I lock the door.
The click of the latch is the loudest sound in the world.
I lean back against the heavy wood, closing my eyes. My knees threaten to buckle, the adrenaline finally receding enough to let the exhaustion crash in.
I whisper the words into the silence, trying to summon the doctor, the professional.
“Get it together, Iris. He isn’t a date. He’s a Fed. A US Marshal sent to keep you safe.”
But pressing my hands against my stomach, I can still feel the echo of that heat. The visceral, undeniable pull of him.
I push off the door and cross to the sink. I grip the cold porcelain until my knuckles blanch, staring at myself in the mirror.
I don’t recognize the woman looking back.
Her hair is a disaster, tangled and wet, strands plastered to her forehead. There’s a smudge of grease on her cheek, starkagainst the pale skin. Her lips are parted, swollen-looking. Her gaze is wide, pupils blown black, rimmed with red.
She looks like a victim. But she also looks alive.
Vibrantly, terrifyingly alive.
I inspect the cut on my arm. The butterfly bandage is holding, but the surrounding skin is angry and red. I check my pulse points. My heart rate is still elevated, tachycardic. One hundred and ten beats per minute.
This isn’t just stress. This is a systemic response to a threat. To him.
“No. Focus.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out the chart.
Information. Data. Facts. The antidote to feeling.
I smooth the crumpled paper onto the marble counter. My hands shake, making the text dance.
Patient Doe. Male. Approx 20. Cause of Death: Traumatic Arrest.
Toxicology: Pending.
I force my brain to switch gears. To engage the engine of diagnosis.
I scan the vitals I wrote down in the trauma bay. The erratic heart rate. The pinpoint pupils. The lack of external bleeding despite the blunt force trauma.
And the arm. The image flashes in my mind, clear, high-definition horror. The bruising in the shape of fingerprints. The track marks.
Ketamine. Or Succinylcholine.
Something that paralyzes. Something that stops the heart without leaving a mark, unless you know where to look. Unless you check the injection site. Which I have stored on my phone. Photographic evidence that the young man was murdered.
They killed him. They forced him down, injected him with a paralytic, and then beat him to death to cover the needle track.Or maybe the overdose killed him first, and the beating acted as set dressing.
Bile rises in my throat.
This isn’t a medical mystery. It’s an execution.
And I have the proof.
This piece of paper. This crumpled, blood-stained sheet of proprietary hospital documentation. It proves the vitals didn’t match the story. It proves Mercer lied.
A knock on the door makes me jump. I nearly knock the paper into the wet sink.
