Outside, the snow buries the clearing in silence. The temperature drops by the hour. The woodstove in the main room ticks as the last embers cool, the metal contracting in small, irregular clicks that have been my only company after dark for years.
Tonight I hear breathing.
Not mine. Hers. Slow, steady, the rhythm of someone who fell asleep between one thought and the next, unguarded and complete, in a stranger's cabin, in a stranger's bed, with a seven-foot minotaur lying awake on the other side of the wall.
I stare at the ceiling. The purr settles into something low and constant, buried so deep in my chest it registers more as vibration than sound. My hand drops to the mattress.
For the first time in fifteen years, the cabin doesn't feel like a hiding place anymore.
Chapter 3
Nina
The minotaur in exam room two has been waiting three hours, and his chart tells a whole ugly story.
His chart readsHector Vane, age 34, anterior dislocation left shoulder,and beneath the clinical shorthand someone, the previous nurse who quit after six weeks, scrawled a note in red ink:Pt uncooperative. Unable to proceed with manual reduction. Recommend referral to Portland.
Portland is four hours away. This man drove here with a dislocated shoulder, sat in a plastic chair that buckles under his weight, and listened to someone tell him he needed to drive four more hours because she couldn't bring herself to put her hands on him.
I flip the chart closed.
Jess looks up from the supply counter. She's organized like a woman who's seen too many night shifts fall apart over a missing IV kit: everything labeled, everything within arm's reach, and God help the person who puts the gauze back in the wrongdrawer. We've known each other since Wednesday and she's already let me shadow two patient intakes without hovering.
"Hector's been in there since seven," she says. She's handing me the information and letting me decide what to do with it.
"Three hours for a shoulder reduction?"
"Laura wouldn't touch him. Documented a refusal, said she'd call ortho in Portland." Jess pulls a splint tray from the cabinet and sets it on the counter between us. "Ortho never called back."
My wrist aches under the ACE bandage. I flex it, test the range—better than Saturday, but worse than I want. "I need you to assist. Counterweight on the scapula while I reduce."
Jess studies me. She already knows I can handle the medicine. What she needs to know is whether I'll flinch when I get my hands on a patient whose species makes other nurses cross the street.
Whatever she finds, it's enough. She nods and grabs the splint tray.
Hector fills the exam table like a man trying to fold himself into a shoebox. His horns, shorter than Garrett's and curving tight against his skull, scrape the wall behind him every time he shifts. His good hand grips the edge of the table, and his knuckles have gone pale beneath dark fur. He's sweating. I can smell the pain on him, the same way it smelled on every patient I've ever treated who waited too long because no one would help.
"Hector." I pull the rolling stool up to the table and sit. Not looming over him, not standing at arm's length. "I'm Nina. I'm going to fix your shoulder."
His eyes track to Jess, then back to me. Looking for the exit. Waiting for the excuse: the referral, the paperwork, the regretfulI'm not really qualified for this.
"I've reduced dislocated shoulders on patients bigger than you." Not quite true, but close enough. "Here's what's going to happen. Jess is going to stabilize your scapula from behind. I'm going to externally rotate your arm—slow, steady, you'll feel pressure but I need you to let me work through it—and the humeral head is going to slide back into the socket. The whole thing takes about ninety seconds. I'll talk you through every step."
"The other nurse said—"
"The other nurse isn't here." I keep my voice even. The voice I used with Mr. King when the morphine drip needed adjusting, his hands shook on the bed rails and his eyes went wide, not with pain but with the helplessness of being at someone else's mercy. "I'm here. And I don't refer patients out for things I can fix in this room."
Hector's grip on the table loosens.
Jess moves behind him without a word, her hands settling on his scapula, steady and sure. I take Hector's arm. The radius feels like a fencepost in my grip, dense and heavy, the bone mass of a species built to survive things that would kill me twice over, and I start the rotation.
"Tell me about that truck parked outside," I say. "The blue one with the lift kit."
His breath catches. "That's—mine."
"What year?"
"Eighty-nine." He grinds the word through his teeth. I'm rotating, steady, maintaining traction. "Chevy. K1500."
