"Please," I begged. "Please, I'll cooperate. I'll do whatever you want. Just let him go. He's nobody. He's—"
Frank's eyes found mine. Wide. Confused. He didn't understand why this was happening, didn't understand that his only crime was being kind to a woman in trouble. In his face I saw the same expression I'd seen on patients' families when I came out of surgery with bad news. That desperate hope that reality would somehow rearrange itself into something survivable.
The gun came up.
"Don't look," I said, but the words were too slow.
The shot was sharp and final in the empty street. Frank's head snapped back. A spray of dark matter painted the wall behind him. He dropped straight down, strings cut, the way bodies did when the brain stopped sending signals.
No dramatic collapse. No last words. Just there, then not there.
The scream that tore from my throat didn't sound human. It was rage and grief and horror compressed into pure sound. I fought against the hands holding me, managed to get a knee up, drove it into someone's stomach. But there were too many of them, and they'd clearly dealt with hysterical victims before.
Frank was dead. Frank who'd trusted me, who'd stolen medical supplies for desperate people, who'd protected his grandmother even knowing it might cost him everything. Dead because I'd walked out of safety. Because I'd thought I knew better.
They dragged me toward the van.
The interior smelled like industrial cleaner and something else—fear-sweat from whoever had been here before me. I thrashed against the hands holding me, managed to get one arm free, swung wild. My fist connected with someone's jaw, pain shooting through my knuckles, but it was worth it for the grunt of surprise.
"Feisty," one of them said, like he was commenting on weather. Not angry, not even particularly interested. Just an observation about cargo that wasn't cooperating.
They pressed me down onto the bench seat, one man holding my arms, another my legs. Professional holds that distributed pressure, made it impossible to get leverage.
"Doctor Maya Cross," one of them said, reading from a phone screen. "Twenty-six years old. Former trauma surgeon, license revoked six months ago." He looked up, face shadowed but voice conversational. "You've been surprisingly hard to find."
"Fuck you."
"The client was very specific," another voice said. "Intact delivery. No damage to the merchandise."
Merchandise.The word hit like ice water. This wasn't about killing me—it was about keeping me functional until they could take me apart properly. Heart to one wealthy client, liver to another, kidneys bringing top dollar on the black market.
"Do it," the first man said.
Someone pressed a cloth against my face before I could react. The smell hit immediately—sweet, chemical, sharp enough to burn my sinuses. My medical brain kicked in even as my body panicked. Sevoflurane, most likely. Fast-acting anesthetic that would drop me in seconds if I breathed it in.
I held my breath, twisted my head, tried to pull away. But the hand holding the cloth was implacable, sealed over my nose and mouth with professional precision. My lungs started to burn. Twenty seconds. Thirty. Black spots danced at the edges of my vision.
Eventually, biology won. I had to breathe.
The first inhale was fire and sweetness flooding my system. The second made my limbs go heavy. The third turned the world soft at the edges, sounds becoming distant, muffled.
Through the van's open door, I could still see Frank's body on the pavement. Small. Still. Twenty-one years old and dead because of me.
"There we go," someone said from very far away. "Don't fight it, Doc. Makes it worse."
The darkness took me.
Soundcamefirst.Asteady electronic beep, rhythmic and familiar, the kind I'd heard ten thousand times duringresidency. Cardiac monitor. Someone's heart rate being tracked in real time.
It took three more beeps before I realized the heart being monitored was mine.
Sensation arrived next, less welcome. Cold metal against my back, the kind of cold that seeped through thin fabric and settled into bone. My wrists ached, positioned wrong, held in place by something padded but unyielding. Same at my ankles. Across my hips. Across my chest.
I tried to move. Nothing happened.
The panic came then, sharp and immediate, but my body couldn't respond to it. Couldn't thrash or fight or run. Could only lie there, consciousness returning in cruel increments, each new awareness worse than the last.
Smell hit me like a slap. Antiseptic. Sterile. The particular combination of disinfectant and surgical prep solution that I knew as intimately as my own heartbeat. I'd worked in that smell for years, lived in it, dreamed in it.
