Chapter 4
Silas
The stringent scent of vanilla hand sanitizer made me pause my fingers from continuing to glide over the keyboard. “Something you need, Violet?”
She cleared her throat—her telltale sign of embarrassment for being caught reading over my shoulder. “Your patient is awake.”
Her voice, unnecessarily close, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. A pet peeve of mine: I hated hoverers.
“Which one? I have a few.”
“Bishop. Room 3.”
The time at the bottom of the computer’s screen read 4:38am. An hour and thirteen minutes post-op. Impressive to already be coming around from anesthesia so soon after being rolled into a recovery room. Not unheard of, but rare, nonetheless.
Especially, after needing a blood transfusion.
Pushing myself back from the desk, and rolling the chair back far enough to force her to scuttle away from me, I stood, readjusting my surgical mask up over my nose. “Nausea? Dizziness? Confusion?”
Wide baby-blues blinked back at me. “Uh, no? He’s pretty alert. Talking and asking the other nurses what happened with his partner. He wanted to talk to you, too, about recovery and how soon he could be discharged.”
Not surprising. A man willing to risk his life would certainly have impulsivity issues.
Technically, if pushed hard enough, the cop could discharge himself at any time. Typical recommendations for abdominal surgeries were anywhere from three to five days. The lower end of the scale were for planned situations: appendectomy, hernia repair or removal, or any other less traumatic events.
His and the way he’d come in half-dead on that stretcher?
He’d be lucky to be out of here by Monday.
Explaining the situation would predictably go one of two ways: acceptance and understanding for the need to follow proper medical protocol, or total lack of care and the demand to be let out of this place as soon as possible.
The latter was my least favorite to deal with and most likely what I’d be walking into.
Snagging a tablet from next to the computer, I nodded for Violet lead the way while I followed two steps behind. Ridiculous, of course, I could map this place in my dreams. But I needed the brief moment of quiet to prepare for the inevitable annoyance.
Quiet voices trickled down the hallway, two patient rooms occupied on this side of the floor, both of them from the same incident. One room had two officers posted outside of the door, another on the inside—the perpetrator, as we’d come to find out once we had Bishop stable and out of the OR.
It struck me as odd for rescue efforts to be wasted on an individual accused of stabbing a cop. Suffering grand wounds of his own from two separate guns firing at him and taking him down at the scene of the crime.
Wouldn’t justice be served in taking out the one responsible for trying to kill your colleague permanently?
Why bother resuscitating?
Then again, the intricacies of the law weren’t exactly my forte.
There was no expected recovery for the man. Two many holes had been punched through his back for Dr. Jacee to do anything but make him stable enough for life support. And even then, not much could be done.
Perhaps it was all a show for legalities sake. A way to avoid a potential lawsuit if the precinct could claim efforts were made to ensure the survival of the perpetrator but were ultimately in vain due to his extraneous injuries.
What lawyer would risk their career trying to defend a potential cop-killer, though?
Not many, that was for sure.
We arrived at Bishop’s room, and I noted there was already a small light on inside, bathing it in a warm, tired glow. Typically, these were the lights used for midnight vital checks, not when patients were already sitting up in their bed, chattering away with their assigned nurses.
The room grew hushed when we entered. Violet picked up the chart at the foot of the bed while Claudia excused herself from Bishop’s bedside and quickly scooted out of the room.
I settled into the guest recliner tucking a leg over my other’s knee, while Violet worked.
The tablet rested in my lap, screen still black.
“I was told you’re looking to get out of here.”
Like Violet had described, the man was up and alert in the same manner I’d imagine he would be after waking up from a restful nap. His eyes were glued to my nurse up until the moment I spoke. Then, his gaze snapped to me.
A romantic would describe them as the color of the needles on a pine tree.
“Yeah. What’s the earliest recovery time?”
“Three days.”
He nodded slowly, gaze drifting off. A pull to the bottom lip, indicating deep thought—a mental calculation of some kind. Most likely tallying benefit days.
“But… with your particular injuries, you’re looking at around five to seven days. At least.”
“A week?” He slumped back into his bed. “There’s no way to speed this up?”
Violet wrote the last of her notes, slipped the chart back into the holder at the foot of the bed, and then excused herself quietly from the room.
“Considering I had to open you up to get to your nicked appendix and an artery, no.” Not to mention the plethora of other shit I’d had to fix. He was lucky I hadn’t found anything else. Like the epigastric artery severed completely and not just partially.
Surgery worked in ascending steps. Getting down to the deepest layer first and working your way out, sewing and cauterizing along the way.
Organs, muscles, layers of fat and skin, those were all pieces of tissue that each needed their own separate time to work on.
Meaning, recovery wasn’t as simple as opening someone up, getting to the root of the issue, and then gluing them back together like a fucking art project.
As Marlow would eloquently put it, people were literal onions.
“I feel fine,” he said.
“You can thank Freidrich Serturner.”
His brows knitted together. A strange expression on such a soft and pretty face. “Who?”
“The inventor of modern morphine.”
His eyes immediately rolled. So far back, in fact, that it wouldn’t surprise me if he came back with a report of what the inside of his skull looked like. Clearly, whatever nerve I’d hit was an exasperated one.
“Okay, look…” He drew his hands up from his sides, one of them hovering over his stomach area. “I’m serious about feeling fine. I get there’s going to be some pain here and there but I can manage. I’ve had worse—”
In real time, his expression morphed from clear determination to sheer, unabashed panic as his hand ghosted over the injury site. His palm flattened, patting gently over his hospital gown while he seemed to search for something.
Interesting.
“Something wrong?”
“Um, you wouldn’t happen to know where my things went during surgery, would you?”
“In the trash.”
His eyes nearly popped out of his head. Horrified. “All of it?”
“Your gun was taken by your colleagues. On its way to be returned to your precinct, I imagine. If that’s what you’re worried about.”
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. His fingers flexed twice, each time splaying and running along the outline of the bandages. No sense of relief or delight at having his organs still in him found tingeing that terrible expression now pinching his features.
“Right. Okay. Thanks. But everything else?”
I raised my brow. “It was all coated in bodily fluids. I doubt you’d want a ruined uniform back.”
Unless… he was talking about something else.
Something underneath his clothes.
My heart picked up a tick.
Traitor.
There was a moment of silence. Ear piercing and annoying.
Only cut through by the soft sounds of the hospital past his doorframe.
His plump lips thinned while staring me down.
A resigned collapse to his shoulders that wasn’t there moments before when trying to get me to agree to discharge him within the next few days.
Before, there was a confident air to him. Now, he looked like a kid being caught five-fingers deep in the candy jar.
Shame, maybe?
Embarrassment, obviously, over the fact that I’d bore witness to what he’d been wearing. Clearly not a choice then.
How could it be when there was shame involved?
There was something else, though, too. A touch of awkwardness that wasn’t necessarily his pride being hurt.
Humiliation?
No, too poignant.
He finally let out a long, and drawn out sigh.
Disappointment.
I’d gotten a better look at the waist chains afterward.
Had rinsed them under water to look at the metal, the dire need to know compounding all sense telling me to let the subject go.
Caught a look at the small tag on the back of one of the gem settings to see it was, in fact like I’d suspected, 14k gold.
Real.
Quite the expensive hazing ritual.
But by then, Claudia had come around with that damn disposal tray, shaking it at me like the fucking holiday bell ringers. And into the trash it went. Forever.
“So. It’s… all gone.” His tone was flat. “I can’t get anything back?”
“I’m not authorized to encourage anyone to dumpster dive.”
Besides, I wouldn’t have any idea what direction to possibly point him in.
We had over a ton in waste disposed of weekly.
Sifting through any of that was not only hazardous but dangerous in the sense of there being such an overwhelming capacity.
There was no telling what would be where and with the chains being so small, there was no doubt they were at the bottom of some biohazard bucket.
Sealed and ready to be burned at the landfill.
The disappointment wafting from him was unsettling.
Did that mean his wearing it had been completely intentional?
Looking at him, I had a hard time believing it. People like him weren’t into kink. Not like that, anyway. They were into day drinking with their buddies and then going home to their wives to slap a pair of fuzzy handcuffs on her and fuck her until the leftovers in the microwave chimed.
There was no sophistication to the act of sex. No dressing up in pretty little pieces that showcased every curve or plane of muscle hiding underneath regular, everyday clothing.
“Nothing was saved for evidence?”
“What evidence? Do you not remember who stabbed you?”
To my surprise, he lifted his hands to groan into them.
An odd reaction out of someone forced into play like that.
Relief would surely come at the possibility of the ritual having to be cut short due to unforeseen circumstances.
A lucky cop-out to more hazing and a story of guts and bravery to go along with the bragging rights of almost dying on the job.
A young cop’s wet dream.
Unless it actually was his and now it was beginning to set in that he’d just lost a very, very expensive looking piece of permanent jewelry.
Fine woven lace and a little ribbon rose flashed in my mind.
As I sucked my tongue against the back of my teeth, the tablet’s screen came to life with a single flick against it.
“A week post-op, you’ll need a scan of the area to make sure there was nothing missed. Once that comes back clean, you’ll be free to get discharged. Until then, rest and sleep. I hear it does wonders on the body’s ability to heal.”
Tabbing over to the notes section on his patient portal, another sigh answered me while I inputted the request for his follow-up scan.
The next two days away from this place would be blissful. Much needed in terms of getting away from what was clearly scrambling my brain no matter the force I’d been using to stamp it down.
By the time I returned, a clear mind would be coming with me.
Images of Bishop’s curvy body and lacy panties erased for good.