Jamie met her eyes. “Please.”
She stood, gave Dante’s hand one more squeeze, and stepped out as the nurses moved in.
“Dante,” Jamie was already fitting the blood pressure cuff over his arm, “listen to me. You’re not in Africa. You’re in New York. You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you.”
The monitor the nurses attached to him showed his vital signs were climbing. Heart rate 142. BP spiking.
“Vasovagal,” Jamie murmured. “Sweating, tachycardia—he’s going to crash if we don’t get ahead of it.” He took Dante’s hands and gently led him to the bed.
As Dante sat, Jamie took a knee by the bed and placed one gloved hand on Dante’s shoulder, grounding him. “Breathe in through the nose. Out through the mouth.”
Dante’s jaw was tight, but his eyes began to blink more frequently. His breath hitched then slowed. Only slightly—but enough.
“Good. Keep going.”
The nurse adjusted the oxygen line near Dante’s nose, turning up the flow slightly.
“You’re not dying,” Jamie assured him. “You’re remembering. That’s all this is. And I’ve got you.”
Dante finally collapsed back against the pillow, exhausted, shaking, soaked in sweat. But breathing. Monitors beeped low and steady in the corner. It was the first calm he had felt since the spiral—since the crash of memory and panic.
Jamie sat beside him with quiet confidence. His voice was low and matter-of-fact. “Your body is starting to relax. Nice even breaths, mate.”
Dante nodded, jaw still tight. His hands were still shaking—not as violently, but enough he couldn’t handle the sterile connectors himself.
He hated it.
“I don’t mind doing this,” Jamie added, sensing the frustration. “I want to keep an eye on you tonight.”
“Because of the crash.”
Jamie didn’t answer.
Dante stared ahead for a long moment, eyes unfocused. “He said it for me to remember.”
Jamie looked over. “Krueger?”
“Both.” Dante nodded slowly. “The phrase. ‘Clean slates are made with dirty hands.’”
Jamie paused, letting the line settle.
“I thought it was some cryptic bullshit. A power play. But it’s not a metaphor. Not entirely.” He exhaled, rubbing his palms over his thighs, still damp from residual sweat. “He didn’t want it to haunt me. He wanted it to guide me.”
Jamie watched him carefully. “Guide you where?”
Dante leaned forward slightly, the dialysis bag sloshing softly in the background. “Slate. Dirty hands. Not philosophy. A designator.”
He stood slowly, unsteady but driven. He walked to the wall-mounted tablet, his hands still trembling, but not enough to stop him from typing.
“Pre-Chase. Not civilian. This was DoD-grade legacy infrastructure. Tied to JSOC intel initiatives. I saw a flash of it once working in San Diego when I was buried in after-action files from burned black sites—comparing injury patterns, stress markers, anything that told me how people were being broken. It’s how you learn a torturer’s signature. It’s how you know who’s been in the room.”
He tapped in a series of commands—Chase override credentials Jamie probably wasn’t cleared to see.
And then he saw it. “The program was called DIRTY HANDS. And the facility?” He turned the screen. “Slate Harbor. Decommissioned naval psy-ops site. Cold War era. Reactivated post-9/11 for behavioral asset manipulation.”
Jamie exhaled. “Where?”
“Montauk. East end of Long Island. Quiet stretch of shoreline surrounded by dead property and fake deeds. No flyover. Satellite shadows. Covered as a NOAA weather archive for years. Nobody ever really shut it down.”
