My voice sounds like a stranger’s, but I don’t have the energy to care.
Lucky and I pile into Colm’s car while Eamon stays behind to clean up. I should really find a place to wash off here before I track evidence all over the car, but it’s not going to happen. It’s cold, in the early hours of the morning, and the idea of standing under a garden hose outside this barn is already making me shiver violently enough to have Colm looking at me and turning off the A/C.
It’s not like anyone’s going to be investigating this guy’s death, anyway. No one cares when a criminal goes missing, and the people who do care are already fully aware of who is responsible.
They’ll come for us soon enough. I just hope I have time to take a shower first and wash off the stench of his death.
Chapter Eighteen
Micah
This shift has been brutal. Not only is it unseasonably busy in the ER, but I’ve been a space cadet the whole fucking night. Dropping shit, misplacing shit, and taking ten times as long as usual to do basic math because I can’t fucking concentrate.
Tadhg. He’s all I can think about, as per usual. Which is starting to concern me all on its own. I realize that not only did we have a weird childhood, we’ve also been shoved into a situation where there is no guidebook on how to have healthy boundaries. Either way, even if there were, we’d be failing.
We were codependent little kids, and apparently, we’ve fallen directly into being codependent adults, as if there isn’t a decade of emptiness sitting between us.
All I can focus on is getting him better. In my entire career, I’ve never struggled to put my patients first until this moment. Stowing my shit and doing my job is my literal expertise.
But no. My brain is justTadhg, Tadhg, Tadhg, on repeat, as if he can’t function without me around to babysit him.
I put out some feelers for getting off-books psych meds from doctors that I’m friendly with earlier, and was immediately shut down. Which is a relief, to be honest. I’m glad that’s not a thing that’s happening here. I’m also glad I gave myself enough conversational wiggle room to not get reported for it.
After that, I operate on instinct, pushing through hour after hour, trying not to fuck up too badly and just make it until I can go home and see for myself that he’s still okay.
He’s not okay, though. I know it. He needs help. Between his father’s abuse, his life of crime and his misadventures with medication withdrawal, he has the emotional regulation of a soup spoon.
How am I supposed to keep him from flying off the handle and doing something he can’t come back from?
Relief washes through me when I see Tristan toward the end of my shift. He’s riding a gurney, looking like he’s basically holding the patient together with his bodyweight, which isn’t a good sign and means I have a lot more work to do before the night is over.
But he’s my only connection for less-than-legal drugs. And I’m quickly coming to understand that when it comes to my brother’s safety, everything else takes a fucking backseat in importance.
I’ll take the gnarly patient if it means I have a chance at getting Tristan to help me with my psych med issue.
It takes four of us, plus Tristan’s EMT partner Cade, to lift the patient into the bed while Tristan extricates himself from whatever he was doing. I’m closest to him, so he grabs me and switches out our hands where he was holding off a sluggish bleeder.
From the pallid color of the man’s skin, I’d say he’s about running on empty, blood-wise. Who knows how long he was left for dead before whoever found him called 911.
It doesn’t take long for a gowned-up trauma doc to take my place. There’s hustle and bustle around us, and it looks like even though he’s pretty bashed up, each wound is individually superficial enough and non-surgical that they’re going to try to do a patch job here in the ER while we take care of evidence collection, before transferring him to ICU.
Of course, because I was the first qualified ER nurse to touch him, that means I’m the one assigned to forensics. So instead of clocking out in a few minutes like I was supposed to, I’m now stuck removing every item of clothing—which are weirdly clean, as if he was dressed after being beaten—and cataloging every single injury, from head to toe, in excruciating detail, for the legal record. And then waiting to talk to the cops, who I am historically not a fan of.
It’s an important part of my job, obviously. But today’s just not the day for it. Not to mention all the Nazi symbols tattooed on this guy’s body are automatically making it harder for me to feel sympathetic.
Not that he deserved this. He’s torn apart. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was attacked by a wild animal. But it’s pretty obvious he was in the life, so he knew what he was risking.
Fuck. I’m very hardened to death and violence, but if this is the kind of thing that Tadhg has been around all his life, no wonder he’s messed up. This is fucking savage. It’s hard to wrap your head around how it’s possible for one human being to do this to another, no matter how many times you see something this awful.
When I finally get home,it feels like I’ve been gone for days instead of hours. There’s a stillness over the apartment that I used to find peaceful, but ever since Tadhg moved in, I’ve come to find it unsettling. Hopefully, it means he’s just fast asleep after working hard all night.
I’m sure the bar was busy as well. I can only cross my fingers that he stayed out of trouble.
I toe off my sneakers at the door and throw my keys somewhere. It wasn’t a particularly fluid-filled shift, but I still feel like every inch of my scrubs are sticking to me. At this point, I think a hot shower is needed just to cleanse my soul.
Cold morning light slips around the edges of my blackout curtains, casting the living room in dim shades of gray. It’s dark enough that I don’t see the footprint until I’m almost on top of it, but as soon as I do, there’s no mistaking it.
Blood.
