"Doc, we got another one!" Someone drags in a guy wearing Iron Talons colors, shoulder blown open like an anatomy textbook illustration.
I should feel something about treating both sides. Guilt, maybe, or conflict. Instead, I feel nothing but the familiar calm of crisis,that place where my hands know what to do while my heart rate stays steady as a metronome.
Bad Decision:Angel. Answer me.
Between compressions on someone's chest—Iron Talons, Coyote, doesn't matter when they're dying—I manage to text back.
Working. Mass casualty.
Bad Decision:Where?
Can't say.
Bad Decision:I'm coming.
DON'T. Please.
Because the last thing this powder keg needs is another match. The warehouse already sounds like a medical episode of Sons of Anarchy—groaning, cursing, someone crying for their mother in Spanish.
"Need help here!" I call out to whoever's listening. My mobile supplies are running low, and I'm basically performing meatball surgery with supplies meant for minor wounds, not the aftermath of whatever territorial pissing contest just painted these walls red.
Three hours. Three hours of blood and bullets and boys pretending to be men while bleeding out like children. By the time the last ambulance leaves—no cops, because nobody called them, because that's not how this works—I'm exhausted in that specific way that makes your bones feel like they're dissolving.
I sit in my van afterward, peeling off nitrile gloves that are more red than purple now. My hands are shaking—adrenaline dump, not fear. My scrubs are destroyed. And my phone has twenty-seven messages from Bad Decision.
Bad Decision:Tell me you're okay.
Bad Decision:Angel.
Bad Decision:If you don't answer in five minutes I'm calling every hospital.
I'm okay. Exhausted. Covered in blood that isn't mine.
Bad Decision:Where are you?
In my van.
Bad Decision:Alone?
Yes.
Bad Decision:What are you wearing?
The question should be inappropriate given what I've just been through. Instead, it's exactly what I need—something normal, something that isn't death and violence and the knowledge that I just saved Torch so he can keep stalking me for my brother.
Destroyed scrubs. Sports bra that's seen better days. Underwear that's somehow still clean.
Bad Decision:Take off the scrubs.
I'm in a parking lot.
Bad Decision:Take them off anyway.
My hands move before my brain can object, peeling off the bloody scrubs like I'm shedding today's trauma. I grab the industrial sanitizer from my supply kit—the kind that could sterilize a crime scene—and scrub my hands until they're raw. Can't be too careful when you've been elbow-deep in a warehouse full of hepatitis and bad decisions.
The van's tinted windows hide me, but it still feels exposed, dangerous, exactly the kind of terrible decision that's become my brand.
They're off. Hands sanitized. Happy?
