Chapter 6
Jack
Remy knocks on the medical room door the next afternoon with a magazine tucked under his good arm. He’s clearly working up to something.
"The guys are doing dinner tonight. In the big kitchen, not the one you use." He shifts his weight. "Figured I'd ask if you wanted to come. Callen's making his mom's stew. Evan says he owes you a beer for not letting him bleed out."
"I don't drink beer," I reply.
"Wine, then. Or that terrible coffee you make." He grins. "Come on, Doc. Eat with actual humans for once."
I should say no. These men work for a criminal organization, and forming attachments in a hostage situation is a documented psychological phenomenon. I should know better. I do know better and can count the reasons even the idea is a problem.
"Fine," I hear myself say.
The big kitchen is warmer than the one I've been hiding in. There’s a long table that seats twelve in the center of the room. The smell of rosemary and beef has drifted far enough to pull in eight men, give or take. They look up when I come in, weighing the new variable.
"Grab a bowl, Rivera, it's getting cold," Callen says, and the moment passes.
I sit, then I eat. The stew is, in fact, very good. The talk moves around me in fragments, territory and supply runs and an argument about the Bruins. Underneath it there is laughter, and good natured teasing. It feels impossibly normal.
Tiernan's chair at the head of the table is empty. No one mentions it.
The stew sits easy in my stomach and I’m focused on the conversation when Donnelly's hand closes around my wrist. I reach for my water, half-listening to Callen, and then fingers dig into the soft skin above my pulse. His breath hits my cheek, sour with whiskey.
"Pretty for a nurse," he says. "Bet you could fix all kinds of things."
The table goes quiet immediately. Conversations cut off and the clatter ends. I’m half convinced that Donnelly’s breath has made me deaf.
Tiernan moves faster than I can track. One second the head of the table is empty and the next his hand is around Donnelly's. A sound like a branch breaking in the cold fills the silence. Two cracks echo, one after the other.
Donnelly screams. He collapses sideways off the bench, clutching his hand to his chest, two fingers bent at angles that turn my stomach even though I have set worse. Tiernan leans down and says something low in Irish. Whatever it is makes Donnelly go white and stop screaming.
"Callen," Tiernan says conversationally. "Remove him."
Callen has Donnelly up by the collar and out the door before the man finishes whimpering. Then they're gone. Tiernan sits back down at the head of the table like nothing happened and picks up his fork.
Nobody else moves.
I realize I'm still holding my own wrist where Donnelly grabbed it. I make myself put my hand flat on the table. Make my shoulders drop. Make my lungs work.
He broke a man's fingers for touching me. The thought should horrify me. I'm a nurse. I don't celebrate the sound of bone snapping.
Except Donnelly's grip is still a ghost on my wrist, and some dark corner of me is filing away the image of Tiernan moving without hesitation, putting himself between me and a threat I hadn't even named yet.
I take a bite of stew, chew, and swallow.
"Statistically," I say into the strained quiet, "that's probably not the recommended treatment for insubordination."
Two soldiers down the table fail to swallow their grins. Remy chokes on his beer. At the head of the table, the tension goes out of Tiernan's shoulders by a degree. He drinks from his glass without taking his eyes off me I feel the weight of his attention land and settle and stay.
I should not like it. I smother the rest of my thought with another too-large bite of stew.
Conversations pick up from where they were cut off as if dinner-time violence is a form of family love.
Maybe it is. This is the first dinner I’ve attended and I’m not entirely sure if I’m cut out for a second one, especially considering the dangerous man who’s watching me like every move is worth capturing.
Remy walks me back to the second floor when the table breaks up. Outside my door he stops and scratches the back of his neck with his good hand. "Can I ask you something?"
"You just did."
He huffs a laugh, then sobers. "Before you got here, I had a panic attack in the middle of a job. Froze up completely. The guys had to cover for me, and after, I couldn't sleep for two weeks." He meets my eyes. "Those breathing things you gave me. They help."
I wait.
"I just wanted you to know it." He shrugs. "You're not only here because of a debt. The guys see it. The way you handled Evan, the way you didn't flinch tonight when Donnelly grabbed you." He hesitates. "They've got a bet going. Whether Tiernan asks you to stay when the year's up."
I've spent years delivering news that shatters people without letting it shatter me, and I use all of it now to keep my face level. "That's not how this works. I work off a debt. The year ends, I leave."
"Sure," Remy says. "That's how it's supposed to work." And he heads down the hall before I can answer.
In my room I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time. Three weeks ago I was marking days on an imaginary calendar. Tonight I accepted a dinner invitation without once doing the math on how many were left.
Laying back, I make myself call my brother. He doesn’t answer, but I’m hoping that means he’s doing his homework or working. I can’t leave, but maybe that will force him to step up. Or maybe he’s already trying to get more loans to cover the difference of not having my salary to rely on anymore.
I leave a message, then set my phone to the side before forcing myself up and through a shower. Even if I can’t go to my brother, even if I can’t decide where I’m working or interact with men who, apparently, see me as one of them, I can hold to a routine.
Taking my time, I shave, wash my hair, wash my body with soap, then a body scrub that one of the guys got me after I helped in some way. I take my time, savor the warmth, and tell myself I’m only thinking of Tiernan because I’m running up his water bill.
My job has always involved dismantling castles and walls of excuses patients use to shield themselves from a diagnosis they don’t want, but maybe there’s something to reasonable logic filling in misplaced emotions. Maybe if I do it long enough, Remy won’t scoff at me saying I have to leave.
I have another life, after all, outside these walls. I’m going to get back to it no matter what kind of softness any of the men in this house show me.
One year minus three weeks. I’ll start using my calendar again as a reminder.