Chapter 3 The Twelfth Floor

I did not expect to be summoned.

That was the word the message used — summoned — delivered by a woman named Priya with an expression I couldn't quite read, somewhere between sympathy and warning. "Twelfth floor," she said. "Ten a.m. He wants to discuss the medical department's clearance protocols."

"With me? I've been here four days."

"With you." She studied me for a second too long. "Word of advice. Whatever happened yesterday, whatever you said to him — don't apologize for it up there. He doesn't respect people who walk it back."

I thought about that the entire ride up in the east elevator, the one I hadn't been supposed to need, watching the floor numbers climb past medical, past legal, past two floors of glass-walled conference rooms full of people who looked like they billed by the minute. The twelfth floor, when the doors opened, was quieter than I expected — no bustle, no open floor plan, just a long hallway of dark wood and a single assistant at a desk who waved me through without asking my name, like she already knew exactly who I was and why I was there.

Kian Vane's office took up the entire corner of the building, floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, and he was standing at the far one when I walked in, back to the door, hands in his pockets, looking down at the city like it was a ledger he was auditing.

"Ms. Bennett." He didn't turn around right away. "Your report was the most direct piece of writing I've received from this department in three years."

"Was that a compliment?"

"It was an observation." He turned then, and I made myself hold his gaze instead of doing what my body wanted, which was to look anywhere else. "Most of my medical staff write reports designed to avoid conflict. Vague language. Room for interpretation. Room for someone upstairs to interpret it the way that's convenient. Yours had none of that."

"I wasn't trying to make a statement. I was trying to describe a knee."

"I know." Something in his mouth almost moved. "That's what made it useful."

He gestured me toward the seating area near the window — not the desk, I noticed, which felt deliberate, like he was choosing to have this conversation as something other than a formal reprimand — and I sat, spine straight, hands folded, doing my best impression of a woman who was not currently cataloging every detail of a man who unsettled her.

"I want to ask you something, and I want an honest answer," he said, settling across from me. "Not a diplomatic one."

"That's usually the only kind I have."

"How long has Torres been playing injured before you got assigned to him?"

I thought about Priya's warning. I thought about how easy it would be to give him the safe answer — I can't speculate, I only have my own evaluation to go on — and how that answer would protect me completely and tell him nothing.

"Longer than the file suggests," I said instead. "The compensatory damage in the surrounding tendons doesn't happen from a single reinjury. It happens from repeated strain over months, which means either his previous therapists missed it — which I doubt, given what I've seen of the actual injury pattern — or someone kept clearing him anyway."

Kian's expression didn't change, but something behind it went very still, the particular stillness of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to. "That's a serious accusation."

"You asked for an honest one."

"I did." He was quiet for a moment, studying me with that same clinical attention from yesterday, except this time it didn't feel like being catalogued — it felt like being weighed, and coming out, somehow, heavier than he expected. "Do you know who signed his last three clearance forms?"

"I don't have access to that."

"I do." He didn't elaborate, and I understood, without him saying it, that whatever name was on those forms had just become a problem he intended to solve quietly, and that I had just handed him the first thread of something much larger than one athlete's knee. "I want you reporting directly to me on Torres's recovery going forward. Not through Priya. Not through the department. Me."

"That's not standard protocol."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

"Can I ask why?"

He looked at me for a long moment, long enough that the question I'd actually asked — why me — seemed to hang in the air separate from the professional one I'd meant. "Because you're the first person in this building in longer than I'd like to admit who told me something true instead of something comfortable," he said finally. "I find that I want more of it."

I left the twelfth floor twenty minutes later with a direct reporting line to the CEO of Vane Sports Group, a growing, uneasy suspicion that something was rotten in how this company handled injuries, and a feeling in my chest that had nothing to do with any of that and everything to do with the way he'd said I want more of it, like it had cost him something to admit it.

I was still turning that sentence over when I stepped off the elevator on four and nearly collided with a man I didn't recognize — mid-forties, expensive suit, a smile that reached his mouth and stopped well before his eyes.

"You must be the new therapist everyone's talking about," he said, extending a hand. "Carl Vane. Kian's cousin. COO." His eyes flicked, briefly, toward the elevator I'd just exited, toward the twelfth floor written invisibly behind me. "I hear you had quite the first week."

"News travels fast."

"In this building?" His smile widened, and something about it made the hair on my arms rise the exact same way it had in Jake's treatment room, except this time it wasn't attraction I was cataloging — it was warning. "Faster than you'd believe. I'll be seeing you around, Ms. Bennett. I have a feeling we're going to be working closely together."

He walked away before I could answer, and I stood in the hallway a long moment, replaying the way he'd looked at the elevator, the way he'd known my name before I'd introduced myself, and the particular, practiced blankness of his smile — a smile built, I was already certain, for exactly the kind of conversations he didn't want witnesses to.