Power Play

Chapter Thirteen: Dr. Reyes

The training room the next afternoon looked exactly as it always did — bright, clinical, humming with the low chatter of players getting taped and stretched before practice — and Dr. Naomi Reyes moved through it with the same brisk, competent efficiency Rae had watched for two full seasons without ever once considering her a threat.

She was younger than most team physicians Rae had encountered, maybe mid-thirties, sharp-eyed, with the kind of quiet authority that made even the biggest guys on the roster defer to her without argument. Rae had always liked her, in the distant, professional way you liked someone whose job was mostly to poke at your joints and ask uncomfortable questions about pain scales.

"Callahan." Dr. Reyes looked up from her clipboard as Rae approached, her expression neutral, professionally pleasant. "You're not on my schedule today."

"I know. I wanted to ask you something." Rae had spent the walk over rehearsing this, trying to find an angle that wouldn't tip her hand too early, and settled, finally, on something close enough to the truth to hold up under scrutiny. "There was a photo. Of me and Beckett. Someone sent it to Whitfield's email. I heard your badge showed up near that hallway around when it was taken, and I guess I'm just — trying to understand who might have seen something."

Something flickered across Dr. Reyes's face — too fast to fully catalogue, but Rae had spent two years learning to read exactly this kind of flicker, the specific micro-expression of someone recalculating what they thought they'd successfully hidden.

"I was in that hallway Saturday," Dr. Reyes said carefully. "I'm in that hallway most days. It's between the training room and my office."

"Did you see anything? Anyone with a phone out?"

"No." The answer came too fast, too clean. "I didn't see anything unusual."

Rae held her gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, watching for the tell she half-expected and half-dreaded finding, and saw it — a small, involuntary swallow, the specific stiffness of a person holding still because moving felt dangerous.

"Dr. Reyes," Rae said quietly. "If there's something you know—"

"I think you should get to practice, Callahan." The response was clipped now, professional distance snapping back into place like a door closing. "I have patients waiting."

Rae left the training room with more questions than she'd arrived with, and the specific, sinking certainty that Beckett's instinct had been right — Dr. Reyes knew something, and whatever it was, she was frightened enough of it to lie badly rather than say it out loud.

She found Beckett after practice in the equipment closet — carefully, deliberately, in full view of the corridor this time, the door propped open, nothing for anyone to photograph — and relayed the conversation in a low, urgent voice.

"She's hiding something," Rae said. "I could see it. She's scared."

"Scared of what, though? If she's the one sending the emails, she wouldn't be scared, she'd be in control." Beckett rubbed his jaw, thinking it through. "Unless she's not the one sending them. Unless she's being pressured by whoever is."

"Pressured how?"

"I don't know. But think about it — Halloran's the athletic director. She has real authority over staff contracts, over funding for medical resources, over Dr. Reyes's entire department budget." His eyes sharpened. "If Halloran wanted leverage on you specifically — your knee, your eligibility — and needed someone with medical access to manufacture or accelerate a finding, who better to lean on than the team physician whose department funding she controls?"

Rae felt the pieces sliding into a shape she didn't like at all. "You think Halloran's pressuring Dr. Reyes to build a medical case against me."

"I think it fits every piece we have. Access. Motive. A pattern of someone documenting things quietly instead of just leaking them all at once — because someone in a position of institutional authority wants deniability if it ever gets questioned." Beckett's jaw was tight with something that looked, underneath the analytical calm, like real fear. "If I'm right, this was never really about the fraternization clause. That's just the opening move. The real target's your knee, and once they have documented proof of that, they don't need a photo at all. They have a clean, defensible medical reason to cut you, and the whole relationship story just becomes convenient cover."

Rae sat down hard on the low bench, the equipment closet suddenly feeling very small around her. "So what do we do?"

"We need to know for certain," Beckett said. "And I think there's only one way to get that."

"What?"

He looked at her for a long moment, something apologetic already forming in his expression before he even said it. "You need to let Dr. Reyes actually look at your knee. Officially. On the record."

"Beckett, no—"

"Hear me out." He crouched in front of her, taking both her hands in his. "If she's building a case against you off some vague suspicion, an official exam might actually protect you — it puts you in control of the narrative instead of her. But more than that, if she's genuinely being pressured by Halloran, sitting across from you in an exam room, looking you in the eye, might be exactly the thing that breaks her. People don't hold up well lying to someone's face when the person's real, and scared, and asking for help."

"And if it doesn't break her? If she just documents everything and hands it straight to Halloran?"

"Then we're no worse off than we already are, with the clock running anyway." His thumb traced gentle circles over her knuckles, steadying her. "I know it's a risk. I wouldn't ask if I could think of another way."

Rae closed her eyes, weighing two years of careful concealment against the specific, terrifying gamble of walking directly into the exact danger she'd spent that entire time avoiding.

"Okay," she said finally, quiet but resolved. "But you're coming with me."

"Always," he said, and meant it in a way that settled something scared and unmoored in her chest, even as the seventy-one hours ticked steadily down toward whatever came next.