Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
GABI
“Not crazy. Just motivated.”
The lantern light cast harsh shadows as Daniel hauled our intruder down the hallway.
Blood trickled from a cut above the guy’s eye.
Given the look of both of them, that might have happened more than once.
Or perhaps it was all the debris that would’ve battered them both from their mad dash through the hurricane.
The captive’s shoes squeaked against the linoleum, leaving wet tracks from the rain they’d brought in.
Even in the emergency lights, I saw the cuts on Daniel’s bare feet.
They left spots of blood on the floor as he walked.
I followed them into the break room, where Daniel shoved the man into one of the metal chairs.
The stranger’s dirty blonde hair plastered to his forehead, water dripping down his face.
His eyes darted between us, but he kept his mouth shut while Daniel secured the man’s already bound hands behind the chair.
Then he retrieved yet more rope from his supplies and set to work on his legs.
“Hold the light closer,” Daniel ordered, as he worked on securing the guy’s ankles.
I lifted the lantern, getting my first good look at our captive’s face.
Mid-thirties, with a scraggly beard and a small scar near his chin.
Not someone I recognized from the island.
But I’d been gone a long time and working so much that unless the guy had come through the clinic, I wouldn’t necessarily have seen him.
Daniel stepped back, his chest heaving. Blood trickled down his back from a gash and from his nose. A bruise was already blooming on his shoulder. His knuckles were raw and bleeding. The adrenaline must have masked the pain until now because he winced when he tried to flex his hand.
"Sit." The word snapped out like a whip, driven by all the fear and adrenaline that had crashed over me when I'd watched the man I loved, the man I'd only just gotten back in my life, race out into the middle of a fucking hurricane.
My voice carried the sharp edge of barely controlled panic, years of medical training warring with the primal terror of almost losing him again.
With a wary eye on the captive, Daniel dropped into a chair across the room, his movements stiff and careful.
I spotted the exhaustion beginning to seep into his shoulders now that the immediate danger was past. I set down the lantern with trembling hands and reached first for his injured hand, my fingers assessing the damage even as my mind reeled.
"I'm fine." But he didn't pull away when I examined his split knuckles, the skin torn and raw across his middle and ring fingers. Fresh blood still seeped from the deeper cuts. "Check him first."
The cut above our intruder's eye was no longer actively bleeding, but it would need cleaning to prevent infection. As I moved closer with my medical kit, fishing out antiseptic wipes, he jerked his head away like a cornered animal.
"Hold still," I said, my voice shifting into the calm, professional tone I used with difficult patients at the clinic. "That needs antiseptic, or it'll get infected."
The guy's brows drew together as I cleaned the wound, dabbing away the blood and debris, as if he didn’t understand why I was still treating him like a human being despite what he'd just put us through.
His eyes kept darting between Daniel and me, calculating, waiting for some kind of retaliation that wasn't coming.
"Do you have any other injuries I can't see? Any other cuts or bruising?" I asked, running through my standard patient assessment even though every instinct screamed at me to get away from this man who'd threatened our safety.
"Sure, I've got plenty of both." He managed a leer that didn't quite reach his eyes, which remained sharp and watchful. "You wanna untie me for a head-to-toe inspection, sweetheart?"
"Not happening, Mickey," Daniel growled from across the room, his voice carrying a dangerous edge I'd seldom heard before.
Mickey? He'd learned the guy's name sometime during their violent struggle outside? The casual way Daniel used it suggested this wasn't their first interaction, or at least that Mickey wasn't a complete unknown to him.
Deciding the onus was on the reluctant patient to disclose anything else that needed immediate medical attention, I turned back to Daniel, my concern shifting to the man whose blood was still trickling down his back.
"What in God's name were you thinking running out there into a hurricane without a shirt or shoes?
" My voice rose an octave, cracking with the strain of holding back tears, and I lapsed into the rapid-fire Spanish my parents had spoken while I was growing up, shooting a litany of colorful insults about Daniel's intelligence and decision-making abilities that would have made my mother wash my mouth out with soap.
He sat placidly listening to the torrent until I fell silent, exhausting my vocabulary of creative curses. His calm acceptance of my verbal assault only made me angrier. "I was thinkin' that I wasn't about to let a threat to you get away to hurt you another day."
I yanked the medical kit closer with more force than necessary, supplies rattling inside, and pulled out gauze and antiseptic with shaking fingers.
"You're an idiot. A complete and total idiot.
" My hands betrayed me, trembling as I dabbed at his nose, gently probing to check for breaks in the cartilage or bone.
"You could have died out there, Daniel. You could have fucking died. "
"Gabi—"
"No, shut up." I tilted his chin with two fingers, examining the purple bruising already blooming across his cheekbone and jaw.
"There are pieces of who knows what embedded in your feet because you ran out there without shoes like some kind of action movie hero.
" The words came out harsher than I intended, but I couldn't seem to modulate my tone through the fear still coursing through my system.
His feet were an absolute mess when I got a good look at them.
Cuts crisscrossed the soles, some deep enough to require stitches under normal circumstances.
Splinters of wood, fragments of shell, pieces of debris I couldn't even identify were embedded in the torn skin.
I grabbed tweezers from my kit and started the painstaking work of extracting each piece, my stomach clenching tighter with every fragment I pulled free.
"What if you'd stepped on a nail? Or gotten impaled by flying debris? Or been struck by lightning? Or—"
"Hey." His voice was gentle as he caught my wrist, his thumb brushing over my pulse point. "I'm right here. I'm okay."
I yanked free and grabbed more gauze with more force than necessary, my movements jerky with leftover adrenaline. "Turn around. Let me see your back."
The slice across his back wasn't deep enough to require sutures, but it was long and angry-looking. I swabbed it with antiseptic, ignoring Daniel's sharp intake of breath as the alcohol hit the raw wound. "Your ribs are already bruising. Take a deep breath for me."
He inhaled, wincing a little as his ribcage expanded. I pressed along the bones, checking for obvious breaks or displacement.
"Probably just bruised, not broken. But you're lucky it's not worse.
" My voice snapped as I used irritation to cover how close I was to falling apart.
"Do you have any idea what it was like watching you disappear into that storm?
Not knowing if you'd come back? Not knowing if I'd ever see you again? "
"About as bad as realizing I might lose you again when I just found you?" His voice was soft, roughened with emotion that matched my own.
I pressed my forehead against his uninjured shoulder, breathing in the scent of rain and antiseptic and something uniquely him that I'd missed more than I could put into words. "Don't ever do that to me again. Promise me."
"Which part? The hurricane chase or the leaving?"
"Either. Both." I straightened and reached for more gauze. "Now hold still while I finish patching you up, you reckless idiot."
When I was finished with the immediate wound care, Daniel dug dry clothes out of his emergency pack and changed with careful movements. He'd be sore for days, probably weeks, but all of it would heal well enough, so long as he avoided infection and didn't do anything else monumentally stupid.
As I cleaned up and reordered my supplies—a ritual that always helped calm my nerves—Daniel pulled a chair closer to Mickey. The professional mask was sliding back into place, and I saw the Coast Guard officer emerging from behind the man who'd just held me like his world depended on it.
Daniel's voice shifted into an unfamiliar interrogation tone. “So, what was the plan? Wait for the storm, hit the clinic while everyone's hunkered down and defenseless?”
Mickey stared at a point on the wall behind us, his jaw set in stubborn silence.
"Or maybe you had bigger plans." Daniel leaned forward slightly, his posture casual but somehow threatening. "Maybe you were supposed to meet someone here. The Lowe brothers, perhaps?"
My hands stilled on the supplies I was repacking as I caught the subtle flicker that crossed Mickey's face. That name clearly meant something to him, struck some kind of nerve.
"Fuck you," Mickey spat, but there was less venom in it now and more wariness.
"No? How about Heneghan? Or does Ortiz run this particular operation these days?"
Each name Daniel threw out landed like a stone in my stomach. These weren't random shots in the dark or lucky guesses. Daniel knew these people, or at least was aware of them and their connections. This level of knowledge spoke to something much bigger than a simple break-in attempt.
"You Coast Guard types think you know everything." Mickey's lip curled, but his eyes had gone sharp and calculating.