Chapter 3 #2
He’s exactly where I left him last night, flat on his back, chest rising and falling with the slow rhythm of deep sedation. The blanket is still tucked around him. He hasn’t moved.
I cross to his bedside and set my kit on the table. Check his pulse first, two fingers on the inside of his wrist, counting. Steady. Slow, but steady. His skin is cool to the touch. His breathing is unlabored.
My own breathing has slowed to match his.
I notice it the way you notice a clock ticking in a quiet room; not the sound itself, but the moment you realize you’ve been hearing it for a while.
My hands are steady again. The restless tension I carried through rounds—through Dane’s questions, through Dara’s story about the sounds that came through the walls—has eased.
Just from being here. Just from touching him.
Don’t be ridiculous, Sable. You’ve been wound up since yesterday. This is just the body coming down.
I let go of his wrist and get to work.
“Good morning,” I say. My voice sounds strange in the empty room. “It’s me again. Sable. You know my voice by now, whether you remember it or not.”
He doesn’t respond. Of course he doesn’t. The drug is too deep for that. But I’ve started talking to him during these visits—a few days ago, maybe longer—because the silence in this room is the wrong kind. It’s facility silence. Walls and stillness and a body that nobody speaks to.
I unwrap the bandage on his left forearm, the one covering the claw marks from yesterday.
The wounds are clean, no signs of infection.
I apply fresh salve and rewrap it with deft movements.
His arm is heavy in my hands. I support the elbow with one palm and work the gauze with the other, and the heat of his skin soaks through the bandage into my fingers.
“Merric’s fine,” I tell him. “You didn’t damage anything vital.
He’s already up and moving.” I smooth the edge of the bandage down, my thumb pressing the gauze flat against the inside of his forearm.
The muscle beneath is dense and warm. “Dane, too. He’s had worse from sparring.
You don’t need to carry that, okay? Whatever you remember when you wake up—and I know you remember, somewhere—you didn’t do permanent damage. ”
I move to his right arm. The tattoo is stark black against pale skin. Six digits. 3-0-6-7-0.
I’ve asked myself a hundred times what his name is. I’ve looked at that number and tried to see past it to whatever came before. A mother who held him. A childhood. A name spoken with warmth.
“I’m going to find it,” I say quietly. “Your name. Someone knows it. And until I find it, I’m going to keep coming in here, and I’m going to keep talking to you, because you are not a number. You were never a number.”
I check the shallow cut on his temple. My fingers move his hair aside, and the dark strands are soft under my fingertips, finer than I expected. I clean the wound, swab antiseptic along the margin, and my hand brushes his forearm—just above the bandage—as I reach for the basin.
His fingers twitch.
I freeze. Put my finger over his pulse.
A single hard beat beneath the skin. Then back to the slow, drugged rhythm.
But the beat echoes somewhere in me. A kick behind my sternum, sharp and sudden, like my own heart tried to answer his. I press my free hand flat against my chest. Nothing. Normal rhythm. Nothing unusual.
What the hell was that?
I wait. His eyelids don’t flutter. His breathing doesn’t shift.
But my hand is still on his arm, and I don’t move it.
I stay there, counting the beats, watching his face.
Looking for the man I saw yesterday—the one who surfaced for two seconds before the needle took him down again.
The one who looked at me, and the look wasn’t rage.
It was something else. Something that almost trusted, before I put him under.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I keep saying that, and it keeps being true.”
I finish cleaning the cut. Pull the blanket higher around his shoulders. My hand rests on his chest for a moment, over the slow beat of his heart.
Under my palm, so faint I almost miss it, there’s a tremor.
Not a heartbeat or a breath. Something between the two, buried deep in his chest. I hold still.
It’s there for one breath. Two. Then it fades, and there’s just his heartbeat again, and the rise and fall of his ribs, and the warmth of him under my hand.
I pull back.
Should I note this down and tell Brenna?
Tell her what? That I think I felt the patient’s heart skip a beat?
The patient.
That’s what I’ve been writing in my notes. Clinical. Distant. Almost as bad as the number.
I need to stop.
I need to find his name. He needs his identity back.
I turn toward the door.
The lock clicks behind me.
I don’t move away at first. My hand stays on the key, fingers closed around the bit of metal that decides whether he gets walls or sky.
Dane’s word follows me into the corridor.
Suspension.
Not healing. Not rest.
Behind the door, his breathing continues in that slow, drugged rhythm I’ve written down so many times it should feel ordinary by now. It doesn’t. It sounds mechanical. Managed. A body kept in place because nobody knows what to do with the man inside it.
The key is warm when I slide it into my pocket.
I have to find another way.