I kept my face neutral. “Understood.”
Dunn stood, which meant the meeting was over. “This isn’t a reflection of your competence.”
It felt exactly like one. I reached for the door.
“Keep your head down,” he added quietly. “Let this stretch pass. The less noise we generate, the better.”
I paused. “For whom?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
And somehow, that told me everything. I walked back to the medical room on autopilot. Closed the door. Stood there with my hands braced against the counter, staring at the travel kits I'd spent two hours assembling this morning—every supplement labeled, every compression sleeve rolled with the precision of someone who gave a damn—and felt the ground shift beneath me.
Not all at once. In stages, the way it always happened. The way Gavin had taught me it happened, back when he'd started with small exclusions—you don't need to come tonight, it's just a work thing—and built them into walls so gradually I didn't notice I was trapped until the door was already locked.
This wasn't Gavin. I knew that. This was institutional. Professional. A decision made by men in offices who weighed liabilities against assets and found me wanting.
I pressed my palms flat against the counter until the stainless steel bit into my skin. Breathed. Counted. Did the thing I always did when the world decided I was too much trouble to keep close.
I packed up the travel kits anyway. Labeled them for Patel. Left detailed notes on every player's maintenance schedule, every nuance I'd spent months learning—the way Ash's left shoulder clicked on cold mornings, the exact pressure point behind Max's knee that released the chronic tension, the temperature protocols for Taz that I'd written in a shorthand only I could read.
Taz.
I thought about the way he’d behaved after the celebration, and standing alone in the medical room with my hands still pressed against the counter and Dunn's words still ringing in my ears, the two things converged with a clarity so sharp it drew blood.
Optics. Minimal variables. Let things cool down.
And Taz, pulling away. Taz, who'd fought for me, who'd shifted on a mountain road to protect me, who'd told me I was his dragon's choice—Taz, who'd held me in his apartment and whisperedI'm counting now—was retreating. Withdrawing. I just couldn’t know if Dunn had gotten to him first or he’d worked out on his own I was a liability.
That loving me cost more than it was worth.
The thought landed in my chest like a knife slipped between ribs—not the sharp, dramatic kind that makes you gasp, but the slow, surgical kind that you didn’t feel until you looked down and saw the handle sticking out.
I pressed my forehead against the cool metal of the counter and closed my eyes.
The evidence was all there, arranged in the neat columns my brain couldn't stop building. Gavin's data breach. Dunn quietly removing me. The article that had circulated last week—nothing explicit, nothing provable, just enough insinuation to make the front office nervous. And now Taz, who read people the way I read vitals, who would have seen all of this coming before I did, who would have understood the threat to the team in a way that was visceral and immediate and tied to centuries of hiding—
Of course he was pulling away.
He was protecting them. The team. Cole, Max, Ember, Ash, Keegan. Every player on that roster who'd bled for this franchise's second chance. Every dragon who'd spent decades—centuries—hiding in plain sight, trusting that the people closest to them wouldn't be the ones to bring the whole structure down.
And I was the crack in the foundation.
Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But the result was the same. My presence—my data, my notes, my history with a man who'd weaponized my own diligence against me—was a vector for exposure. A fissure in the armor that Taz and Ignatius and every dragon on this team had spent lifetimes building.
I understood it. That was the worst part. I understood it with the same clinical clarity I brought to every impossible situation—the same detached, analytical precision that my nursing instructors had called an "unusual capacity for detachment" and that I'd always known was just a fancy way of sayingyou're good at watching things die without screaming.
Taz was choosing the team over me. And he was right to.
My phone buzzed against the counter. I straightened, wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist—when had they gotten wet?—and checked the screen.
Taz:Safe travels prep going ok?
Two hours ago, that text would have made me smile. Now it read like a wellness check from a colleague. Polite. Measured. The kind of thing you sent someone you were already in the process of leaving but hadn't figured out how to say it yet.
I typed back:Got pulled from the road trip. Dunn wants me on site.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.