Adriana #3
“Tri-County Emergency Medical Services Regulation 402, Paragraph C requires your signature on the intake liability form prior to patient offload so my partner can retrieve the specific industrial neutralizing agent the engineering facility keeps on file. We can’t release the patient until the document is executed, Doctor.
” His face was a hard mask, devoid of expression, as harsh as his tone.
He stood between her and the ogre on the stretcher like a boulder.
“If you refuse to sign, I’m required by protocol to contact the shift supervisor at the facility of origin and document a refusal of care. ”
Behind the discharge desk, Deneen’s keyboard had gone silent. Eyla was staring open-mouthed at Trapp, shocked by the cold efficiency of the wolf she’d probably known since he was in diapers.
Adriana felt a hot wave of fury surge through her veins. He was weaponizing the very thing she prided herself on — unyielding adherence to clinical protocol. And he was doing it in front of her staff, again.
“Give me the chart,” she hissed, clicking through the requisite screens until she reached the signature he was requesting. “Put him in the room.”
By the time the lights of the ambulance were pulling away, her hands were shaking so hard she had to shove them back into her coat pockets to hide them from Eyla.
It was a set-up, she realized, a warning of what the rest of the day would look like.
There had been a birthday party a few days earlier, she learned, listening to Shileen chat unendingly with a troll who was there with her elementary school-aged daughter.
A party that every child in the upcoming third-grade class had been invited to, a super spreader event that had their waiting room bursting at the seams for the first time since she’d started at the clinic.
Adriana was fuming. They had the nerve to be busy when she had vengeance on her mind.
“I need assistance in here,” she called down the hallway after a green-skinned girl with pigtails and the teeth of a piranha nearly bit her.
The little girl’s mother protested when a silicone wedge was fit between her daughter’s jaws, forcing them to stay open, but Adriana intended to end her shift with all her fingers intact, regardless of the little girl’s tears.
“Open,” she told a six-year-old Wulvern boy, her eye still twitching as she jammed a wooden tongue depressor into his mouth, the hard bark of Trapp’s voice reverberating around her skull. “Swab . . . and done. Shileen, run the rapid test.”
The boy’s mother squinted with a look of deep irritation. “Is he going to need an antibiotic? Can we make sure it’s the one from Hastings-Durning? All of those human drugs give him a stomachache. Dr. Grigor used to—”
“Dr. Grigor is retired,” Adriana snapped, not looking up as she tapped on the tablet. “If it’s viral, antibiotics won’t do anything but ruin his gut flora. Which we won’t know until the test is done. Wait in the lobby, please.” She didn’t wait to see the woman’s reaction.
Trapp thought he was the only one who could weaponize a policy manual?
He thought just because he had an important name and a big dick, just because he was connected and charming, that he’d be able to twist protocol around her like a boa constrictor?
She would show him how wrong he was. She had spent years navigating the most cutthroat emergency department in the Northeast. She knew how to find a loophole in a hospital charter that could dismantle a chief resident’s entire scheduling rotation before they came back from lunch.
He thinks he can tie your hands with red tape? We’ll see if he enjoys it as much. The notion of tying his hands with anything made her blush; the image in her head not one that was safe for work.
For the next week, every minute she wasn’t at the clinic, Adriana was dissecting every line of the Tri-County Emergency Medical Services manual, paying fifty dollars to download the full, unredacted PDF of the county operational guidelines from the state database.
To trap him in his own game? Fucking worth it.
“Eyla, I want you to pull up the run sheet for every ambulance drop-off from the last thirty days.” The grin that crossed her face was probably a bit unhinged, but she was past the point of caring. “Specifically, any patient dropped off at this facility by Unit 43. I want a full audit done.”
The orc looked up from the computer she sat in front of at the central desk, her expression instantly guarded, eyebrows shooting up. “That’s Trapp’s . . . an audit? Dr. Grigor never ordered an audit for any of the—”
“Dr. Grigor is gone,” Adriana interrupted.
“And per section 9-B of the Tri-County Medical Oversight Charter, which I have read very thoroughly, the director of the receiving facility has the right to review all pre-admission charting for diagnostic alignment. I want to see if the field diagnostics match our diagnoses. If there’s a discrepancy greater than five percent, I am required to flag it for the regional medical board. ”
Eyla’s mouth opened slightly, a flush of dark green rising on her neck. “Trapp’s charts are always clean, Dr. Brunelli. He’s very thorough.”
“Then he has nothing to worry about.” Adriana offered a tight, razor-sharp smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Let’s get it done today.”
She didn’t wait for Eyla to protest. She turned and walked into exam room three to prep for her first patient. The trap was set. Now, she just had to wait for him to slide into it.