Chapter 3 #4
"Jesus," she breathed when she saw the damage. The professional mask slipped for just a second, revealing something human underneath. "You should be dead."
"Probably." The word came out as barely a whisper. The fluorescent lights above her head were starting to halo, everything getting soft around the edges. “But it’s not my first rodeo.”
She worked fast, hands moving with the kind of precision that came from years of practice. No hesitation in her movements, no uncertainty. She pressed gauze to the knife wound, applied pressure that made me bite through my lip to keep from screaming.
"Intestines intact," she muttered, more to herself than to me. "That's lucky. Shoulder's through-and-through, looks like it missed the subclavian. Also lucky. You have a guardian angel or something?"
I almost laughed. Guardian angel. If she only knew the things I'd done, the people I'd killed. Angels didn't look after monsters like me.
"Hold this," she commanded, pressing my hand against the gauze on my abdomen. "Hard. Harder than that. Good."
She moved around the table, gathering supplies with the efficiency of someone who'd done this too many times. IV bag, tubing, needles. Her movements were economical, no wasted motion. Every gesture purposeful. When she came back to my side, she already had a needle ready.
"This is going to hurt," she said, not apologetically, just informative.
She slid the IV in on the first try, despite my veins probably being collapsed from blood loss. Saline started flowing, cold in my veins. Then she was back at my wounds, irrigating them with something that burned like acid. I might have yelled. Hard to tell. Everything was getting distant.
"You're not going into shock on me," she said sharply, and her hand cracked across my face. The slap brought everything back into focus for a moment. "Stay awake. Look at me."
I tried to focus on her face. Sharp features made sharper by exhaustion. Dark circles that looked permanent. Eyes that were brown or maybe green—hard to tell in this light. But what struck me most was what wasn't there.
No fear.
I was six-five, two-forty, covered in tattoos and scars, bleeding out from violence that clearly wasn't random. I was everything that should have terrified her. But she looked at me like I was just another problem to solve. Another machine that needed fixing.
"What's your blood type?" she asked, pulling on surgical gloves.
"O-positive."
"Good. Universal donor. Though you won't be donating anything if you keep bleeding like this." She picked up a suture kit, tore it open. "This is going to hurt more. No anesthesia."
"Used to it."
She looked at me then, really looked at me, and something passed across her face. Recognition, maybe. One survivor seeing another.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "I bet you are."
The needle went in, and even though I'd been stabbed, shot, and beaten, the precise pain of suturing without anesthetic was its own special hell. But her hands never shook. Never hesitated. Just steady, sure movements, putting me back together one stitch at a time.
"Stay awake," she said again, though her voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. "I'm not losing a patient tonight."
The last thing I remembered thinking, before the darkness finally won, was that she'd said "patient."
Not stranger. Not criminal. Not monster.
Patient.
Consciousness came back in pieces—the sharp smell of antiseptic first, then pain like a living thing crawling through my chest and shoulder, then her voice, steady and clinical, narrating actions I could only half-feel.
"Irrigating the abdominal cavity," she was saying, like she was teaching a class to invisible students. "No signs of peritoneal breach. Patient's lucky—the blade slid along the external oblique instead of through it."
Lucky. There was that word again. I tried to open my eyes fully, managed to get them to half-mast. She was bent over my abdomen, hands moving with the kind of precision I'd only seen in people who'd devoted their lives to a craft.
Her face was intent, focused, a small crease between her eyebrows that deepened when she encountered something that needed extra attention.
The pain should have been unbearable—I could feel every pull of suture, every probe of forceps—but there was something almost hypnotic about watching her work. She moved like this was a dance she'd performed a thousand times, every gesture flowing into the next without hesitation.
"You're awake." Not a question. She didn't even look up from her work. "Try not to move. I'm at a delicate part."
I wasn't planning on moving. Couldn't have even if I wanted to. My body felt like it belonged to someone else, responding to her hands but not my commands.
"Checking for hollow organ perforation," she continued her narration. "None found. Another two inches to the left and this would be a very different conversation. One we'd be having in an actual hospital while I called time of death."
Her hands disappeared from my field of vision, then returned with fresh gauze. The irrigation solution was cold against my skin, shockingly so, enough to make my muscles contract involuntarily.
"Don't," she said sharply. "I said don't move."
The command in her voice was absolute. My body obeyed before my brain even processed the words. She had that kind of voice—one that expected compliance and got it. Made me wonder what she'd been before she was patching up criminals in a basement.
Time went fluid. I'd surface to find her working on my shoulder, then drift away and come back to her suturing my abdomen.
Once I woke to find her just standing there, hands on the table, head bowed like she was praying or maybe just exhausted.
The harsh light caught the dark circles under her eyes, made them look like bruises.
She was younger than I’d thought—maybe mid-twenties. Too young to have the kind of exhaustion that lived in her bones, the kind that came from seeing too much and not being able to unsee it. But she had it anyway, wore it like armor.
"Bullet's still in there," she said, and I realized she was talking about my shoulder. "Lodged against the scapula. I'm going to have to dig for it."
She didn't wait for permission or acknowledgment, just picked up forceps and went in. The pain was immediate and blinding, white-hot agony that made my vision go static. I might have screamed. Probably did. She didn't stop, just kept working with those steady hands.
"Almost . . . there." A grunt of effort, then the wet sound of metal on metal as she dropped something in a tray.
"Got it. Nine millimeter, looks like. Deformed from hitting bone.
" She held it up to the light, examining it like it was interesting rather than evidence of violence.
"You'll have matching scars now. Very symmetrical. You're welcome."
Was she . . . joking? This woman who'd just pulled a bullet out of me with her bare hands was making jokes? The absurdity of it almost made me laugh, which would have been a disaster given the state of my abdomen.
"Why?" The word came out rough, barely audible.
She paused in her suturing, looked at me directly for the first time in what felt like hours. "Why what?"
"Why are you helping me?"
She went back to her work, needle moving in and out of my flesh with mechanical precision. "You knocked on my door. You needed help. That's what I do. Plus, I’m going to charge you a lot."
"I could be anyone. Could be dangerous."
"Could be?" She actually snorted, a sound so unexpected I thought I'd imagined it. "You're six-five, built like a truck, covered in bratva tattoos, and you showed up shot and stabbed. There's no 'could be' about it. You are dangerous."
"Then why—"
"Dangerous people need medical care too." She tied off a suture with unnecessary force. "Because everyone deserves a chance to not die, even if they probably deserve to." Her voice dropped lower, almost to herself. "Because that's what I tell myself, anyway. Plus, you know, the money."
She didn't ask how I'd gotten shot. Didn't ask who I was or who I worked for. Didn't ask if more violence would be following me to her door. Just kept sewing me back together like I was a torn shirt that needed mending.
I watched her hands—small, elegant despite being raw at the knuckles, moving with absolute confidence.
No wedding ring. No jewelry at all except for a watch that looked medical, the kind that could take a pulse.
Her nails were short, clean, practical. Working hands.
Healing hands. Though something about the way she held herself, tense and ready, suggested those hands had seen more than just healing.
"There," she finally said, stepping back. "You're closed up. You've lost a lot of blood—probably two units' worth—but not enough to kill you. You need antibiotics, pain management, and rest. Actual rest, not whatever passes for it in your world."
She stripped off her bloody gloves, threw them in a biohazard bag, then pulled a prescription pad from a drawer. Her handwriting was precise, medical shorthand that probably only another doctor could read.
"Antibiotics," she said, handing me the paper.
"Take all of them. Every last pill, even if you feel better.
The wound was deep, and infection will kill you faster than your enemies will.
" She pulled out another bottle, shook two pills into a small envelope.
"Oxycodone for the pain. Just these two—I'm not giving you more.
You seem like the type to have your own sources anyway. "
She was right. I did have my own sources. But I took the envelope anyway.
"Clean the wounds twice daily. Keep them dry otherwise.
The sutures are absorbable, so don't try to pull them out.
" She rattled off the instructions in that same commanding tone, like she was used to giving orders that were followed without question.
"If you spike a fever over 101, if the wounds start smelling sweet or showing red streaks, if you can't keep food down—you find a real hospital.
Tell them whatever lie you need to, but get actual medical attention. "
I sat up slowly, testing my body's response. Everything hurt, but it was manageable hurt. Survivable hurt. My shirt was destroyed, so she handed me a black t-shirt from a drawer—oversized, generic, the kind bought in bulk.
"How much?" I asked, pulling out my wallet. The leather was stained with blood, but the cash inside was still good.
"Eight hundred."
I counted out eight hundreds, then added four more. She watched me place them on the table, her expression unreadable.
"Eight hundred," she repeated.
"The extra is for the shirt. And the silence."
"I don't talk about my patients." She took only the original eight bills, pushed the rest back toward me. "That's included in the base price."
I stood, legs shaky but functional. The room spun once, then settled.
She watched me find my balance, ready to catch me if I fell but not moving to help unless necessary.
There was something about that—the way she let me maintain my dignity even when I'd been at my most vulnerable—that lodged in my chest next to the monster.
"Spasibo," I said in Russian. Thank you. The word carried more weight in my native language, more meaning than the English equivalent.
She tilted her head slightly, studying me. "You're welcome."
But the way she said it, tired and resigned, suggested she knew I would. People like me always did.
I walked to the door, each step careful but steady.
My gun was where I'd dropped it, so I bent—carefully—to retrieve it.
When I straightened, she was standing by her surgical table, already starting to clean up the mess I'd left behind.
The blood, the gauze, the remnants of violence she'd quietly repaired.
"What's your name?" I asked, not sure why it mattered.
She looked up from her cleaning, that same exhausted expression on her face. "Does it matter?"
"Of course it matters."
A pause. Then: "Dr. Cross. That's all anyone needs to know."
Dr. Cross. Not her first name, of course. But then, she hadn't asked for mine either. We were just two people operating outside the normal world, crossing paths in a basement that shouldn't exist.
“I want you back here in three days,” she said, reluctantly. “I’ll have to check for infection. See how the wounds are healing. Unless you want to do that at a normal hospi—”
“No. I’ll be back here. I trust you.”
She smiled an almost imperceptible smile.
“See you in three days, then.”
I climbed the stairs to street level, each step pulling at my sutures but manageable.
Dawn was breaking over Brighton Beach, painting everything in shades of grey and gold.
The Escalade was where I'd left it, front tire still up on the curb, driver's door hanging open.
Blood had pooled on the driver's seat, already starting to dry in the morning air.
I got in anyway, started the engine, and drove away from the basement where Dr. Cross was probably already bleaching away any trace of my existence.
But I'd be back.
The monster in my chest, usually so restless, had gone quiet again. Not satisfied, not peaceful, just . . . interested.
It had been a long time since anything had interested us besides violence.
Dr. Cross, whoever she really was, had changed that.