Chapter 5
Petra
I wake up on the examination table at six-fourteen in the morning with my face against Damon's collarbone and my hand still on his pulse.
This is not how I sleep.
I do not sleep with my hand on someone's pulse.
I do not sleep on examination tables. I do not, under any circumstances, sleep through my morning alarm, which I set last night at four a.m. before the finals because the recovery suite needed a six o'clock check on the Kentucky alpha and I have been running on coffee and the discipline of habit for three nights running.
I sit up.
The cervical collar is on the floor.
Damon is awake. He has been awake. He turns his face — slow, deliberate, the way I told him to move his head — and looks at me.
His eyes are clear. The gold in them is gone, banked, the wolf settled somewhere I cannot see.
His hair is rumpled. His pulse, when I find it again at his throat, is steady.
He looks better than a man should look six hours after he took a feral alpha down in front of three hundred people.
"What time is it," he says.
"Six-fourteen."
"You missed your alarm."
"I noticed."
"Petra."
"Yeah."
"I want to be clear about something."
"Okay."
"Last night was not a thank-you for saving my life.
It was not adrenaline. It was not the bourbon.
It was not the proximity of the tournament.
I have been thinking about it since the moment you walked into the chamber and called me out on the C4.
The fact that it happened on the examination table is incidental. I want you to know that."
I look at him.
He is, I am beginning to understand, a man who says exactly what he means when he means it.
There is no theater in Damon Serrano. There is the booth, and the pit, and the careful economy of words he uses when the words matter.
I have spent eleven years on the circuit listening to men who lie to women in the post-fight afterglow.
He is not lying. He has thought about whether he was going to say this and he has decided to say it, and he has said it cleanly, and that is who he is.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay."
"I need to check the Kentucky alpha."
"I know."
"Stay on this table for another two hours. Drink water. Eat the protein bar in my left jacket pocket. Do not move your head. I will be back to do a full follow-up scan at nine. Nell is going to come check on you at seven-thirty."
"Yes ma'am."
I get off the table. I dress. I am still wearing yesterday's pants and yesterday's underwear and I have approximately no shame about that because no one I work with would think it was anything but a logical outcome of having slept where I slept.
I splash water on my face at the suite sink.
I pull my hair back into a clip. I look at the woman in the mirror over the sink and the woman in the mirror is more rumpled than yesterday and her pupils are still a little wide and her mouth is bitten and she is smiling.
She is not a person I have seen in eleven years.
I find Nell at the recovery suite. The Kentucky alpha — his name is Jonas, I learned at four a.m. when I last checked him — is awake, coherent, oriented to person, place, and time.
I run him through a quick neuro exam. He is fine.
He will be fine. He asks me about Crawford.
I tell him Crawford has been turned over to a containment pack out of West Virginia who specializes in feral recovery, and that he will spend three to six months in supervised isolation working through whatever broke in him.
Jonas nods. He drinks the water I give him. He goes back to sleep.
I walk back through the central tunnel. The mine shaft at six-thirty a.m. is doing the post-tournament thing where it returns to itself — prospects raking the pit sand, the cleaning crew swabbing the upper terrace, a few patched Sinners sitting in the bleachers drinking coffee and going over the tournament cards.
They nod to me as I pass. One of them says, "Good work last night, Doc. " I do not correct him.
I should leave.
That is what my body knows how to do. Eleven years of pattern.
Three nights. Last bout was last night. The contract was three nights.
The pay is ten thousand dollars plus room and board.
I have done the work. I have collected the kit.
I should pack the van — except I do not have my van, the van is in Roanoke, Wren drove me here — I should call for the SUV and go back to Roanoke and pick up the van and drive south to a fight in Asheville that one of my regular promoters has on the books for next weekend.
That is the pattern.
I do not move toward the pattern.
I walk back to my own little bunk in the suite annex.
I shower in the small attached bathroom — the water is hot, the pressure is real, the soap is the kind I would buy if I bought soap, and I make a note that whoever stocked this suite for me was paying attention to more than just medical inventory.
I change clothes. I go back to the main suite.
Damon has, I see, ignored my instruction about staying on the table and is now sitting up at the edge of it, drinking from a water bottle, and reading a clipboard.
"I said two hours," I say.
"You said don't move my head. I have not moved my head. I have moved everything else."
"That is a lawyer's reading of medical instruction."
"I'm not a lawyer."
"I'm aware."
I do his nine o'clock scan at seven-twenty.
The bruising is settling. There is no delayed bleed.
The fusion is intact. He is going to be sore for ten days and he is going to need to stay out of contact training for thirty days and he is going to need a follow-up with Jo, the club surgeon, but he is — by every measure I have — going to be fine.
I tell him so.
He says, "I'm going to ask you something. You don't have to answer."
"Okay."
"How long are you staying."
I open my mouth to say I'm leaving tomorrow, because that is the answer that lives in my throat from eleven years of saying it.
I don't say it.
I say, "How long do you want me to stay."
Damon looks at me for a long second.
He says, "I would like you to stay until I am cleared by Jo. Ten days."
"For medical observation."
"For medical observation."
"Of yourself."
"Of myself."
"Damon."
"Yes."
"That is not the actual reason."
"No."
"Tell me the actual reason."
He sets the clipboard down.
"I am asking you to stay because I do not want you to leave.
That is the actual reason. Medical observation is the structure I can offer you that does not require you to commit to anything except your own professional discretion.
If at any point in the ten days you decide you are done, you tell me, and I will have the SUV at the gate within the hour and you do not owe me a conversation about it.
I am offering you ten days because ten days is what I think is fair to ask for and not a moment more.
If you stay past the ten days, that will be a different conversation, and we will have it when we have it. "
I think about this.
I think about Asheville. I think about my van in Roanoke. I think about the four names. I think about a fifth name I do not want to add to the notebook.
I think about a man who is offering me a structure that costs him nothing to offer and costs me nothing to take.
I say, "Ten days."
"Yes?"
"Yes."
He nods. He gets off the table — slowly, carefully, with the obedient deference of a fighter who has just been told by the only medic he trusts that he can move — and he picks up his cut from the chair where Nell folded it last night. He puts it on. He looks at me. He nods once more. He leaves.
I stand alone in the medical suite.
I think: I have just done something I have never done.
I think: I am going to find out what it costs.
— —
The first day, I sleep.
I sleep eleven straight hours in my bunk in the suite annex.
I wake up at three in the afternoon with my mouth dry and my body sore in the muscles that do not get sore when I work, which is the muscles that have not been used in roughly three years.
I eat the entire protein bar I forgot to give Damon.
I drink three glasses of water. I go for a walk.
Bone Hollow above the mine is — I have not really seen it yet. I have seen the parking, the iron door, the way to and from my suite. I have not seen the compound that lives above the chamber. I walk.
The compound is bigger than I expected. Fifteen cabins arranged in two loose rows along the slope, with the lodge at the center and a paddock for motorcycles and a small workshop at the east end and a garden — a real garden, with corn and tomatoes and herbs — at the western edge, behind a cabin I do not yet know is Damon's. I learn the layout. I meet people.
A woman in her thirties intercepts me at the lodge porch. She has long dark hair and a no-nonsense set to her shoulders and she looks at me the way a senior doctor looks at a junior doctor in a hallway — assessing, friendly, not letting me past until she's done.
"You must be Petra. I'm Jo."
"You're the surgeon."
"I am."
"You stocked my suite."
"I did."
"I owe you a debt."
"You don't owe me a debt. You owe me a coffee. Come up to the porch."
I follow her up to the porch. We sit. She brings out a thermos and pours us both coffee in tin camp mugs and we sit and look out over the valley below the compound, which is hazed in late-afternoon light, blue and green and going gold.
"You did good work this tournament," she says.
"Thanks."
"You also did something my husband says he has not seen in this compound in a long time, which is get Damon Serrano to take a piece of his own armor off in public.
He shifted in the upper terrace. He did the thing he has not allowed himself to do for eight months.
You should know that you are part of why. "
"He did it because Crawford was going to kill people."