Power Play

Chapter Twelve: Seventy-One Hours

Sleep did not come easily that night, for either of them.

Rae lay awake in the dark of her room — technically her room, though most nights now found her curled against Beckett's chest instead — running the same math over and over, trying to find an angle where the seventy-two-hour clock resolved into something survivable. There wasn't one. Every path led to the same conclusion: someone with real institutional access wanted this program destabilized badly enough to sacrifice both of them to do it, and Whitfield, for all his careful maneuvering, was one man trying to hold back a flood with his bare hands.

She heard Beckett's door open around one a.m., heard him pad quietly down the hall, and found him in the kitchen a few minutes later, laptop open, a legal pad beside it covered in the same cramped handwriting he'd used mapping the equipment closet corridor days earlier.

"You should be sleeping," she said.

"So should you." He didn't look up. "I'm cross-referencing athletic department access logs. Whitfield gave me read access to the building system this afternoon — said if I wanted to help find whoever's behind this, I'd need it, and he trusted me not to a***e it."

"Find anything?"

"Maybe." He turned the laptop toward her. A spreadsheet, badge swipe times, cross-referenced against the timestamp of the photo and the compliance email. "Whoever took the equipment closet photo had to be in that hallway between four-forty and four-fifty-five last Saturday. That narrows the badge swipes to eleven people."

Rae scanned the list, most of the names meaning nothing to her — facility staff, a handful of assistant coaches, two boosters who apparently had standing access for reasons she didn't fully understand. One name near the bottom made her go still.

"Coach Reyes," she read aloud. "Dr. Naomi Reyes. The team physician."

"I saw that too." Beckett's jaw was tight. "Doesn't mean anything on its own — she has legitimate reasons to be in that hallway constantly, it's right by the training room. But it's the first name on this list with both access and a plausible motive I can think of."

"What motive would the team doctor have?"

"I don't know yet. But if she's the one who eventually reviews your knee — if there's ever an official injury report—" He stopped, watching her face carefully. "You said if anyone found out about your knee, you'd lose everything. Who exactly makes that call?"

Rae felt something cold slide down her spine. "Dr. Reyes. She'd be the one to flag it for the medical review board."

"So if someone wanted leverage over you specifically — real leverage, not just gossip about a relationship — the person best positioned to manufacture it would be the one person who controls whether your knee ever becomes an official liability issue."

"You think she's building a case against me."

"I think," Beckett said carefully, "we need to find out exactly what Dr. Reyes has been doing with her access to that hallway, and why her badge shows up in that window three separate times in the last two weeks, according to this log — not just Saturday."

Rae stared at the spreadsheet, three separate entries under Dr. Reyes's name clustered suspiciously close to moments she and Beckett had both, in retrospect, been somewhere they shouldn't have been overheard. The specific, unpleasant sensation of being watched — not once, but repeatedly, methodically — settled over her like something physical.

"How do we find out?" she asked.

"Carefully," Beckett said. "Because if I'm wrong, accusing the team physician of anything is going to blow up in our faces exactly like accusing Tanner almost did. And if I'm right—" His expression darkened. "If I'm right, we're dealing with someone who has access to my medical files, your medical files, and enough institutional credibility that nobody's going to question her word over ours."