Chapter 1

Audrey

"Audrey!” Lucille's shrill voice adds to the throbbing in my temples. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

"I know what time it—"

"The surgery was scheduled for seven thirty."

"I know."

"It is seven forty-three."

"Lucille—"

"Are you doing this on purpose? Trying to act out? The governor’s son is already on my operating table," she says, and her voice drops to the specific low register she uses when she is promising mayhem. "If anything happens to him, I'll make sure to bury you alive.”

"I'm four minutes out."

"Three," she yells. "You'd better be three. I'm late for my spa treatment already!”

She hangs up.

I push the car to the next amber light and make it through. London at nearly eight in the morning is a living creature — buses and cyclists and delivery vans all breathing and surging and blocking every road I need — and I weave through it with the focus of someone who has been doing this long enough to know which shortcuts are real and which ones add five minutes and cost you your mirrors.

The client ran long. That is the polite version. The full version is that a black market contact — a beta with a cervical fracture he couldn't take to a conventional pack hospital for reasons I didn't ask about — decided that 4am was when he had questions, and with the amount of money he paid, I had to answer them all.

“Rae!” Hana's voice booms through my car speakers as I drive through a red light on Barrington Road. “Where are you?”

“I'm two minutes out. What's the patient's status?”

“He's good but we've got an incoming from a car crash and everyone else is in surgery.”

Shit.

“Okay…” I park and change my shirt in the car. “I'll be up soon… entering the elevator now.”

When I arrive, Hana looks at me the way a person looks at something they love deeply and want to throw out a window.

"You look terrible," she winces at my appearance.

"Good morning to you too." I take the scrub top from her and pull it on over my shirt, already moving toward the sink. "Talk to me."

She follows, flipping to her notes. Nurse Hana Park with a clipboard is a different creature from Hana Park without one — focused, rapid, forensically precise. It is my favourite version of her.

"Male, thirty-one, human. Car collision on the M25 at approximately two this morning. The other vehicle was pack-driven — delta wolf, ran a light at speed. Your patient took the full impact on the passenger side." She pauses. "He's being prepped for cardio surgery."

"Good. I'll get on with him after I'm done with the governor's son."

"About that one, he has a subdural haematoma, significant midline shift, and his GCS when he came in was nine." She looks up from the clipboard. "It's eight now."

I am already pushing through the scrub room door. "Deteriorating?"

"Slowly."

"Who's scrubbing in with me?"

"Martha."

I stop.

Hana watches my face. She has known me long enough to read what I don't say, which is why she adds, very carefully: "She was already here. She volunteered."

I start moving again. "Fine."

Martha's standing at the OR table when I enter, and she is acting like she's in charge… again.

Lucille's little follower's here to make sure I do a good job which would have been fine if she actually knew what a good job looks like.

"You're late," she says, which is true, and which she says with the particular emphasis of someone who wants the nurses to hear it.

"I'm here now," I say, and step to the table, my eyes reading the scans.

"Bridging vein haemorrhage," I say. "Left temporal. The shift is at seven millimetres — we're at the threshold. We need to move."

Martha nods. “I was just about to assess—"

"Lucille," I say. "Craniotomy tray. Let's go."

♦♦♦

“I swear,” I try to work out the crick in my neck with my fingers as I walk out of the OR. “It feels like I've been run over by a truck.”

My feet are tired. My shoulders are carrying six hours of tension and twenty-six hours of not sleeping, and the corridor between the OR wing and the consultants' offices is very long and very fluorescent and I am navigating it on autopilot.

I turn the corner, and into a warm wall that instantly knocks me off my tired feet.

His firm hands catch me at the waist.

I look up.

He is looking down.

He is tall — at least a head taller than me, which is not rare, but the specific scale of him registers differently, the way certain things do when you're standing close enough to notice the detail. Dark hair, slightly dishevelled. A jaw that looks like it was put together by someone who had opinions about geometry. And his eyes — the thing I notice last because I'm working backwards from the hands still at my waist and the chest I just walked into — are silver.

Not grey. Silver. The specific clear colour of early water, or a sky before weather.

He is looking at me with an expression I can't fully read — not alarmed, not irritated, something that is more like the look of someone encountering something unexpected and taking a moment to categorise it.

The moment is approximately three seconds long.

It feels considerably longer.

A heat moves through me, one that is not professional and is not fatigue and is entirely unwelcome at this moment. It starts at the hands on my waist — warm, through the thin fabric of the scrub top — and moves downward in a way that my body manages completely without consulting me.

"I've got you," he says, worsening my body's reaction.

“Thank you,” I jump out of his hands, two steps away, which puts enough corridor between us to allow my nervous system to remember its professional obligations.

"Sorry," I say. "I wasn't watching where I was going."

"I noticed," he says. Not unkindly.

"Are you—" He glances at the files on the floor.

"I have them." I crouch and gather them before he can, because the last thing I need is a stranger with silver eyes reading the names on my surgical notes. I straighten. "Thank you. For—" I make a slight gesture indicating the catching, the not-letting-me-hit-the-floor. "That."

"Of course," he says.

I look at him for one more second than I mean to. He looks back with the same quality of attention — direct, unhurried.

I turn and walk away.

I am four steps down the corridor before my brain registers the warmth still sitting at my waist like a handprint, and I make the executive decision to blame it on the twenty-six hours and the adrenaline come-down and the fact that I haven't eaten since yesterday at two, which are all reasonable and medically sound explanations for a momentary physical response to an attractive stranger in a hospital corridor.

Completely reasonable.

I push open the door to my office, barely stepping in before my head snaps to the right, pain blooming across my cheekbones and into my ears which are ringing nonstop.

The files are back on the floor, the office silent except for the sound of my own surprised breath and the door swinging shut behind me.

“Who the fuck were you with just now?”