Room Three

The floor squeaked. Real vinyl, the kind that squeaked under running shoes — Mira registered that before she registered the rain still dripping off her collar, before she registered anything else about a room somebody had built to look exactly like the place she trusted most in the world.

The waiting chairs matched too.

Same molded plastic, same faint chemical smell of a cleaning product ordered in bulk.

A rack of outdated magazines sat fanned across a side table with the studied casualness of a stage set.

Someone had gone to a supply catalog and bought the whole aesthetic of safety, piece by piece, and gotten almost all of it right.

The clock above reception ran five minutes fast. Same as Saint Agnes.

Someone had remembered that.

Someone hadn't remembered the oxygen ports. Polished. Labeled. Mounted at the right height. Disconnected. She noticed it the way she noticed everything now, without meaning to, and felt something cold that had nothing to do with the rain.

A framed print hung on the far wall, generic hospital art, a lighthouse against a sunset, the kind of thing purchased in bulk for waiting rooms nobody actually looked at. Even that felt deliberate. Even that felt like someone had asked what a hospital was supposed to feel like, and built the answer from a catalog.

"Doctor Castell." The man at the door didn't carry a gun she could see, which unsettled her more than a gun would have. "He's through there. Wouldn't let anyone else near him tonight."

"Wouldn't, or wasn't allowed to?"

Nothing. She hadn't really expected an answer.

Room Three smelled like antiseptic laid over something warmer — cedar, sweat, blood gone metallic in the air.

A man sat on the edge of an exam table bolted down exactly like the ones back home, a towel pressed to his side, holding pain the way some men hold a secret: expensively, without complaint.

Younger than the voice. Dark hair, damp at the temples. A face built out of angles instead of anything showy — forgettable in a crowd, impossible to forget across a table.

"You're late." Not an accusation.

An observation, delivered the way she delivered them.

"You're bleeding on a towel instead of a paramedic forty minutes ago. I'd call us even." Gloves on. Cataloguing. "Move your hand."

He did. The towel came away red enough that his jaw tightened — one flinch, gone, smoothed back before she could name it properly.

That, she noted, and said nothing.

That was the job.

"Knife," he said, before she asked. "Amateur got lucky."

"Congratulations to the amateur." Four inches. Shallow on the left. Deeper where it curved under the ribs. Not arterial. Not simple either.

"Needed six stitches an hour ago. You waited."

"I wanted you."

Three words. No more weight than a man ordering coffee. Her hands stopped for exactly one second before she made them move again.

"That's not how triage works."

"I know."

She opened the suture kit. Same brand as home. Even the thread matched color. Something in her wanted to laugh at that and didn't.

"Local, or do you want to be difficult about that too."

"Local's fine." A pause. His voice slowed — not softer, careful, a man choosing words off a very short shelf of ones he trusted. "You don't like me."

"I don't know you. Given three years, that's a choice you made. Not one I did."

That landed. A flicker at the corner of his jaw.

"I was protecting the arrangement."

"Convenient. That the arrangement needed protecting from the one person keeping your men alive."

"You're angrier than I expected."

"I'm not angry. I'm cataloguing." She tied the first stitch. "Stay busy hoping I keep it that way."

Silence. Not tense. Recalculating.

"Understood," he said, and there was a thread in it — the first unguarded thing all night — that in a lesser man might have been nerves.

She worked. Thread through skin. His breath stayed even, deliberate, until the needle caught wrong on the deepest part of the wound and the exhale that followed ran half a second too long before he smoothed it flat again.

Small. Real.

She noted that too, next to everything else she wasn't ready to examine.

An old scar sat low on his ribs, badly closed. A second one, straighter, ran along his forearm — the kind a man got on purpose, or let happen on purpose, which amounted to the same thing in her line of work. She saw both. Asked nothing.

Not tonight.

"Your brother." Into the quiet. Her hands didn't stop. Everything else did. "He said yes this morning. To Marco. Two hours ago."

The needle paused half a centimeter from skin.

"I told them to hold the paperwork until I told you myself." He slid a folded page across the tray.

Leo Castell. Fresh ink, still faintly wet at the last letter.

"He can still walk away.

Nothing's filed."

"Why tell me at all."

"Because you'd have heard it from someone who enjoyed it more."

She finished the last two stitches in silence. Her hands, at least, could be trusted.

"We're done." Gloves off. "Keep it dry. Ice for the swelling — around the wound, not on it."

"You're the only one who—" He stopped. Jaw tight. Some argument settling behind his eyes.

"You're the only doctor I trust."

"That's not a compliment. That's a liability."

"I know."

She was at the door before she trusted her voice again.

"Don't send anything to my apartment. If you want to fix what you did to my brother, do it to his face."

She didn't wait to hear if he answered.

Outside, the rain had thinned to something almost gentle. She stood under the awning, phone in hand, Leo's name glowing under her thumb.

Somewhere down the block a delivery truck idled, its hazards blinking orange against the wet pavement, the only other sign of life on the whole street. A dog barked once behind a fence and went quiet.

The city, indifferent, kept moving around her while she stood perfectly still.

She thought about going back inside. About asking him, directly, what kind of man builds a fake hospital to make a woman comfortable enough to hate him properly.

She didn't.

She didn't call Leo either.

Rain gathered on the screen until his name blurred under a single drop.