Free Web NovelChapter 333: A pink surprise
NICK
(Few hours earlier)
The fluorescent light fixtures in the second-floor recovery wing hummed with a low, vibrating drone that felt directly connected to the pulse behind my ears.
This was my fourth consecutive twelve-hour shift, a stretch of time I had navigated on roughly three hours of sleep and the specific, stubborn refusal to acknowledge that my lungs were currently full of hot sand.
I had decided weeks ago that stopping was simply not an option on the table.
My body, however, had begun to make its own decisions without asking for my permission first.
The headache had officially graduated past the stage where four hundred milligrams of ibuprofen could touch it; it had settled into a heavy, throbbing ache directly behind my retinas, pulsing with a regular, angry rhythm that felt like a secondary heart trying to kick its way out of my skull.
I had slipped into the staff restroom at dawn to press a glass thermometer under my tongue.
The digital screen had blinked back 38.9—a clear, steady rise from the low-grade fever I had noted the previous afternoon.
I had looked at the small black numbers, rinsed my mouth with ice water, and walked straight back to the surgical boards.
The only part that truly irritated me was the slight tremor in my left hand.
In the operating room, under the blue glare of the overhead lamps, my fingers were perfectly steady, muscle memory and adrenaline forcing a competence my marrow was privately trying to abandon. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
The moment I stepped away from the table, though, the shallow shaking would return to the tips of my fingers like a bad habit.
My colleagues weren’t blind. I could see them tracking the dark tint under my eyes, the slight hitch in my stride when the dizziness rolled through my hips.
One of the doctors had cornered me near the chart rack this morning, her brow furrowed as she looked at my face, clearly weighing whether she wanted to risk my temper by telling me I looked like a corpse.
I had given her a long, perfectly polite stare that settled the matter before she could open her mouth.
But Dr. Carmichael was a different problem. He found me between my first two cases, his large frame blocking the narrow corridor near the scrub sinks.
"Bennett," he said, his deep voice carrying that careful, deliberate tone he used when he was about to cross a boundary. "When was the last time you actually took a day off?"
"I’m perfectly fine, Doctor," I said, keeping my hands flat against the sides of my white coat to hide the twitch in my knuckles.
"That wasn’t the question I asked," he countered, his eyes narrowing as he took in the dry flush on my cheekbones. "You look like absolute hell, Nick. Factually. I’m taking you off the afternoon list."
"With respect," I replied, my voice dropping into that smooth, unyielding register that usually made people back away, "I don’t need the afternoon off. I have two more procedures scheduled before five."
Carmichael looked at me with the heavy, exhausted assessment of a senior clinician who had spent thirty years watching stubborn residents run themselves straight into the concrete. "If you faint over an open field in this hospital, Bennett—"
"I won’t faint," I said. I delivered the line with the total, absolute certainty of a man who had never once lost control of his own physical form in a professional space, regardless of the 38.9 fever currently boiling through his blood.
He held my gaze for three seconds longer, checking for the slight rattle in my breathing before he let his shoulders drop. "My door is open," he muttered, stepping aside. "The moment it gets worse, you walk into it."
"Of course," I said, offering him the small, formal nod that served to close conversations I had zero intention of ever remembering.
Admirable, I thought as I walked down the hall toward the sterilization room. The department head has apparently decided to perform a brief lecture on human concern.
It’s very touching. I remained completely unmoved, the memory of his face dissolving before I had even reached the end of the linoleum.
The first surgery went perfectly. My hands handled the retractor and the initial incisions with that independent, detached ease that comes from hundreds of identical hours under the linen.
My physical self did the work while my mind drifted away, wandering into corners it had no business exploring until I forced it back to the red tissue beneath my fingers.
The second case was a mess... a sudden, wet tear in the splenic artery that had the monitor screaming within ten seconds of the first cut. I didn’t hesitate.
The room went entirely quiet around my voice as I called for the clamps, the nurses moving into the rhythm of my decisions without a single tremor of doubt.
I was good at this; I was always good at this, and the hospital knew it.
Afterward, I stood at the scrub sink for five minutes, letting the water run as hot as my skin could bear. I stared at my wet palms through the steam, watching the small, rhythmic tremor shake the tendons in my wrist.
The heat didn’t fix it. Nothing fixed it except the work itself.
I heard the voices from the break room before I even turned the corner. Two pediatric nurses were standing by the coffee machine, their heads tilted together as they talked over the rattle of the plastic cups.
"—Wolfe is apparently awake," one of them murmured, her voice carrying clearly through the cracked door. "Four days now, and they say he’s already talking to the specialists."
"That assistant of his has been in that vinyl chair every single morning," the other replied, shaking her head. "Literally every day for three weeks. You’d think they were family, the way he sits there. He’s Dr. Bennett’s brother isn’t he? They look almost identical."
I didn’t slow my pace. I walked straight past the open door, my eyes fixed on the gray tile ahead as my brain automatically processed the data.
Cassian Wolfe was awake. Four days. Which meant the people who mattered to him would have received that phone call ninety-six hours ago.
Interesting, I told myself, my inner voice dry and smooth. So the long drama is over.
Cassian Wolfe continues to inconvenience the entire city, including his own grave. Entirely predictable.
What I didn’t allow myself to analyze was the sudden, sharp drop in my own chest... a massive wave of physical relief that arrived before I could put up any defensive walls to stop it. It was immediate and frustratingly real.
I hadn’t set foot on the private ward in twelve days. I had gone out of my way to adjust my schedule, handing over the recovery charts to one of the other doctors specifically so I wouldn’t have a single medical reason to walk down that corridor.
I told myself it was an issue of professional delegation... a clean hand-off to keep the paperwork simple. The actual truth was much uglier.
I was sick to death of walking past that door and seeing Noah’s pale face through the glass, sitting in that stupid vinyl chair, rendering a devotion I refused to name for a billionaire I couldn’t stand.
And below that, deep down in the dark part of my throat where I couldn’t doctor the thoughts was the ridiculous, humiliating hope that if I walked down that hallway, Cyan might be standing there.
That he would just appear out of the gray walls like a sudden, unmanageable problem, the exact way he had done in my kitchen.
There were forty minutes before my next pre-op assessment. My bones were aching with a heavy, cold fluid that made every step feel twice as heavy as it should be, and my stomach was turning over at the mere thought of the lukewarm cafeteria broth.
I needed air. I didn’t want the hospital food, I didn’t want the hospital smell, and I didn’t want the sight of another white coat.
I just wanted sixty seconds of standing near the front exit, letting the automatic glass doors slide open so the damp, dirty air of the city streets could hit my face.
The main lobby was a crowded, noisy cavern of moving bodies and squeaking sneakers.
As I walked through the center of the linoleum, my brain did that strange, hollow thing it always did when the fever got too high, the sounds began to feel underwater, and the people passing me on either side became gray, blurry suggestions rather than real human beings.
I was five feet from the glass doors when the pink hit my eyes.
It didn’t just register; it detonated against my retinas. For twenty-three days, my visual cortex had been misfiring against every single pink object in this building... sparking at balloons, at scarves, at the pediatric nurse caps, always turning out to be a false alarm.
But this was different. The bright, obnoxious color was moving fast through the crowd, heading in the entirely wrong direction toward the back elevators, already past my shoulder before I could even draw a breath.
I stopped dead in the center of the floor. The sluggish, medicated systems in my blood came roaring back online all at once, the fog clearing out of my head with a sharp, painful snap.
Behind the flash of pink, an older man in a perfectly tailored charcoal suit was trying to navigate the crowd with as much dignity as the pace allowed. "Sir," he called out, his voice low but thick with a lifetime of polite reprimand. "Running in a medical facility is—sir, please."
He carried himself with that old, unyielding weight that most people never manage to find in their entire lives. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
The pink hair was already at the elevator bank, the doors sliding shut around his long, slender frame before the old man could even reach the line.
My boots were moving across the floor before my conscious mind had even cleared the choice.
