have to," he said. "I'm going to."She sat down on her couch with the phone against her ear and looked at the photograph again: her car, her plate, the parking lot where she'd been just hours ago trying to do something that was only about her and her recovery and the things she'd been slowly building back. And someone had been standing in that lot watching her do it.She thought about the five witnesses, the timestamped photograph, the financial transfer, the cooperating gym owner, the administrative leave, the denied delay, the hearing seven days away. And she thought about the fact that Dale Rork had looked at all of that and decided his best remaining move was this: watching her train, taking a picture, sending it so she'd know he could see her. She thought about what kind of man did that when the walls were closing in, and what it meant about what he was capable of, and what the next seven days might hold.Outside, Quinn's truck pulled to a stop on her street. She heard his door open, heard his footsteps on the sidewalk, heard him take position near the front of the building—not coming in, just being there.And the seven days stretched out in front of her like terrain she was going to have to cross in the dark. She didn't know yet what was waiting on the other side, but she knew with the same certainty she'd felt on the bench that first night when nobody stepped forward and she'd looked at the room and understood exactly what she was dealing with: she knew she was going to walk through it.She just didn't know that before the hearing convened, Lena's records would surface something that nobody in the investigation had expected: a document buried in three years of gym files that bore Garrett Wills's signature and Dale Rork's badge number, and a date six weeks before Dory Marsh had ever walked through Irongate's door.