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"Don't get it twisted, blondie," he said, shaking his head. "We're all motherfuckers here. Save the smiles for someone else. You aren't going to butter me up."
With that, he was gone again, leaving me feeling very foolish for thinking there was something good inside these men to appeal to. Good men brought horrifically injured women to the hospital. Even if all they did was drop them off at the emergency room and ran off out of fear of getting implicated.
Alone as the time dragged on, I found myself pacing the room, humming at first to try to comfort the woman. Then, as minutes turned to hours, to soothe myself.
"Here's your shit," Ace said, making me jump, a stifled scream escaping me as I turned, finding him already moving into the room when I hadn't even heard him open the door.
I decided not to concern myself with his bloody hands.
It wasn't my business how he got the supplies.
And whatever he had done to get them wasn't my fault just because I needed them.
At least that was what I was trying to convince myself of as I laid everything out on the dresser, rearranging it in the order I thought I would need.
"Ace, here," yet another voice said, making me turn to find two more men moving into the room.
Both were tall.
One was dark-skinned with loc'd hair and a more muscular, stockier build.
The other was a little thinner with inky black hair kept a little long and tanned skin that maybe spoke of Middle Eastern descent.
Both had brown eyes.
And both appeared to have those strange red flecks in theirs as well.
What the hell was that about?
"What is that?" I asked as the Black man handed Ace a bottle.
"Goodfellas," the other man supplied, looking me over.
Goodfellas.
You didn't work in hospital rooms without learning a few street names for drugs.
Goodfellas. China Girl. Dance fever. He-man.
They'd gotten fentanyl.
Which was fifty to a hundred times more potent than morphine.
"Ace told us to get something strong," the Middle Eastern looking man supplied. "Is that strong enough?"
"They use it after surgery," I supplied. "So, yes."
"Will it be enough to knock her out while you work on her?" he pressed.
God, I hoped so.
I couldn't imagine doing what I needed to do to the woman if she was conscious.
"But, um, I still might need all of you to help hold her down," I told them, even if the idea of all three of them in the room put me on-edge.
"Whatever Red needs," he agreed, sounding pained. "She's a good friend," he supplied, to what must have been a question in my eyes.
"Aram," Ace called to the man who was speaking to me. "Go get some water. You are going to need water, right?" he asked, looking at me.
"Yes. Right," I agreed, taking a steadying breath as I moved toward the woman. "I need to take the gag off to get the medicine in," I told them.
Ace brushed past me, none too ceremoniously ripping the gag off the woman. Who immediately started screaming at the top of her lungs—a raw, animalistic sound that made a chill wash over me, leaving me paralyzed as the sounds she made seemed to wipe all thoughts out of my head.
"The fuck are you doing?" Ace yelled. "Get your ass over here and give her the medicine."
Snapping out of it, I rushed forward, shaking a pill into my hand, then pressing it down the woman's throat, feeling like something was lodged in mine as I did so.
"What the hell was that?" he asked as he put the gag back in her mouth, shooting accusing eyes at me. "Is this your first week as a nurse? You've never heard someone in pain before?"
I had.
Of course, I had.
It was rare, though, that someone actually hit a ten on the pain scale. A ten was an unimaginable amount of pain, the kind that made you bedridden and delirious. Only a handful of people ever have to experience a ten.
This woman?
I'd swear this woman was experiencing a fifteen.
I'd never heard anything like it before.
Dread flooded my system at the idea of needing to cause her any more pain, even if it was going to help her in the long run.
"I think you got a stupid one," the other man in the room said, looking at me as I stood there, unable to remember what Ace had even said to me, let alone know how to appropriately answer.
"If you don't have anything helpful to say, Seven, shut the fuck up," Ace demanded, gaze slipping to me. "I think she might have jiggled her brain around in her skull when she fell," he supplied, looking at my forehead.
I'd forgotten all about the cut, about the poultice that was probably giving me a raging infection as each moment passed.
"Concussion," I supplied.
"What?"
"When your brain hits your skull. It's called a concussion."
