Chapter 5
Tiernan
Imove the mugs to the lower shelf at five in the morning and I don’t let myself think about why. Instead, I focus on the slight tug of the stitches she pushed into my side. I want to believe superglue would be just as good as it was in the past, but this time my skin doesn’t itch the same way.
Rather than stare at the well-done patch job, my attention shifts abruptly to the mugs.
The good set sits too high for her. I watched her reach for it the second day.
Her body stretched taut as her arm craned above her head, seeking without any force or fury behind it.
She came up short and refuse to make a thing of it.
The next morning the mugs were where she could reach.
Callen noticed. Callen notices everything and has the good sense to say nothing.
He still, however, puts the mugs too high, so I’ve developed a new morning routine to ensure that the nurse is happy enough that she doesn’t give anyone the wrong meds. That’s what it is. It’s the same reason I do everything that would pass for kindness around here.
I make the coffee before she comes down. I tell myself it's efficiency, that a medic who hasn't slept is no use to me, that I'd do the same for any asset. The word is a habit I haven't fully broken. It fits worse every day.
Even though I’m not in the habit of shoving a square peg into a round hole, I keep using that fucking word like if I say it enough, it’ll become round and easy to deal with. It’ll make her become the same.
Something else stirs under my skin, but I refuse to call it what I know it is. Instead, I’m sure it’s just because my kitchen decisions aren’t private.
There's a camera in the kitchen, in the corner by the cabinets. It’s part of a system that covers every room a stranger might stand in. I built this house to be watched. For eight years the feed has been a tool, a way to know who is where and whether they should be.
I’m not used to being on the film. I’m specifically not used to using it when I don’t have a pressing reason to do so. Now, however, I regularly find the kitchen feed open on my screen at six in the morning, and what I am doing is not surveillance, and I know it. I keep the feed open anyway.
She made the coffee stronger after the second week. I pour mine before the pot finishes, always have, a thing I do without thinking, and she clocked it and adjusted the grind so the early cup would still wake me. She told Remy it was about wasting less coffee. I know better than that.
This is the part I keep turning over.
She keeps making excuses to do little things that are almost kind. They’re thoughtless things that usually have a price attached or the bitterness of someone trying to earn my attention. She dismisses it and reframes every small action like explaining the intention absolves the result enough.
It means she doesn’t have to face it and Jack is not a woman that backs down from my gaze, a contract, or an emergency situation.
She’s also not a woman who says anything except what she wants a person to understand.
That doesn’t mean that her inconsistencies and the few comments I hear about her from the men aren’t adjusting how I see her.
I understand my men the way I understand a ledger. I know which of them drinks, which of them sends money home, which would break, and which would die before they cracked. It’s the core competence of the work, reading people fast enough to use them, trust them, or remove them. I am very good at it.
She reads them better and in ways that I didn’t consider. She does it even though she’s not caught in crosshairs and can’t use them to escape. Her motives elude me.
She had Remy doing breathing exercises inside a week, the boy who froze on a job last winter and couldn't sleep after, the boy I'd written down as a liability I'd have to carry.
She had Evan joking about his range of motion while she dug a round out of his shoulder.
She walked into a room of men who could kill her without changing expression and made them defer to her through nothing but competence and the refusal to be afraid.
The hierarchy in this house has held for eight years.
She rearranged it in three weeks and didn't ask permission.
By every measure of this organization, I should be reminding the men who they serve and reminding her that she’s under contract, a prisoner in any other definition. The thought has crossed my mind and I dismissed it for unusual reasons.
I could have used calm threats. I could have reminded the men of loyalty. I could have leaned into her pressure points. All of those options made me feel like I was failing and grasping at power I already have.
Not that my late night musings stopped her from being … her.
The respect came first. That is the order of it, and the order matters.
I noticed how she thought before I noticed anything else.
She processes quickly and presses down on the weak areas of problems. The rest of it, the loose hair at her temple when she leans over a wound, the clean botanical thing she uses once the immediate threat is closed, the steadiness of her hands closing a cut on my arm, came after.
And it came hard. It is the kind of want that gets people killed in my business because it tells your enemies exactly where to put the knife.
The fact I’ve moved the mugs, check the video feed, and make coffee has already been partially noticed by a man I trust. It wouldn’t take long for someone else to see it or overhear the wrong conversation about her. An asset can become a liability if they become endearing.
I should send her down the hall to a different room. I could hire a male medic. It should be easy to let the contract run its year and let her go back to her hospital and her brother and her dog-eared paperbacks while insisting on professional distance.
I will not do any of that, and I have stopped pretending that I might.
Above all else, I am not an inefficient man. I don’t waste my own time with lies, even if they’d spare my ego. Admitting to myself that I want her around for what she offers and who she is…that’s simply good logic. Admitting it vocally would be a new level of stupidity.
I finish my coffee at the window while the house comes awake around me. She'll be down by six. She’ll wear scrubs and exhaustion and that level look she gives me like I'm test results she needs to run a second time. She’ll look a second too long because she knows she can, then she’ll move on.
She is the first thing in this house I have wanted to see in eight years.
I think it plainly, in my own head, where no one can use it. Then I rinse the mug, set it in the sink, and go to run an operation as if the thought changes nothing.
If it changes anything then it means something. If Jack is going to mean something, then I need to run risk analysis first so I know what I’m willing to lose or surrender.