Chapter 1 - The Mark on the Cheek|
The blood had already soaked through the second layer of gauze when Naomi Hail understood that the man on her table would die if she stopped moving for even one second.
She didn't stop. Six years of nights like this one had taught her hands what her mind was too tired to argue with. Swab. Clamp. Suture. Press. The monitor above the bed ticked out a rhythm too fast and too thin, and the room smelled of alcohol and hot metal, and somewhere past the curtain a drunk was shouting at a security guard about a parking ticket while a woman sobbed over a child with a fever. None of it reached her. The only thing in the world was the hole in the man's left side, the size of a thumbprint, its edges scorched black.
No shard of glass made a wound like that. No blade did either.
She had written trauma from a sharp object on charts before. She had never once believed it.
"Pressure here," she said to the resident, and moved his hand with hers, not waiting to see whether he obeyed. The man on the table was big—broad through the shoulders, the kind of frame that took up more of the bed than it should have—and blood loss had already turned his skin the color of old paper. Dark hair cut close to the skull. A faded scar riding the ridge of his left cheekbone, pale and old, like a signature someone had pressed into him and never bothered to erase.
Something in her chest went very still.
She knew that scar. She had watched it heal.
Naomi kept stitching. That was the thing about her—she had learned, in foster homes and night shifts and the long year of her husband's dying, that the body could keep working long after the person inside it had gone somewhere else to hide. Her fingers closed the wound in neat, even rows. Her mind went back ten years, to a concrete yard behind a high school, to a thin boy pressed against a graffiti-stained wall with his arms over his head.
Raymond Lockwood.
The name came up through her like cold water.
She looked at him again and the room seemed to tilt half an inch. The boy had grown into this. The jaw had squared, the shoulders had widened, the eyes—shut now, sunk deep—had stopped being the eyes of someone who flinched. She remembered the handkerchief she had used on his knuckles. She remembered the way he had asked her, suspicious, almost angry: Why are you doing that?
She had told him there was no reason. That sometimes people were kind simply because they wanted to be.
He had looked at her as though she had spoken in another language.
"Doctor's coming," the resident said, his hands shaking under his latex gloves.
May you like
"He won't make it to the doctor," Naomi said, her voice dropping into an icy, calm register. She tied off the last stitch and reached for the dressing. "Two units of O-negative and a chest tray. And find out who brought him in."
The someone found her first.
