He nodded slowly, gaze drifting off. A pull to the bottom lip, indicating deep thought—a mental calculation of some kind. Most likely tallying benefit days.
“But… with your particular injuries, you’re looking at around five to seven days. At least.”
“A week?” He slumped back into his bed. “There’s no way to speed this up?”
Violet wrote the last of her notes, slipped the chart back into the holder at the foot of the bed, and then excused herself quietly from the room.
“Considering I had to open you up to get to your nicked appendix and an artery, no.” Not to mention the plethora of other shit I’d had to fix. He was lucky I hadn’t found anything else. Like the epigastric artery severed completely and not just partially.
Surgery worked in ascending steps. Getting down to the deepest layer first and working your way out, sewing and cauterizing along the way. Organs, muscles, layers of fat andskin, those were all pieces of tissue that each needed their own separate time to work on. Meaning, recovery wasn’t as simple as opening someone up, getting to the root of the issue, and then gluing them back together like a fucking art project.
As Marlow would eloquently put it, people were literal onions.
“I feel fine,” he said.
“You can thank Freidrich Serturner.”
His brows knitted together. A strange expression on such a soft and pretty face. “Who?”
“The inventor of modern morphine.”
His eyes immediately rolled. So far back, in fact, that it wouldn’t surprise me if he came back with a report of what the inside of his skull looked like. Clearly, whatever nerve I’d hit was an exasperated one.
“Okay, look…” He drew his hands up from his sides, one of them hovering over his stomach area. “I’m serious about feeling fine. I get there’s going to be some pain here and there but I can manage. I’ve had worse?—”
In real time, his expression morphed from clear determination to sheer, unabashed panic as his hand ghosted over the injury site. His palm flattened, patting gently over his hospital gown while he seemed to search for something.
Interesting.
“Something wrong?”
“Um, you wouldn’t happen to know where my things went during surgery, would you?”
“In the trash.”
His eyes nearly popped out of his head. Horrified. “Allof it?”
“Your gun was taken by your colleagues. On its way to be returned to your precinct, I imagine. If that’s what you’re worried about.”
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. His fingers flexed twice, each time splaying and running along the outline of the bandages. No sense of relief or delight at having his organs stillinhim found tingeing that terrible expression now pinching his features.
“Right. Okay. Thanks. But everything else?”
I raised my brow. “It was all coated in bodily fluids. I doubt you’d want a ruined uniform back.”
Unless… he was talking about something else.
Somethingunderneathhis clothes.
My heart picked up a tick.
Traitor.
There was a moment of silence. Ear piercing and annoying. Only cut through by the soft sounds of the hospital past his doorframe. His plump lips thinned while staring me down. A resigned collapse to his shoulders that wasn’t there moments before when trying to get me to agree to discharge him within the next few days.
Before, there was a confident air to him. Now, he looked like a kid being caught five-fingers deep in the candy jar.
Shame, maybe?
