My chest goes tight. "What?"
"You were watching. At the checkpoint. You're always watching. But you didn't move. Not until..." She trails off. Her eyes hold mine for a beat, steady, and there's no accusation in her face. "You let him."
I don't know what to say. Don't know if there's anything to say. She saw me. She knows.
"I need to file my report," I manage.
"Gage."
My name in her mouth. I stop.
"Thank you," she says.
Then she picks up her clipboard and walks away. The corridor reeks of blood and I stand there until it's the only thing I can smell, then I head to the security office and close the door.
The paperwork takes four hours.
I write my statement the way they taught us in the military. Subject, verb, object. What happened, when, where. No emotion, no interpretation, just the facts lined up in the right order.
A true story. Technically.
Hudson accepts it without comment. Dr Kennedy wants a full psych evaluation of Chadwick, which is almost funny. What's he going to find that we don't already know? Dane is conspicuously absent, which tells me everything about where his loyalties lie.
Rick goes to the hospital with two shattered arms, a broken femur, and a career that's finished. The official line is patient aggression during transport, an unfortunate incident, a reminder of why security protocols exist.
Nobody asks about the half-second.
The parking lot is empty when I finally leave at ten. My truck is the only vehicle in the staff section. Everyone else went home hours ago.
I sit in the driver's seat for a few minutes. The steering wheel is cold under my hands. I grip it anyway, knuckles going white, and I let myself feel what I've been holding back since the moment Rick's first arm snapped.
I let it happen.
I watched a serial killer, a patient I'm sworn to protect and contain, destroy another human being, and I let it happen. I could have stopped it. Everything I've ever been trained to do says I should have stopped it.
I didn't.
Because Rick was going to hurt her. I heard Tully's words in the corridor, saw the way Rick looked at her in the hallway, and I knew—I knew—that whatever Chadwick did would be less than what Rick was planning.
That's not my call to make. That's not justice, it's vigilante bullshit, the exact thing I spent twenty years standing against.
And I broke every rule I had, for her, without a second of hesitation.
"Fuck."
I press my forehead to the steering wheel and try to breathe. It's not guilt. I know what guilt feels like. This is worse. This is the part where I know I'd do it again and I can't make myself care.
I came home from war to keep people safe. Took this job because I needed structure and a reason to get out of bed. I believed doing the right thing mattered even when it hurt.
And now the only person I can't stand the thought of losing is the one I've got no right to.
She's probably at home right now making dinner. She watched me let a man get destroyed.
I let it happen.
I'd let it happen again.
Put me back in that corridor with the same choice and I wouldn't change a thing. I didn't hesitate today and I wouldn't hesitate tomorrow, and that's the thing I'm going to have to carry around now.
