Chapter 14
Hope
The front desk smells like industrial cleaner and recycled air, same as always. Everything looks exactly the way it did two weeks ago, except for the laminated sign taped to the security desk that wasn't there before.
All external personnel must present current authorization documentation. No exceptions.
I've been staring at it for six minutes.
"I'm really sorry, Ms. Turner." Gianna's nails click against her keyboard, the sound sharp and rhythmic. "I just can't find your clearance in the system."
"It was there two weeks ago."
"I understand that." Click, click, click. "But the system shows your access as suspended pending review."
"Pending review of what?"
She doesn't meet my eyes. The clicking stops for a second. "I'm not authorized to discuss that."
Behind me, the security queue grows. A delivery driver shifts his weight. A nurse I don't recognize checks her phone. I'm holding up the line, and Gianna's polite expression says she'd very much like me to stop.
But I don't move.
"Can you tell me who is authorized to discuss it?"
"You'd need to speak with Dr. Hudson's office."
"Dr. Hudson's office hasn't returned my calls in thirteen days."
Click, click, click. "I can leave another message for you."
Gianna's fingers hover over the keyboard. She's looking at the screen, not at me, and her mouth is pressed flat. She's not the problem. She's doing what she's been told, and pushing harder may not change that.
"Gianna." I keep my voice level. "I was court-appointed to this facility. My access isn't discretionary. I'm legally allowed to be here."
"I understand that, Ms. Turner." The clicking resumes. "But until the paperwork clears—"
"What paperwork?"
Silence.
"I really am sorry," she says finally, and she sounds like she means it. "There's nothing I can do."
I walk out through the lobby and sit in my car with the windows down and my notebook open.
Thirteen days of attempted contact. Fourteen unanswered calls. Six emails that bounced back with auto-replies about high volume and processing delays. The new sign at the checkpoint. Gianna's inability to locate paperwork that existed before the incident.
The pattern is clear. Someone is blocking me out, and they're using bureaucracy to do it.
My phone buzzes. Kent's name on the screen.
"They won't let me in," I say instead of hello.
"I know. I've been on the phone with their legal department since seven this morning." His voice is tight, controlled in that way that means he's furious underneath. "They're claiming your presence creates a security risk following the incident."
"I'm the security risk." My hand tightens on the phone. "Rick threatens to follow me home and I'm the problem."
"That's their position. Your presence provoked the incident. Your documentation is adversarial. Your continued access to Ward C is—and I'm quoting—'contraindicated for patient stability.'"
The steering wheel is warm under my hands. Heat pours in through the open windows and the whole parking lot ripples with it.
"They're punishing me for being the person their own guard threatened."
"They're punishing you for documenting everything they've done wrong for two months." His voice is grim. "Rick gave them the excuse. Your reports are the real problem."
A security guard walks past, doesn't look at me.
"Kent." I keep my voice steady. "Is he okay?"
Silence. Then: "I'll call you when I have an update."
He hangs up before I can push harder. I drive home and try again the next morning, and the morning after that.
It takes Kent two more days to get my access reinstated. When I finally walk through the checkpoint, Gianna hands me my badge without meeting my eyes, and I pretend not to notice the way her hands shake slightly.
The facility looks the same. Smells the same. But the air is different—a tension I can feel in the set of every guard's shoulders, in the way conversations stop when I pass.
Gage finds me in the admin corridor.
He looks tired. Shadows sit under his eyes that I've never seen before, and his shoulders are rigid, held tight even when he sees me.
"You're back," he says.
"I am."
We stand there for a moment. He's blocking my path without quite blocking it—positioned so that I'd have to step around him to continue down the corridor. The last time we were in the same hallway, Rick was on the floor and the air smelled like blood.
Neither of us brings it up.
"How is he?"
Gage doesn't ask who I mean. "Two weeks in isolation. IV sedation the whole time. They pulled the line this morning for your visit. They're calling it behavioral stabilization," Gage says. "But the dosing isn't in any protocol I've seen in my time here."
"Because it's not treatment. It's retaliation."
A muscle jumps in his jaw. He doesn't argue.
"I need to see him."
"I figured." He shifts his weight. "Day room's been cleared. Thirty minutes. I'll walk you down."
We fall into step together, and neither of us talks. Through the security door, past the nurses' station, down the long corridor to Ward C. Gage badges us through each checkpoint without breaking stride.
At the day room door, he stops.
"Gage."
He's watching me, giving nothing away. His hand moves to the back of his neck, rubs once, drops.
"Yeah?"
"Your report. What you told Hudson about Rick." I hold his gaze. "That was really nice of you, backing Jude."
His face changes—surprise, maybe, or gratitude. Gone before I can be sure.
"Just doing my job," he says, but his voice is rougher than the words warrant. He opens the day room door and steps aside.
The room is empty except for Jude.
He's sitting at one of the bolted-down tables, hands flat on the surface, completely still. The lights wash him out, turn his skin pale, highlight new hollows under his cheekbones. There's bruising on the back of his left hand where the IV line sat, yellowing at the edges.
Fourteen days of isolation and sedation and white walls.
He looks up when the door opens. Green eyes on mine across the room, and I forget about the camera, Gage, the antiseptic smell. All of it.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
Then I'm walking toward him. Not running, because I'm still a professional and there are still cameras and this is still a facility where I'm supposed to be neutral.
But my legs carry me faster than they should, and when I reach the table, I don't stop on the other side like I'm supposed to.
I stop next to him. Close enough to touch.
"Hope." My name in his mouth, low and rough and worn thin from not speaking.
Then his eyes shift past me to the door.
His face hardens.
"He walked you here." His voice is flat.
"He's head of security. That's his job."
Jude's gaze stays on the door. On Gage. "Tell him if he touches you, I'll take his hands."
I put my notebook down on the table.
"I am not yours to threaten people over. I'm not anyone's. If you can't handle someone walking me down a hallway, you can sit in this room alone."
The room goes quiet. At the frosted window, Gage is watching. I don't look back.
Jude stares at me. His hands press flat against the table, the IV bruise stretching white. He doesn't speak.
I pick up my notebook.
"Are you okay?"
He doesn't answer. His hand lifts from the table—slow and controlled, giving me time to pull away—and his fingers brush my wrist.
The touch is light. Barely there. But I feel it everywhere.
"I'm okay," he says, and his voice is steadier now. "Are you?"
"They wouldn't let me in. For two weeks. I tried—"
"I know." His fingers curl around my wrist. "Kent told me."
"I should have been here."
"You're here now."
My throat tightens. I should step back. I should sit on the other side of the table, maintain professional distance, remember the camera—
I glance at the door. Gage isn't there. He gave us some privacy.
So, I lean into his touch.
His breath catches. It's a small sound, barely audible, but I'm close enough to hear it. Close enough to see the way his pupils dilate, the way his hands flatten hard against the table, the way his whole body goes rigid.
"Hope." His fingers press harder into my wrist. "Gage gave us thirty minutes. He told me when he brought me in earlier."
"I know."
"But we have to be careful. The camera—"
"Has a blind spot." I don't know why I say it. "Behind the bookshelf. Three feet of dead zone."
He stares at me. Surprise first, then his eyes go dark with lust.
"How do you know that?"
"I document everything in this facility."
He laughs. It's not the dry exhale I've heard before—it's real, rough, startled out of him.
Then his hands are on my waist and he's lifting me onto the table, positioning me in front of him so smoothly that I don't register the movement until I'm there. My legs bracket his hips. His hands stay on my waist, fingers pressing into the fabric of my shirt.
"Two weeks," he says, low. "Two weeks of white walls and nothing, and all I could think about was whether you were okay."
"I'm okay."
I think about him in isolation, sedated, alone, and my eyes sting.
"I'm here now," I say, echoing his words back to him.
His hand lifts from my waist, finds my jaw, and tilts my face up until I'm looking directly into those green eyes, and what I see there makes my breath catch.
He wants me. No mask, no blankness, nothing held back. Just pure hunger.
"I need to know you're real," he says, and then his mouth is on mine.
The kiss is not gentle—hard and desperate, and the sound he makes against my lips is low and rough and urgent. His hand slides into my hair, tilts my head back, and I open for him without thinking, without hesitation.
He tastes like coffee and underneath that, just him, and I can't get close enough. My hands find his shoulders, his neck, the short hair at his nape. He groans into my mouth and pulls me closer, until I'm pressed against his chest and his heart is pounding under my palm.
His mouth moves to my jaw. My throat. His hands are everywhere—my waist, my back, sliding under the hem of my shirt to find skin.
"We shouldn't—" I start, but my voice comes out breathless and unconvincing.
"Tell me to stop." His lips brush my collarbone. "Say the word and I'll stop."
I don't say the word.
His hand slides up my ribs, and I arch into his touch, and his mouth finds mine again, swallowing the sound I make. The table is hard under my thighs but I don't care, don't care about anything except his hands and his mouth and the solid heat of him between my legs.
A door slams somewhere in the corridor.
We freeze.
Footsteps. The guard making his rounds, his shadow passing across the frosted window of the day room door.
Jude pulls back. His breathing is ragged, his eyes dark, his hair disheveled where my hands were just buried in it. He looks wrecked, and God help me, he's beautiful.
"Time," he says roughly.
I glance at my watch. Twenty-two minutes left.
"We have time."
"Not enough." His thumb traces my lower lip, swollen from his mouth. "Not nearly enough for what I want to do to you."
The words send heat pooling low in my stomach. Any other version of me would be embarrassed, horrified at what we almost did, what we were doing, in the middle of a psychiatric facility with cameras and guards and everything at stake.
I'm not.
"Next time," I say.
His eyes flash. "Is that a promise?"
"Yes."
He kisses me once more—softer now, almost tender—then helps me off the table. By the time a guard's shadow passes back the other way, we're sitting on opposite sides, professional distance restored, nothing visible except the flush on my cheeks and the intensity in his gaze.
"Whatever you're writing in that notebook," he says quietly, "be careful who reads it."
I think about my documentation. The patterns I've recorded. Everything that's closing in around both of us.
"I'm always careful."
"No." His voice drops, dead serious. "You're not. That's the problem."
I laugh. He doesn't.
Gage knocks at thirty minutes. I stand, smooth my shirt, and walk to the door. Neither of us says goodbye.
I spend the rest of the day in the admin wing, pulling everything I've missed. Medication logs, incident reports, staffing records. Two weeks of changes that nobody told me about, and none of them look right.
The parking lot is half-empty by the time I leave.
Gage is leaning against my car, arms crossed, watching the facility doors. When he sees me, he straightens. Doesn't move toward me. Just waits.
I stop a few feet away. "Gage."
"I gave you that time in there." His arms are still crossed. "Don't get used to it."
His voice is tight, but not angry. I can't place it.
"Thank you. I know you didn't have to do that."
He nods. Shoves his hands in his pockets, pulls them back out.
"Look," he says. "He can't take you anywhere."
I blink. "What?"
"Jude." His eyes meet mine, brown and steady. "He can't take you to dinner. Can't walk with you in daylight. Can't be seen with you anywhere that isn't behind locked doors."
That stops me. I hadn't thought about it in those terms—the limits of what's possible, the walls that will always exist between the inside of that facility and the outside world.
"But I can."
My breath catches.
Gage unfolds his arms, takes a step closer. Close enough that I can see the gold flecks in his brown eyes, the stiffness in his neck, the way he's holding himself carefully still.
"Dinner," he says. "Daylight. Normal things. Things you deserve."
"Gage—"
"I'm not asking for an answer." His voice is rough, honest. "I'm laying it down plain. You should know you have options."
Options. I turn the word over.
He's close now. Close enough that if I leaned forward, if I tilted my chin up...
I don't move. Neither does he.
Neither of us speaks. His eyes drop to my mouth, just for a second, then back up. He wants to move closer, but he doesn't let himself.
"Just think about it," he says quietly.
Then he steps back, and he's walking away across the parking lot before I can find words for whatever just happened.
I stand there for a long time, watching him go.
The sun is warm on my face. The air smells like summer and hot asphalt.
The facility is behind me. Jude is in there, behind all those locked doors, and twenty minutes ago he kissed me with everything he had.
And Gage just offered me dinner and normal things.
I get in my car and I sit there for a long time with both men in my head and no idea what to do about either one.