I roll my eyes, stepping past him into the small supply room. The shelves are lined with bandages, antiseptics, syringes, and things that never seem to be fully stocked no matter how many orders we put in.
“How’s it looking tonight?” I ask, grabbing a fresh pair of gloves.
He exhales, rubbing a hand over his stubbled jaw. “Couple of minor injuries. Domestic dispute gone bad, some idiot tried to break his own fall with his face. And a guy in room three, overdosed. We got him stable, but he’s still out.”
Same shit, different night.
I nod, tying my hair back. “Anything you need me on?”
Sawyer studies me for a second, his eyes dark, unreadable. Then he jerks his chin toward the back. “You can check on the overdose. If he wakes up, he’ll either be grateful or pissed off. Either way, he’s not going be happy.”
Sawyer doesn’t move as I step past him, but I can feel his eyes on me. Sharp, assessing. Like he’s measuring something—not just whether I can handle what’s waiting in that room, but maybe whether I should. We both carry a past that haunts us.
He’s always like this. Watching, weighing.
EthanSawyerBeckett isn’t just an ex-Army medic, he’s the kind of man who carries war with him, even when he’s standing in a too-brightly lit hallway, wearing a scrub top that’s seen better days. The military never really left him, even after it spat him out.
He served two tours in Afghanistan. First as a field medic, then as part of a special combat search-and-rescue unit. He doesn’t talk much about it, but I’ve seen the faded ink on his forearm, coordinates, dates, initials. Things he doesn’t explain.
Sawyer’s the kind of guy who never raises his voice unless he has to. Doesn’t need to. He has a presence that does the work for him. Tall, broad-shouldered, built like he could still carry a full pack across the desert if he had to. But there’s a tiredness in him, the kind that settles into a person’s bones when they’ve seen too much, done too much, and still keep moving.
He drives an old truck, keeps a metal flask in his glove compartment, and has a habit of rolling a coin between his fingers when he’s thinking, some kind of old superstition or just something to keep his hands busy. His left knee aches when it rains, but he won’t admit it. And when the nights get bad, when the clinic is empty and there’s nothing left to distract him, he sometimes lingers by the supply room, fingers absently brushing the dog tags he still wears under his shirt.
But there’s one thing Sawyer holds onto tightly, one thing that still makes him soft: his daughter. Olivia is nine years old, a little firecracker with curly brown hair and big, expressive eyes. He loves her more than anything. They co-parent every now and then, sharing custody when life allows. He tries his best, even though the separation from his wife, Jenna, still stings. When he turned forty, Jenna left him for another man. It hit him harder than he let anyone know. She said it was because he was too broken, and he couldn’t argue with that. The marriage fell apart slowly, too many nights spent apart, too many times when he couldn’t be there when she needed him.
I guess we all have our family issues in here, maybe that’s why we all get along.
It’s not that he talks about the past. He doesn’t. But it leaks through the cracks anyway. I also spotted most of his information in his file when I got here and scanned through my colleagues.
He used to work in a real hospital after the military. Didn’t last. Too many rules, too much red tape, too many nights spent tryingto save people who didn’t want to be saved. So he ended up here, in a place where the world only expects him to patch up wounds and send people back out into the dark.
“You good?” he asks now, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I glance at him. His face is unreadable, but there’s something behind his eyes. A kind of quiet knowing.
“I’m fine.”
He doesn’t argue. Just nods and steps aside, letting me pass. But I know Sawyer. And Sawyer doesn’t believe in ‘fine.’
Neither do I.
Chapter 11
Whispers of the Fallen
Isabella
I take a steadying breath before pushing open the door to room three. The small, sterile space smells like antiseptic and stale air, the faint hum of the fluorescent lights above almost too loud in the silence. A soft beeping monitor is the only other sound, its rhythmic pulse a reminder that this man, this overdose victim, is still tethered to something beyond the darkness that took him.
The patient lies in a bed near the window, the blinds drawn, casting long shadows across his face. He’s pale, his skin the color of ash, but his chest rises and falls steadily. The kind of stability that comes from a dose of intervention, life hanging by a thread, held together by skill and medication.
I walk over quietly, my sneakers barely making a sound on the linoleum floor. The IV drip is hooked up to his arm, the needle in place like a tiny parasite feeding on the veins beneath his skin. His lips are cracked, his hands twitching in his sleep like his body is still fighting something he can’t name.
I pull the chart from the foot of the bed, glancing over the details. John. No ID. Just a dead-end name.Classic.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” I mutter under my breath, checking his vitals one last time.
I’m about to step back when his eyes snap open, wide and frantic, like someone waking up in a nightmare. I freeze, staring into the dark, almost bloodshot pupils that meet mine with amix of confusion and something darker. Fear? Panic? The kind of look that says he’s already been through Hell and isn’t sure he wants to come back.
