5
HELENA
The clinic feels too quiet today.
I stand at my desk organizing patient files, but my mind keeps circling back to the contractor's face from the surveillance footage—cold eyes, professional demeanor, someone comfortable enough to forge federal credentials and canvas a small town in broad daylight. To the tactical calculations happening while Eli looked at that footage with that controlled intensity, already running defensive scenarios in his head.
And the moment it seemed something passed between us like current through water.
My chest tightens. I'm not some twenty-year-old who gets flustered by attractive men, but Eli Vance keeps catching me off guard.
I pull Traci's file from the stack and review my notes from her last exam. Physically, she's healing ahead of schedule. The bruising has faded, defensive wounds are closing clean, no signs of infection. But the psychological markers tell a different story. Hypervigilance. Selective mutism. The way she positions herself near exits, keeps her backpack on like she's ready to run at anymoment. Classic trauma responses from someone who survived months of captivity.
The question is whether she's stable enough for what I'm about to ask her.
Briggs said not to push before she's ready. But how do you gauge readiness in a girl who's been through hell? Who communicates only through writing when she feels safe enough to communicate at all? There's no medical protocol for this. No chart that tells me the exact right moment to ask a trafficking survivor if she can identify the man running the network that destroyed her life.
I close the file. Sometimes medicine is more art than science, and right now I'm operating on instinct and hope.
My phone buzzes. Text from Zeke:
Briggs got an ID on the contractor. Gary Kern. Former military, dishonorable discharge. Works as private contractor. Multiple ties to Haywood's shell companies.
Haywood?
Lyle Haywood was a corrupt FBI agent. He ran protection for Julian Montrose's trafficking network, used his position to redirect federal task force operations away from Montrose, framed Cara Brennan during the Stormwatch investigation by presenting fabricated evidence, and ordered the murder of Emma Blackwater—Rhys's wife—when she gathered photographic and financial evidence linking him to Montrose. He fled into the Alaskan wilderness after DOJ issued a warrant for his arrest, but was taken into custody.
I read it twice. So the network sent someone with direct connections to a trafficking infrastructure they thought was dismantled. It seems more like a retrieval operation rather than just reconnaissance.
I respond:
Understood. I'll talk to Traci this afternoon.
The text exchange ended with a plan—I find out what Traci knows, and if she has intelligence that threatens the network's leadership, we move her somewhere secure. Somewhere off the grid where corrupt federal agents can't track her. The details will depend on what she tells me.
But first, I need to know what that girl saw that makes her worth sending a professional contractor to hunt.
I pull out my phone and text Eli:
Can you bring Traci in this afternoon for a follow-up. I want to check her healing progress.
His response comes fast:
What time?
Mid-afternoon? Back entrance.
We'll be there.
The next few hours pass in a blur of routine appointments. Mrs. Bailey's blood pressure check shows she’s stable. The months of medication adjustments have paid off. A rancher comes in with an infected hand wound that needs antibiotics and a tetanus booster.
Then there's the kid with strep throat.
His mother hovers while I examine him, the way mothers do when their children are sick. "He's been running a fever for two days. Won't eat. Just sleeps."
I swab his throat, note the inflamed tonsils and white patches. Classic presentation. "Streptococcal pharyngitis. I'll prescribe antibiotics. He should start feeling better within a day or two."
"You sure?" She touches her son's forehead. "He's never been this sick before."
