PROLOGUE
Leah
There's a specific sound a bone makes when it's broken badly enough to puncture skin.
Most people never hear it. Most people go their whole lives blissfully ignorant of the wet snap that separates a clean fracture from the kind that makes seasoned ER nurses hold their breath.
I've heard it more times than I can count.
I've set the bones, cleaned the wounds, and held the hands.
I've looked mothers in the eye and told them their child would be fine when the blood was still warm under my gloves.
Tonight is no different. Except it is.
The ambulance bay doors blast open a few minutes after seven-thirty p.m. on a Tuesday that had been, up until this moment, blissfully uneventful.
I'm mid-bite into my freshly DoorDash’d Taco Bell quesoburrito—the first thing I've eaten since the sad excuse for a breakfast sandwich I choked down twelve hours ago—when the radio crackles and the charge nurse calls my name.
"Mercer. Bay three. Sixteen-year-old female, compound fracture of the left tibia. Four-wheeler accident on a back road off Route 7."
I drop the food on my station, tighten the lanyard holding my WVU Medicine badge, and move.
My sneakers squeak against the linoleum as I round the corner and push through the curtain into bay three, already pulling gloves from the wall dispenser.
The girl on the gurney is blonde.
That's the first thing I notice—white-gold hair fanned across the pillow, tangled with leaves and dirt and what looks like dried blood near her temple.
She's pale beneath a summer tan that hasn't fully faded, her jaw clenched so hard I can see the muscles jumping beneath her skin.
Her left leg is splinted but the damage is visible even through the temporary dressing—the kind of break that makes you wince no matter how many years you've spent in trauma medicine.
She's trying not to cry. I can tell because I've been that girl.
Sixteen years old and determined to prove the pain can't touch her, even when it's eating her alive from the inside out.
"Hey there," I say, stepping into her line of sight. I keep my voice even. Warm but not pitying—teenage girls can smell pity from a mile away, and they hate it. "I'm Leah. I'm your nurse tonight. Can you tell me your name?"
She blinks at me. Blue eyes—bright, sharp, furious at the world for putting her in this bed. "Wrenleigh," she says through clenched teeth. "And before you ask, yes, it hurts. And yes, I know it's bad. I saw the bone."
The name tugs at something in the back of my mind, but she's covered in dirt and blood and pain, and I'm already in work mode. I file it away and focus on what matters—the break.
"Well, Wrenleigh, since you've already done my visual assessment for me, how about you let me check the rest? I promise I'll be quick."
Something flickers in those blue eyes. Not trust—not yet. But the faintest crack in the armor. "Fine. But if you tell me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten, I swear to God?—"
"Wouldn't dream of it." I snap on my gloves and get to work.
She's tough, this one. Tougher than most adults I treat.
I clean the wound around the fracture site and she hisses through her teeth but doesn't scream, doesn't pull away.
Her hands grip the side rails so hard her knuckles go white, and she makes jokes through the pain—terrible, dark, sixteen-year-old humor that has no business being this funny in a trauma bay.
"Bet the four-wheeler looks worse than I do," she mutters while I irrigate the wound.
"I wouldn't take that bet," I tell her, and she lets out a laugh that turns into a groan halfway through.
