Justine
“He suffered a concussion and some second-degree burns. Broke a couple bones. He’s in a coma now. But he will survive. Probably will be here for treatment for quite some time, though.”
Zack looked utterly relieved.
Zack. It had been so damn long since I had interacted with any of these…guys, whatever the fuck they called themselves now, and I could still remember this guy’s name. I wasn’t like Katie, who had just run through guys before mysteriously declaring she and Connor had loved each other. But I also wasn’t going to remember the name of someone I’d had one encounter with and then sworn off.
But I was.
And he looked as handsome as the day he’d come out and talked to me. He still had that stubble—it was a little thicker than when I’d last seen him, a little darker—and that same well-groomed hair. How he was a part of that friend group was a little beyond me, since, for starters, he didn’t seem like a fucking asshole.
But it didn’t matter.
“Listen, go tell your friends that he’s going to make it. And leave me to work in peace, OK?”
“I get it,” Zack said. “I just thought you’d prefer to have a friendly face asking you questions. Better me than Connor.”
I had to smile at that. I hated it, but I did.
“Yes,” I said. “But seriously. I don’t like working with people watching me. So please, let me work in peace.”
“Of course,” he said. “But you’ll forgive me if you see me again, right?”
“Go, Zack.”
He arched an eyebrow at that. I realized that he didn’t know I’d remembered his name. Now he knew that I still remembered him after all this time, and he wasn’t wrong to think that there was something more to it than that.
Damnit.
Fortunately, Zack got the hint and left me to work in peace right after that. I admit, I watched him leave. I told myself that I was making sure he actually did leave, as Reapers did not seem like the kind of group inclined to listen to orders.
But I knew the truth.
“Dr. Elks?”
I whirled right back around. The call of my name, especially from a nurse or in an urgent tone, could instantly snap me out of whatever I was doing and into work mode. Though I didn’t have much time for a dating life these days, I half-joked that I could be having sex and still get jolted to attention by that name.
“Yes.”
“Let’s prep the patient for surgery?”
“Yes, I had to remove the peanut gallery,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
I stepped inside, and as I looked over Cole, doing what I needed to do to treat him for the burns and the wounds, I couldn’t help but wonder what he had done to deserve this. For one, he wasn’t dressed like the rest of the Black Reapers; if not for them circling outside his room, I might have assumed he was just the victim of a terrible, horrible crime.
We’d all heard the bomb going off from the hospital, and we’d all seen it pop up on the news a minute after it happened. We all knew the deal in the hospital—whenever disaster struck, we were going to have our hands full. Although I felt terrible for Cole, we got lucky. One patient to take care of who looked like he would live was a hell of a lot better outcome than having to triage patients, deciding who lived and who died.
It was no surprise to me a gangster would be targeted. Albuquerque was generally safe, though rumors of biker gangs popping up had filled the air—and the relationship decisions of my friends confirmed those rumors—but that didn’t mean we didn’t have our fair share of criminals.
I just never would have imagined that the Black Reapers, the group that had made me feel terrible about myself when they were Bernard Boys, would be the ones behind it.
* * *
A couple hours later, we’d finished our surgery. It would take about a month for the bones to heal, and the burns would probably always leave a scar of some kind. The coma was something Cole would wake up from eventually, maybe as soon as that night, but trying to predict when that would happen was a fool’s game.
“All right,” I said. “We’ve done what we can for now.”
I left the nurses to check his vitals and stabilize him as needed. Whenever I handled surgeries like these, I always preferred to retreat to the break room for as long as I could to center myself. Even just two minutes with my eyes closed did a good job of calming me. And a surgeon could not, under any circumstances, operate, whether literally or figuratively speaking, under stress.
