I dress. The fabric feels like an apology against my skin.
I'm pulling on the hoodie when a knock comes at the bedroom door. Two taps. Measured.
"Max. The doctor's here. Can we come in?"
Atlas. Asking permission. I zip the hoodie halfway and open the door.
She's in her fifties—sharp eyes, gray-streaked hair pulled back, a leather medical bag that looks older than me. The kind of doctor who makes house calls to hotel penthouses and doesn't ask how the injuries happened. Atlas follows her in and takes the doorway. Arms crossed. Watching.
"I'm Dr. Callahan." She sets her bag on the bed. Snaps on gloves. "May I?"
I nod. She tilts my chin toward the lamp. Checks my eyes with a penlight. Presses gently around the bruise on my cheekbone—I wince and she notes it without comment. She examines the split lip. Checks my wrists, turning them over, running her thumb along the soft abrasions.
"I'm going to need you to remove your shirt," she says. Matter-of-fact. "I need to see your back."
My stomach drops.
I glance at Atlas. He's watching from the doorway, his expression carefully neutral, but I can see the tension in his jaw. He already knows what's under the shirt. He saw it through the glass—the cross, the whip, the welts being laid into my skin while he sat at a dinner table and couldn't move.
I pull the hoodie off. Then the t-shirt. Turn around.
The silence that follows is clinical from her. Not from Atlas. I hear his breathing change—a sharp inhale through the nose, held, controlled. The sound of a man seeing something for the second time and finding it worse up close.
Dr. Callahan's fingers find the first bandage. Peels it back. I feel the air hit the broken skin and my jaw tightens.
"Who dressed these?" she asks.
"Bane." My voice comes out smaller than I want. "He—we had bacitracin. In the—where we were."
She doesn't ask where we were. Just peels the other two bandages. Cleans each laceration with something that stings enough to make me grip the edge of the mattress. Applies fresh ointment. Fresh gauze. Tapes them down with quick, precise motions.
"Three lacerations," she says, for Atlas's benefit as much as mine. "Two are superficial and slight—they'll close on their own. The third is deeper. It's not infected yet but it needs to be watched. I'll leave oral antibiotics and a topical."
Yet. The word sits in the room.
"You can put your shirt back on."
I do. Fast. My cheeks are burning—a deep, crawling heat that has nothing to do with my omega biology and everything to do with the fact that Atlas just watched a stranger examine marks that were put on my body while I was naked and restrained and gagged.
Marks he saw being made. Something I’d nearly forgotten.
The humiliation is a living thing. It sits on my chest and presses down and I focus on zipping the hoodie all the way to my throat like the fabric can undo what he's already seen.
"You're dehydrated," Dr. Callahan continues, packing her bag. "Your blood pressure is low. Stress markers are elevated, which is expected." She pulls two bottles from her bag—one prescription, one over-the-counter—and sets them on the nightstand beside the water. "Antibiotics twice a day with food. Ibuprofen as needed for pain. Keep the lacerations clean and dry—no soaking, pat dry after showers." She looks at me directly. "And I need you to sleep. Real sleep. Your body has been running on cortisol and adrenaline for days and it needs to crash. Twenty-four hours minimum."
"Twenty-four hours?"
"Minimum," she repeats. "Your body will tell you when it's done. Listen to it."
She packs up and follows Atlas out of the room to go back on Bane next. I hear her voice through the wall—wrist abrasions, residual sedative load that needs to clear his system.
Same twenty-four hours. No exceptions.
I sit on the edge of my bed. The adrenaline is draining out of me in real time, like someone pulled a plug. My hands start to tremble. My vision softens at the edges. The mattress is obscenely comfortable and my body is screaming at me to fall backward into it and not surface for a year.
"Come eat something first."
Zero. In the doorway. Leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, watching me the way he watches everything—like he's taking a photograph with his eyes.
