Taken by the four bikers who hate me

VEDA "He's been shot!" That was all I needed. I dropped the chart in my hand and was already moving before the nurse finished her sentence, snapping on gloves as the trauma bay doors burst open and the gurney came crashing through with four people running alongside it. "Gun shot wound to the left forearm, entry and exit confirmed, BP is dropping, he's losing too much blood—" "How long ago?" I asked, calmly. "Forty minutes." I looked at the man on the table. He was buff with neck tattoos that told me everything I needed to know about who he was before he even opened his mouth. The three men who had followed the gurney in were the same type as him with hard eyes, closed mouths on what happened and similar tattoos. The aura around them told me these came from violence. I recognized their biker symbol and aura because I had grown up inside that same violence. "Everyone who isn't staff, out." I said. None of them moved. I looked up from the wound. "I will let him bleed out on this table if you don't get out of my trauma bay in the next five seconds." They left. "Get me his vitals." I said, and everyone snapped into action around me. The damage wasn't as bad as it looked. Messy, yes. Dramatic, yes. But the bullet had gone clean through the fleshy part of the forearm and the real problem was the vessel it had nicked on the way out which was fixable. Nothing was critical so I worked fast with steady hands, calling for what I needed while trying to fight the demon telling me not to save him. This was the part I loved. Not because of the blood or the urgency but because in here, in this space, I was completely in control and nothing else existed. No past. No looking over my shoulder. Just a body that needed fixing and hands that knew how. I had been running since I was fourteen years old and medicine was the first place I had ever stopped. "Pressure's stabilizing," someone said. "Good." I didn't look up. The man groaned and I glanced at his face. He was coming back around, eyes half open, trying to orient himself. "Stay still," I said. "Do you know who I—" "I don't care," I said, and went back to work. That was true. I genuinely didn't care who he was in whatever world he operated in. In here he was a body with a problem and I was the person solving it. That was all. Except. I looked at the wound. Stop it, Veda. I took a deep breath but when I opened my eyes they were back on his forearm, right on the tension I was working on. “You want to do it. Just do it.” My father’s awful voice was back in my head. No. I shook my head, trying to focus. My father’s illusion laughed. “You aren't the saint you try to be, Veda.” He was right. I grew up watching men like this biker operate. I watched how they ran drugs through dying neighborhoods to ruin lives, they sold weapons to people who used them on each other and trafficked human beings like they were livestock. “Yes.” My father whispered in my ear. Everything around me vanished and all I could see was the tendon I could cut to end his life. “Getting rid of people like me is what makes you a saint, not I watched my father do all of it with his hands clean, his voice calm and his dinner on the table at seven while his fellow evil men laughed and I had to stomach it all. The world had too many men like this in it. I made a decision. I wasn’t going to outrightly kill him but leave him with a disability. I held the tendon and made a small incision which would never show up on a post op review, raise issues or even be traced back to anything but a natural complexity of a trauma surgery. I wasn't a bad person. I was making the world a better place. He would recover fully. He would shake hands and lift his fork and type on his phone and never knew anything had been taken from him until six months from now when he reached for a gun and found that his left hand no longer had the grip strength to hold one. I leaned in close while everyone was busy and I looked like I was focused on the wound. "You're going to be fine," I said quietly reassuring him. "You'll walk out of here and go right back to whatever you do. And you won't even notice what's missing until it matters." I pulled back and straightened. "Men like you always think you're untouchable. You won't see me coming. None of you ever do." He was too out of it to process a word of that. I sutured him up cleanly then stepped back.. "He's stable. Get him to post-op." I stripped my gloves. "Someone should update the attendance." I walked out. *** The scrub sink was empty, which made it perfect for me to think about what I had done. I stared at my reflection and saw no remorse. I thought about my father a lot in moments like this, not on purpose, but I hated how he still had his grip on me. Viktor Voss, who had built an empire on other people's suffering and called it strength. He sat at the head of a table with men who did terrible things and laughed with them over food while somewhere in the same house his daughter was either being punished or touched inappropriately and all he ever said was I was too weak that's why they preyed on me. He used to say that the weak existed to be used by the strong and that sentiment was just the way of the world. He raised me to believe it. I chose not to. But I also chose not to pretend the world would clean itself up if good people simply waited long enough. Men like the one on that table didn't stop because someone asked them to. They stopped because something stopped them. And if I was the something, quietly, one at a time I would get rid of them and one day go back and get rid of my father. I was still a good doctor. "Dr. Sinclair." I looked up. One of the floor nurses was in the doorway, slightly out of breath like she'd been moving fast to find me. "Sorry to pull you, but we have a new admit. He’s high profile, the attending chief of surgery asked for you to meet the patient specifically." "What's the case?" "Gunshot wound, upper left chest. He's stable but the attending doctor doesn't want to touch it. He says you're the best shot at clean extraction without complications." Another one. Of course. I dried my hands. "What's his name?" She checked her tablet. "Calloway. Dex Calloway." The name meant nothing to me then and I nodded and followed her down the hall, and I had absolutely no idea that the next ten minutes were going to be the last ordinary ones I would have for a very long time.