Chapter 2

The alarm cut in before he could answer — three short bleats, red strobe kicking on over the door. Then nothing. No siren, no override, just the magnetic lock clunking dead in the frame like a dropped anvil.

"False alarm," Levi said, already at the door, already shoving it. It didn't move. "They reset every ninety seconds. Wait it out."

"It's not resetting." I checked the panel. Red light, steady, no countdown. "Building's on a full seal. Somebody pulled a fire trigger three floors up and now we're locked in with the cage until IT gets off their ass."

"Then call it in."

"Comms only run to the hearing floor from in here. You know that. You wrote that policy."

He didn't have an answer for that one either. He just stood there, breathing through his nose, jaw working like he wanted to hit something that wasn't me, and that's when I saw it — the drip. Off his right cuff. Landing on the tile in a rhythm too fast for a scrape.

"Grant." I said it low. "Hold your arm up."

"Don't."

"Hold it up or I'm calling this a medical event on the log, and then it's not a badge fight anymore, it's a commissioner bleeding out in a sealed room with a cutman he banned for life. That's the kind of headline that ends careers."

He held it up. Barely. But he held it up, and that told me more than the wound did — he was already doing the math on what I could make of this.

Blood was coming through the sleeve fast, soaking a widening dark patch just past the wrist bone, and it wasn't dripping like a scrape. It was pulsing. Small, but pulsing, in time with his heartbeat, which meant something under that fabric had a nick in it that his fist against my chest a minute ago had torn wide open.

"You've had this before tonight," I said. Not a question. "You've been squeezing it shut for what, an hour? Two?"

"Get away from me."

"You're gray around the mouth, Grant. That's not adrenaline. That's blood loss." I grabbed his wrist. He tried to pull it back and I didn't let go, and for one second we were just two men gripping the same arm like it was a rope neither of us would drop, bone against bone, his pulse hammering under my thumb harder than it had any right to.

"You put your hands on me," he said, voice gone rough, "and I will end everything you've rebuilt in this building. The pass. The corner. All of it."

"You already ended it once. Nothing left to burn."

That got him. His eyes did something — not fear, nothing that soft — more like recalculation, like he was seeing the math flip on him for the first time since he walked in here thinking he owned the room.

"Sit down," I said, and pulled him toward the gurney bolted to the wall.

He didn't sit. He shoved. I went back a step, caught the edge of the counter, and he was right there again, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him through his shirt, close enough his breath landed hot against my jaw when he said, "I don't sit for you."

"Then you bleed out standing. Your call."

We stood like that a second too long. His chest was moving fast against mine, both of us breathing off the same six inches of air, and under the anger there was something else running hot in the room now, something neither of us was going to name with the lock still red on that door.

He sat.

I didn't say anything smart about it. I grabbed the trauma kit off the wall, snapped a glove on hard enough the latex cracked, and peeled his sleeve back myself before he could stop me. The cut ran along the inside of his forearm, ugly, deep enough to need more than gauze — a straight line, not jagged, like he'd caught it on glass, not knuckles.

"Door window," I said. "When you tried to leave the corridor. You clipped it on the frame."

"Doesn't matter how."

"Matters if it hit the vein." I pressed two fingers below the cut, watched the color drain and come back, watched his jaw lock at the pressure. "It didn't. You got lucky. You'd have gone down twenty minutes ago if it had."

"You almost sound disappointed."

"I sound like a man who knows exactly what I'm holding right now." I pressed harder than I needed to, right on the wound, and watched him take it — not a flinch, not a sound, just his hand closing into a fist on his knee so tight the knuckles went white. "You want to know what that is, Grant? That's a commissioner who can't afford this on record. Positive test, hidden injury, sealed room, alone with the man he banned. That's not a headline. That's a resignation letter."

"You wouldn't."

"Try me and find out. Or" — I eased off the pressure, just enough that his breath went ragged with the relief of it — "you let me finish this, clean, quiet, and we walk out of that door owing each other exactly nothing."

His eyes came up to mine, and for a second the room went smaller than it already was, his knee against my hip, my glove still wet on his skin, both of us close enough that I could count the seconds his pulse was slamming against my fingers.

"Nothing," he repeated, like the word tasted wrong in his mouth.

"That's the deal."

"I don't make deals with men I've already destroyed."

"Funny." I reached for the gauze roll, didn't look away from him. "Because you're sitting here letting me hold the only thing keeping you upright."

He grabbed my wrist before I could wrap the first pass, fingers locking down hard enough to bruise, and for one long, ugly second neither of us moved, his blood still warm between us, the red light over the door still burning steady, and he opened his mouth like he was about to tell me exactly what he thought that deal was worth—