Chapter 1The Man Who Should Have Died
Aurora
Rain pounded against the emergency room windows so hard that it sounded like the sky was trying to tear the hospital apart.
I glanced at the clock above the nurses' station.
2:17 a.m.
Three more hours.
Just three more hours, and I could finally crawl into bed and forget this shift ever happened.
I rolled my aching shoulders before reaching for another patient's chart. My feet were screaming in protest, my stomach hadn't seen food in hours, and my coffee had gone cold long before midnight.
The glamorous life of a nurse.
"You're doing it again."
I looked up to find Ada watching me with an amused smile.
"Doing what?"
"Thinking too hard."
I laughed. "Thinking is part of the job."
"No." She shook her head. "You get this little wrinkle between your eyebrows whenever you're trying to solve everyone else's problems."
I instinctively touched my forehead.
"I do not."
"You absolutely do."
Before I could argue, the overhead speaker crackled to life.
"Trauma team to the emergency entrance. Trauma team immediately."
Every conversation in the emergency department died instantly.
My exhaustion disappeared as adrenaline took over.
I pulled on a fresh pair of gloves while jogging toward the ambulance bay.
The ambulance doors burst open just as we arrived.
Two paramedics rushed out, pushing a stretcher covered in blood.
My heart sank.
I've seen terrible injuries before.
Car accidents.
Gunshot wounds.
Knife attacks.
But nothing could have prepared me for the man lying in front of me.
His body was covered in deep claw marks, as though something had tried to tear him apart.
For a split second, I couldn't move.
Those weren't normal wounds.
They couldn't be.
"Female nurse!"
One of the paramedics' voices snapped me back to reality.
"BP is crashing. Pulse is thready. We've got less than a minute if he arrests."
I nodded.
"Bed One!"
The trauma room exploded into motion.
I climbed beside the stretcher and reached for the scissors clipped to my scrub pocket.
"I'm Aurora," I said quietly, more to myself than to the unconscious man. "And you're not dying tonight."
I had no idea that those words were about to change my life forever.
