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“I warned you,” he says to me. “Very clearly.”

“I came here because it was an emergency.”

Alester jerks his jacket straight and looks at me with flat disgust. “I warned you once. If you go near her again, I will sue you so thoroughly you’ll spend the rest of your life paying lawyers instead of operating.”

Dalton takes a step toward him. “Try it.”

“Oh, I will,” Alester says quietly. “I’ll drag your name through every board review and licensing committee I can reach. By the time I’m done, no hospital in this country will let you touch a scalpel.”

I straighten fully and move away from the bed so Maggie is no longer caught between us. “Your child was in danger, and this is all you can think about?”

He gives me a look so cold it almost passes for boredom. “You mean your child?” The acid in his voice is slight. Controlled. That only makes it uglier.

Maggie makes a sound—small, shocked enough that for a second I think she’s in pain again—but I don’t look away from him.

“You accepted the child,” I say.

That gets him. Not visibly, not in any way another person in the room would catch, but I know him well enough now to see the tiny hardening around the mouth, the fraction of a second too long before he answers.

“I accepted an arrangement,” he says.

“Same difference.”

“No,” he says. “Not to me.”

“Clearly.”

The monitor behind me starts beeping faster.

Maggie says my name, low and strained. I hear her, but I can’t stop now. Not when he walked in here and chose this, not when she’s lying in a hospital bed and he’s still treating her like a disputed asset.

He looks past me, briefly, toward the chart at the end of the bed, then back to my face. “Who is feeding you information?” he asks. “Acharya?”

I actually laugh. It’s not a pleasant sound. “You think this is about information?”

“I think boundaries are no longer being respected.”

“You don’t get to use that word in this room.”

“I’ll make sure he’s off the case too,” he says.

For a second I don’t even process it. Then I do, and I’m moving before I’ve fully decided to. “You will do no such thing.”

It happens fast after that.

Not a fist thrown, not some wild, stupid brawl. We’re both too old for that and too practiced at control. But I’m in front of him now, close enough that he has to step back or pretend he isn’t. He doesn’t step back.

His hand catches my forearm when I shove him away from the bed, and then we’re in each other’s space, shoulders hitting, voices no longer low enough to count as private.

“Get out of her room,” I say.

“This is not her room,” he snaps. “This is a hospital, not your apartment.”

“At least in my apartment she was safe.”

The second the words leave my mouth, I know they landed exactly where I meant them to.

His grip tightens. “You are in no position to talk to me about safety.”