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I frowned at the note. It unsettled me deeply, but what caught my attention was the first line. “Con. Connor McTiernan? The man who brought you in?”
Johnny’s finger stabbed at the name again.
“You mean he didn’t do this to you?”
Johnny stabbed at the second line.
I put the pen back in his hand. I had to wrap my own fingers around his, his strength waning fast. “Johnny, who did this to you? Do you know who shot you?”
The door opened behind me, and Johnny’s eyes shot up and past me, pupils dilating. I didn’t even turn around; I knew it was the night nurse answering my summons. “Hey Maggie, did the blood panel results come back for—”
One second, I was on my feet. The next second, I was lying on the floor, pain detonating in the back of my skull. My vision went—I don’t know, I might have even blacked out for a moment—but when it came back, I was staring at a figure in scrubs leaning over Johnny’s bed.
“Who…what happened?” The words came out slurred. My stomach lurched as I tried to push myself up. The room tilted. Something was wrong.Did I faint?I blinked, trying to focus on the man by Johnny’s bed.Why isn’t he helping me? What—
The man was wearing big, black boots. The steel-toe kind you see workers wear. No nurse or doctor would ever wear something like that.
The realization that he must have hit me from behind propelled me to my feet. The room spun, but the sight of the man emptying a syringe into Johnny’s IV as he struggled sobered me right up.
“Security!” I screamed at the top of my lungs as the alarms monitoring Johnny went off. The man lunged at me. A surgical mask obscured the lower half of his face, but his eyes left little doubt as to his intentions. Instead of moving towards the door, I side-stepped left, yanking down the lever for the one thing that would bring the entire floor to Unit 7 in a heartbeat—the emergency activator for a Code Blue.
The alarm began to sound. I turned to run. A hand clamped over my mouth, and I caught a glimpse of a faded tattoo on the inside of my attacker’s wrist. It looked like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Fingers tore at my hair. Johnny was staring right at me, eyes wide and full of fear. Body odor and stale cigarette smoke filled my nostrils. I was wrenched off my feet, pain shattering my vision as my skull slammed into something.
This time, I didn’t even feel myself hit the floor.
Something wet splashed my feet.
Footsteps retreated. The boot’s heavy tread was unmistakable.
Something drifted to the floor in front of me. Johnny’s note. It took every ounce of energy in me to close my fist around it and shove it into my pocket.
And as I lost my grip on consciousness, the last thing I heard was the single, mournful tone of the monitors as Johnny flatlined.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse. A blow to the temple like that could’ve been fatal.” Jerome crushed a cold pack in his hand and gave it to me, his mouth pulled into a deep frown. “I thought you were going home.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my aching head back against the wall, waiting for my stomach to stop doing backflips. I’d already thrown up twice. Once was all over Winters’ shoes, so I guess there was a bit of a silver lining. But to say Jerome was pissed at me would have been the understatement of the year. “A dump-and-run came in, and I was available.”
“You mean you barged in there like Joan of Arc herself, like you usually do. Damnit, Cassidy, we have these policies for a reason.”
“You sound like Winters.”
He scoffed. “You take that back.”
“You would have done the same thing, Jerome. The kid was…” dying, I meant to say, but the argument felt hollow. It didn’t matter anymore.
Johnny was dead. Apparently, the Code Team had found me collapsed at the foot of his bed, the coffee that had been sitting halfway across the room somehow spilled at my feet. Johnny’s heart had stopped—the team worked on him for nearly an hour, but whatever the assassin used had done its job. Time of death was called at 10:42 pm.
“All right, you’ve got me there, but Cass, when you work to the point of exhaustion, you put everyone at risk,includingyour patients. If you hadn’t passed out—”
My eyes flew open. “Wait. Is that what you think happened? That I justfainted?”
“Too much work, too much coffee, not enough food, not enough sleep.” Jerome ticked each point off on his fingers, in full lecture mode, now. “I’ve seen it happen before. Residencies are tough, and I know you’ve got a lot on your plate.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” I pushed up from the gurney I’d been banished to. He had wanted to admit me and run concussion protocol, but that would be happening over my dead and rotting corpse. “I was attacked, Jerome. A man in scrubs and work boots hit me from behind, and then he injected something into Johnny’s IV. I called for security and pulled the code box just before he hit me again.”
“Cassidy,” Jerome gently took me by the shoulders and guided me back down to the gurney. He handed me the ice pack again. “Maggie didn’t see anyone but you enter or exit the patient’s room. Security reviewed the footage, and they didn’t see a man matching your description, either. There was no attacker.”
I angrily pointed at the bruising on my temple. “Then how do explain this?”
