hold onto me Mr nan

Chapter 1: Rain hammered the windshield in relentless sheets, blurring the city's neon into smears of red and gold. Lin Anya gripped the wheel with both hands, her white coat folded on the passenger seat, still carrying the faint bite of antiseptic from a twenty-hour shift. Her body ached for sleep. But her mind kept circling back to the boy in Room 6 — the one whose hand had gone slack in hers an hour too late. "I'm sorry," she whispered, to no one. Thunder cracked overhead. Her phone lit up on the dashboard. Grandma. She answered through the car's speaker, forcing warmth into her voice. "I'm on my way home." "You haven't eaten again, have you?" Her grandmother's voice was soft, scolding, familiar — the one steady thing in a day that had taken everything else from her. "I know, I know. Save me some dumplings." "Drive safely. The roads are bad tonight." "I will." The call ended, and for a moment there was only rain, and the hush of a street gone strangely empty for a Friday night. Then the world cracked open. BANG. A gunshot, so close it rattled in her chest before her mind caught up to what she'd heard. Another followed. Then a third. Anya slammed the brakes, heart lurching into her throat, headlights sweeping across a narrow alley where black SUVs sat parked at violent angles and dark shapes moved between them. Men. Armed. "No," she breathed. Every instinct told her to reverse, to drive, to be anywhere else. Her hand found the gearshift. That was when he fell. A man stumbled from the alley's mouth, suit soaked black with rain and blood, and collapsed directly in the beam of her headlights. Shouts erupted behind him. "He's there! Don't let him get away!" Anya's pulse roared in her ears. Every rational part of her screamed to drive. But her eyes had already caught the pale line of his jaw, the impossible stillness of him against the wet asphalt, and something older than fear rose up in her. Doctor. It wasn't a decision. It was instinct, worn into her bones through a hundred nights just like this one. She threw the door open and ran into the storm. "Can you hear me?" Her fingers found his throat — a pulse, thin and stuttering. Blood welled dark beneath her palms as she pressed against the wound in his shoulder. "Stay with me. Stay with me, do you hear —" Footsteps. Fast, closing in. "There she is." She turned. Six men stood a few feet away, rain sliding off gun barrels aimed level with her skull. Their leader smiled, slow and without warmth. "Since you've seen his face," he said, "you'll die with him." Anya's whole body went cold. Her hands did not move from the wound. "If I let go, he dies," she said, and hated how her voice shook. "That's rather the point." The trigger clicked. BANG. Not his gun. The leader staggered, a bloom of red spreading across his chest before he crumpled into the flooded gutter. Chaos detonated around her — gunfire from the rooftops, from doorways, from nowhere and everywhere at once. Anya threw herself over the wounded stranger, covering his head with her arms as concrete exploded in fragments above them. Then — silence. Only rain, and her own ragged breathing. Black-clad men descended from every direction, disciplined and silent. When they saw the man on the ground, every head bowed a fraction. "Boss." Boss. One of them dropped to his knees, checking the pulse she'd been fighting to protect. His face went bloodless. "We need to move him — now!" "Wait." Anya didn't let go. "If you move him wrong, that wound tears wider and he bleeds out in the car. I'm a doctor. Let me stabilize him first." "No outsiders," one of them snapped, gun still half-raised out of habit. Before the argument could go further, the man beside him — older, clearly in charge — pressed a phone to his ear, voice tight. "Ma'am. We found him. He's alive, but barely. There's a woman here — a doctor. She's the one keeping him breathing." A pause. Anya couldn't hear the voice on the other end, but she watched the bodyguard's whole posture change, spine snapping straight. "Understood." He lowered the phone and looked at Anya as though seeing her for the first time. "Madam Nan says bring you along. She said—" his jaw tightened, "—she said you have to save her son. Whatever you need, you'll have it. Now work." Relief and terror hit Anya in the same breath. She didn't have time for either. "Get me something rigid for a splint, and anything clean to pack this wound," she said, already tearing a strip from her own coat sleeve. "And I need pressure on his leg — there's a second wound bleeding out under his knee, he's losing volume faster than the shoulder alone explains." They obeyed her without hesitation now — six armed men taking orders from a woman with blood to her elbows, because somewhere on the other end of a phone line, a mother had made her word law. Anya worked with a focus that blocked out everything else — the rain, the bodies in the alley, the reality of what she was doing. Her hands remembered a hundred trauma bays, a hundred codes, and she poured every hour of that training into the man dying beneath her fingers. She packed the wound, tied off the bleeding in his leg with a length of cord someone produced, kept two fingers pressed to his pulse the entire agonizing ride to wherever they were taking them, narrating vitals under her breath like a prayer. Stay. Stay. Stay. By the time the car screeched to a stop before a house she didn't have the presence of mind to properly see, his pulse had steadied beneath her fingers — thready, but holding. Holding because of her. They rushed him inside, into a private surgical suite better equipped than half the ORs at her own hospital, and this time no one tried to keep her out. She scrubbed in on instinct rather than invitation, standing shoulder to shoulder with surgeons twice her seniority, calling out what she'd found in the field while they worked to close what the bullets had opened. It was nearly dawn by the time the monitors settled into a steady, unbroken rhythm. Anya stood at the edge of the room afterward, blood dried stiff on her hands and forearms, watching the rise and fall of a stranger's chest with an exhaustion so complete it had gone past feeling into something numb and glassy. She had done it. Whoever he was — whatever he was — she had kept him from dying in an alley in the rain. That should have been the end of it. Instead, as the last of the surgical team filed out and the room fell quiet, his eyes opened. Not the half-lidded, drugged flutter she expected. Fully. Sharply. Focused. Emerald green, startlingly vivid even in the dim light, fixed directly on her — and there was nothing grateful in them. Nothing soft. Just a cold, assessing stillness, as though he were cataloguing her the way he might catalogue a weapon someone had left within his reach. Deciding, in the space of a single unblinking breath, exactly what she was now worth to him. Anya's own breath caught in her throat and refused to move. Neither of them said a word. Outside, the rain had finally begun to ease — but something told her, standing frozen under that gaze, that whatever storm she'd just walked into was only getting started.