By the time he hit my stretcher, I’d already broken three of my own rules.
Rule one: never pick up an extra shift when you can’t remember the last time you slept.
Rule two: never get attached to a case.
Rule three: never, ever take on more responsibility than you can chart.
The doors to the ambulance bay exploded inward with a wet slap of air and rain, and the paramedics barreled through the threshold like the storm itself had grown arms.
“Male, late twenties, GSW to the abdomen, unstable pressure, barely maintaining airway,” one of them shouted.
Behind them, thunder growled over the city. It vibrated up through the soles of my shoes, but the sound was almost swallowed by monitors shrieking in adjacent rooms, the buzz of fluorescents, the constant ringing phone at the nurses’ station no one had time to answer.
It all went distant the second I saw his face.
He wasn’t supposed to be beautiful.
He was pale under the smeared blood, lips tinged blue, black hair soaked and plastered against his forehead. There were streaks of mud and asphalt down one side of his jaw, and an ugly, hastily wrapped bandage over his left flank that was already dark and slick. But his eyes—when they found me as we shoved the gurney through the corridor and into Trauma Two—were sharp. A startling pale gray, too focused for someone in that much trouble.
People were usually glassy or gone by then. They either clung to you like a lifeline or stared through you.
He watched me. Like he was cataloging me.
“Hi, I’m Mia, I’m your nurse tonight.” My voice came out too calm, like it belonged to the version of me from twelve hours ago, before the double shift, before the chest pain in Four, the OD in Seven, the old man who coded twice and came back just to squeeze my hand. “Can you tell me your name?”
The paramedic rattled off numbers. “BP eighty over fifty and dropping, heart rate one-thirty, O2 sats low eighties on non-rebreather. Entry wound right lower quadrant. No exit that we could find.”
“Name?” I repeated, snapping on fresh gloves, already reaching for scissors.
His gaze dragged from my ID badge to my face. Some part of me noted that his lashes were dark and thick, absurdly pretty, even stuck together with rain.
“Callum,” he murmured, the word barely there.
I leaned in closer over the roar of the storm and the chaos outside the thin curtain. “What was that?”
He swallowed, and I saw the effort it cost him. “Callum,” he said again, slightly clearer. “Vane.”
The name meant nothing to me in that moment. Just a label to attach to a chart, a body, a set of crashing vitals. I hit the bed brake with my foot and moved on instinct and habit.
“Okay, Callum. We’re going to take good care of you.”
Half of that was prayer.
Dr. Park swung into the room in a swirl of navy scrubs and authority, her dark hair twisted into a bun that had seen some things tonight. Her eyes took in the scene in two seconds. “What have we got?”
I hit the bullet points fast. “GSW abdomen, hypotensive, tachycardic, likely internal bleed. He’s responsive. No ID yet.” I started cutting away his soaked shirt, metal scissors biting through fabric, revealing skin.
