Kieran snorted. “Every day you get up and decide that you trust yourself to cut patients open, to crack them open like crabs because you can put them back together. You’re a surgeon. You might not be toxic, but you’re on the scale. That means you want to be in control, and between our breakup—”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
Kieran ignored him. “—and what happened last month with this biker, the echoes of what happened in New York. This is just you trying to take back control, to rewrite it so you didn’t make a mistake with this man. With me.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Kieran raised his eyebrows. “Really? So why didn’t you go to the sheriff, Tag? Was it because you were afraid? Because you thought someone else would get hurt? Or did you just not want to admit that you—hotshot trauma surgeon Tag Hayes—had been made a fool of again?”
That caught Tag by surprise. It was a sharp, crushed pain in his chest that felt like gravel. He didn’t know if it was because Kieran was right or because he was wrong and had only done a good impression of someone who knew Tag better than he knew himself.
“Why is this even your business?” Tag asked, his voice rough as it squeezed out of his throat.
Kieran gave him a pitying look. “I told you, I care about you. Just because I’m with Freddie now, that doesn’t mean I don’t still have feelings for you. That isn’t going to change. I’ll always care about you.”
“Yeah.” Tag opened the door. “Pretty sure the fact you think I give a damn how you feel makes you the narcissist.”
Or not. What did he know? But it was a good line to leave on. The door slammed shut behind him, and Tag stalked through the ER toward the main doors. He needed some fresh air to clear his head before he got back to—
The doors clashed open around a stretcher as the paramedics shoved it ahead of them. A skinny blond lay on vomit-stained sheets, her eyes rolled back in her head and her skin gray and waxen.
“Overdose,” one of the paramedics said between hard breaths as he pushed the stretcher. He gestured at the woman’s groin, where bruises stained her thighs like ink. “Looks like she injected it into her groin. We’ve given her naloxone already, but it’s had no effect. Her BP is—”
Tag registered the vitals, but his focus was on the woman’s shallow breaths and the pinpoint pupil revealed when he rolled her eyelid back with his thumb.
“I need two more doses of naloxone,” he yelled to any nurse who heard as he jogged alongside the stretcher. “And gloves. It looks like another synthetic overdose, and we can’t afford to lose any of you guys before shift change.”
The paramedic laughed, and, with the perfect timing of the ER, the woman spat out a mouthful of bile and coded.
