"Hold this," she commanded, pressing my hand against the gauze on my abdomen. "Hard. Harder than that. Good."
She moved around the table, gathering supplies with the efficiency of someone who'd done this too many times. IV bag, tubing, needles. Her movements were economical, no wasted motion. Every gesture purposeful. When she came back to my side, she already had a needle ready.
"This is going to hurt," she said, not apologetically, just informative.
She slid the IV in on the first try, despite my veins probably being collapsed from blood loss. Saline started flowing, cold in my veins. Then she was back at my wounds, irrigating them with something that burned like acid. I might have yelled. Hard to tell. Everything was getting distant.
"You're not going into shock on me," she said sharply, and her hand cracked across my face. The slap brought everything back into focus for a moment. "Stay awake. Look at me."
I tried to focus on her face. Sharp features made sharper by exhaustion. Dark circles that looked permanent. Eyes that were brown or maybe green—hard to tell in this light. But what struck me most was what wasn't there.
No fear.
I was six-five, two-forty, covered in tattoos and scars, bleeding out from violence that clearly wasn't random. I was everything that should have terrified her. But she looked at me like I wasjust another problem to solve. Another machine that needed fixing.
"What's your blood type?" she asked, pulling on surgical gloves.
"O-positive."
"Good. Universal donor. Though you won't be donating anything if you keep bleeding like this." She picked up a suture kit, tore it open. "This is going to hurt more. No anesthesia."
"Used to it."
She looked at me then, really looked at me, and something passed across her face. Recognition, maybe. One survivor seeing another.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "I bet you are."
The needle went in, and even though I'd been stabbed, shot, and beaten, the precise pain of suturing without anesthetic was its own special hell. But her hands never shook. Never hesitated. Just steady, sure movements, putting me back together one stitch at a time.
"Stay awake," she said again, though her voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. "I'm not losing a patient tonight."
The last thing I remembered thinking, before the darkness finally won, was that she'd said "patient."
Not stranger. Not criminal. Not monster.
Patient.
Consciousnesscamebackinpieces—the sharp smell of antiseptic first, then pain like a living thing crawling through my chest and shoulder, then her voice, steady and clinical, narrating actions I could only half-feel.
"Irrigating the abdominal cavity," she was saying, like she was teaching a class to invisible students. "No signs of peritoneal breach. Patient's lucky—the blade slid along the external oblique instead of through it."
Lucky. There was that word again. I tried to open my eyes fully, managed to get them to half-mast. She was bent over my abdomen, hands moving with the kind of precision I'd only seen in people who'd devoted their lives to a craft. Her face was intent, focused, a small crease between her eyebrows that deepened when she encountered something that needed extra attention.
The pain should have been unbearable—I could feel every pull of suture, every probe of forceps—but there was something almost hypnotic about watching her work. She moved like this was a dance she'd performed a thousand times, every gesture flowing into the next without hesitation.
"You're awake." Not a question. She didn't even look up from her work. "Try not to move. I'm at a delicate part."
I wasn't planning on moving. Couldn't have even if I wanted to. My body felt like it belonged to someone else, responding to her hands but not my commands.
"Checking for hollow organ perforation," she continued her narration. "None found. Another two inches to the left and this would be a very different conversation. One we'd be having in an actual hospital while I called time of death."
Her hands disappeared from my field of vision, then returned with fresh gauze. The irrigation solution was cold against my skin, shockingly so, enough to make my muscles contract involuntarily.
"Don't," she said sharply. "I said don't move."
The command in her voice was absolute. My body obeyed before my brain even processed the words. She had that kind of voice—one that expected compliance and got it. Made mewonder what she'd been before she was patching up criminals in a basement.
Time went fluid. I'd surface to find her working on my shoulder, then drift away and come back to her suturing my abdomen. Once I woke to find her just standing there, hands on the table, head bowed like she was praying or maybe just exhausted. The harsh light caught the dark circles under her eyes, made them look like bruises.
