Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
MIREYA
I sat across from Leah Mills, the hospital's HR administrator, trying to focus despite the relentless pounding behind my eyes. My head throbbed like someone was slowly tightening a vise around my skull. I pressed my fingertips to my temples, drew a slow breath, counted to three, and exhaled.
Leah’s voice pulled me back. "Mireya, we just wanted to check in with you." She folded her hands on her desk. "You've been picking up extra shifts almost every week for months. We're worried about you."
I nodded and kept my face neutral even though my shoulders felt like they were carrying someone else's weight on top of mine. “I’m fine. I can handle it.”
Her smile was kind but tinged with worry. "I don't doubt your capability. But there's a difference between managing patients and managing yourself. You've been working overtime constantly—double shifts, emergency call-ins."
I swallowed hard. She was right. My body was screaming at me in ways I couldn't ignore anymore. My hands trembled even as I pressed them flat against my thighs. My stomach had stopped growling hours ago, settling into a hollow ache.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, forcing the words out, hoping they sounded convincing. “I just need a little more time. Things will settle down soon.”
She shook her head. “That’s what everyone says before they crash.”
Then, more firmly, “We’re placing you on a temporary schedule restriction. Effective immediately, you’re limited to standard hours. No additional shifts without approval.”
My stomach dropped. “I can’t do that.”
“I understand you’re hardworking, and we appreciate it,” she said, calm and unmoving. “But it’s not optional. You’re exhausted, Mireya. That makes you a risk–to yourself and to your patients.”
Silence stretched.
“I’ll note this in your file. If it’s ignored, it becomes a formal issue.”
I nodded slowly. I wanted to argue and insist I was fine, but my headache throbbed harder with every second of silence. I had no energy left to fight.
“Now, get some rest,” she said.
After she dismissed me, I walked down the quiet hospital corridor, every step echoing in my skull. The lights were too bright and too harsh, stabbing through the ache behind my eyes.
I slipped into the nearest supply closet and closed the door, immediately hit by the sharp smell of bleach and sterile packaging that made my eyes water. I pressed my back against the cold metal shelving and closed my eyes, trying to remember how to breathe normally.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
So why did it feel like I was drowning?
Sixteen hours. That was how long I’d been on my feet. Three surgeries, including the emergency case at three in the morning when Dr. Cross had specifically requested me. The last real meal I ate was my mother’s soup from yesterday. The protein bar in my locker remained untouched.
My hands trembled as I picked up a clipboard, pretending to do inventory. The numbers blurred together. Boxes of surgical gloves. Sterile drapes. Suture kits. My vision kept going fuzzy at the edges like someone had smeared the world with a finger. My ears filled with rushing blood.
One minute. Just one minute to pull myself together.
Then I'd be fine. Dr. Cross had another surgery scheduled, and he needed his first assist. I couldn't fall apart now. Not when people were counting on me.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to slow my breathing, but my lungs refused to cooperate. Short, shallow gasps that weren't enough to clear the fog from my brain. My legs felt liquid, ready to give out.
I gripped the metal shelf harder, focusing on the cold bite of steel against my palms, praying it would anchor me while the world tilted sideways.
Movement outside the door made me look through the small window.
Dr. Cross strode past, white coat pristine and unwrinkled despite the emergency surgery we'd finished barely three hours ago. Patient chart in hand, dark head bent, expression unreadable. Like always.
He looked untouchable. Like exhaustion and hunger and fear had never once found him behind whatever wall he'd built around himself.
The contrast hit me somewhere tender.
He moved through this hospital like he was the only person who had ever truly belonged in it.
Controlled. Precise. Unshakeable. While I was hiding in a supply closet, barely remembering the last time I'd slept more than three hours or felt anything except low-grade panic about bills and evictions and keeping everything from falling apart.
And yet.
He had requested me. Again. It was always me he requested, and I had never once let myself think too hard about why. It was professional. It had to be professional. He was the most sought-after cardiac surgeon in the state and I was good at my job and that was the entire explanation.
Except.
There were moments I couldn't fully explain away.
The way I'd sometimes look up mid-surgery and find his eyes already on me, just for a second, before he looked back down at the field.
The way he'd gone still in the scrub room this morning when I handed him the ibuprofen.
The way he said my name sometimes, low and careful, like he was paying attention to the sound of it.
I had told myself I was imagining things.
Standing here now, dizzy and hollow and held up by nothing but stubbornness, I wasn't so sure.
Not that it mattered. A man like Riven Cross did not think about his surgical nurses in any way that wasn't purely clinical.
He was precise and cold and had made it quietly, consistently clear that I existed to him inside the OR and nowhere else.
Half the floor thought he didn't like me. There were days I believed them.
But he kept requesting me.
And I kept saying yes, every single time, at every single hour, because somewhere underneath all the professionalism and all the sensible reasons I told myself, I wanted to be in that room with him.
Which was a spectacular problem to have while currently losing consciousness in a supply closet.
The edges of my vision went dark. Not all at once. Like shadows creeping inward, narrowing my field of sight until I was looking through a shrinking tunnel. I reached for the shelf but my fingers wouldn't grip properly.
I thought, absurdly, that if I fainted right now he would probably find out.
I thought, even more absurdly, that some small traitorous part of me didn't entirely mind.
Then there was nothing but darkness swallowing me whole.
I woke up to beeping monitors.
My body registered, slowly, how wrong it felt to be lying on something soft instead of the hard floor. A scratchy blanket had been pulled over me. A cool, steady pressure circled my wrist, two fingers against my pulse point, and that was enough to snap me back to the present.
I wasn't dreaming. I had become a patient.
I forced my eyes open. Light stabbed through them and I blinked against the assault, shapes and colors swimming until they settled into something I recognized.
Dr. Riven Cross was standing beside my bed.
Two fingers pressed to my radial pulse. His other hand adjusting my IV drip. His eyes were on my chart, that familiar furrow between his brows, like even now, even here, he was solving something.
For one strange, half-conscious moment I just looked at him.
The sharp line of his jaw. The quiet authority in the way he stood, like he had never once in his life been uncertain about where he was supposed to be.
He was still in his white coat. Still somehow unwrinkled.
Still unfairly, unreasonably handsome in a way that felt almost inconsiderate given the circumstances.
I had collapsed in a supply closet and he had apparently found me and now he was standing close enough that I could see the faint shadow of exhaustion under his eyes that he would never, ever acknowledge out loud.
Then the monitors caught up with my brain.
The beeping accelerated in a quick, mortifying climb and I watched with complete horror as his eyes cut sideways to the screen. Then back to me. Slow. Unhurried. One dark brow lifted, just slightly, in that way he had that made junior residents want to disappear into the floor.
"Interesting," he said. His voice was low. Almost casual. "Your vitals were perfectly stable until about four seconds ago."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
The monitor beeped again, cheerfully, as if it had decided to finish destroying whatever remained of my dignity.
"I was disoriented," I said. "The light is very bright in here."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then back at the monitor. The corner of his mouth did something that was almost, almost a smile, and he said nothing at all, which was somehow so much worse.
My phone buzzed from where it had been resting on my bedside table, the screen lighting up with a cascade of notifications. Past due notices. Final warnings. Collections threats.
My humiliation crystallized into something sharp and painful in my chest.
But Dr. Cross remained focused on the IV, his expression unreadable.
In the past six months of working as his first assist, he'd barely acknowledged me outside the OR. To him, I was a pair of competent hands across the surgical field. His best assistant, maybe. But definitely just another cog in the machine.
I stole a glance at him. His face was carved from stone, jaw set in that way he always wore during surgery—complete concentration, absolute control. His fingers were still pressed gently against my wrist as he monitored my pulse, eyes flickering to the cardiac monitor.
“Dr. Cross.” My voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper. “I’m so sorry. Thank you for helping me. I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize.” His tone stayed professional and detached, like in the OR. “You collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration. You need fluids and observation.”
“I can’t stay.” I tried to sit up, but his hand on my shoulder stopped me. Gentle but firm. “I have a shift soon—”