Chapter 1 - The Blood on Curtain Four
At Mercy General, the night shift smelled of antiseptic, burnt coffee, and rain carried in on people’s coats.
I had been on my feet for sixteen brutal hours when Dr. Patel slid a chart across the counter of the nurses’ station.
“Curtain four,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “Side laceration. He won’t tell registration his real name or how he got it.”
“I’m due to clock out in twenty minutes, Doctor.”
“I know.” He glanced nervously toward the crowded waiting room, then back at me. “Just take a look. Please.”
Behind the curtain, two towering men in dark charcoal suits stood on either side of the narrow hospital bed.
Between them sat a third man with a sodden white linen shirt pressed tightly against his lower ribs. Blood had soaked entirely through the fabric, darkening his knuckles and dripping onto the linoleum tile.
His tailored jacket lay neatly folded on the chair beside him, as if he had arrived for an ordinary corporate board meeting.
“I asked for a doctor,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
“Dr. Patel is covering trauma if you need emergency surgery. I’m Emma Shaw, the senior triage nurse assigned to you.”
I set my suture tray on the metal counter. “May I see the wound?”
He turned his piercing, slate-gray gaze toward the two armed sentries. “Wait outside.”
They obeyed instantly, though the taller one lingered at the divider long enough to ensure I noticed the bulge beneath his armpit.
I washed my hands at the stainless sink and snapped on fresh latex gloves. The man watched me with an unnerving, predatory stillness as I cut his ruined shirt away with surgical shears.
The laceration ran six inches along his intercostal space, clean, jagged, and bleeding heavily.
“What caused this?” I asked, applying pressure with sterile gauze.
“A knife.”
“When?”
“About an hour ago.”
I reached toward the red wall button to summon Dr. Patel for an operative consult.
Before my thumb could touch the plastic, his large, bloodstained hand clamped around my wrist like a steel shackle.
“No one else enters this stall,” he commanded.
I kept my eyes level with his until he slowly released his grip.
“I need to clean this properly, and you need to tell me if you have internal bleeding,” I replied, pointing to an older, jagged scar running just above the fresh cut. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” His answer came far too easily.
While I irrigated the deep tissue, he noticed the faint exhaustion tremor in my fingertips. “Are you frightened, Nurse Shaw?”
“I’ve been awake for sixteen hours,” I said, threading the suture needle to buy myself composure. “And you’re bleeding all over my clean bed.”
To my shock, the harsh line of his mouth softened into the ghost of a smile.
I offered local lidocaine. He initially refused, then relented once I informed him that if he flinched, I would leave an uneven scar across his ribcage.
When I tied off the fourteenth stitch, I applied an antibacterial barrier and wrote out a home-care regimen.
Dr. Patel returned, but the patient gave brief, evasive answers, declined cross-match blood testing, and refused antibiotics from our pharmacy.
Before rising, he pulled a thick roll of folded hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and pressed them toward my hand.
“I cannot accept tips. It violates hospital ethics.”
“Then consider it an anonymous donation.”
“You can hand donations to the front desk administrator.” I pushed the cash back into his hand. “Keep the dressing dry. Return immediately if you spike a fever or notice drainage.”
He tucked the money away into his pocket. “You’ll know if I do.”
I watched him slip his jacket over his broad shoulders. “You can request any nurse on duty.”
“I know,” he whispered, pausing at the fabric curtain. “Thank you, Emma.”
I had not told him my first name was Emma. I glanced at the patient clipboard where my ID badge number was stamped and assumed that was how he had read it.
At six in the morning, I clocked out beneath a weeping gray sky and caught the commuter bus back to my modest suburban apartment.
I fell onto my mattress without even kicking off my scrub pants, falling into a dead, dreamless sleep.
Violent pounding on my front door ripped me from sleep at 4:37 in the afternoon.
Through the brass peephole, I saw the scar-faced man who had stood guard in curtain four, his hand raised against my wood frame.
May you like
“Miss Shaw,” his voice boomed through the hallway. “Mr. Russo needs you immediately. The wound has turned septic.”
Before I could reach for the deadbolt, a sleek black smartphone slid under the gap beneath my door, buzzing frantically against the linoleum.
