Bleeding For No One

Chapter Five - The Ghost

Serena's POV.

Five years buried, and Dr. Osei had just unearthed it with four simple words.

"Serena?" His voice came through the phone again, cautious, as you’d talk to someone teetering on the edge of a cliff. "Are you still there?"

"I'm here." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was a small miracle in itself. "When will he arrive?"

"Transport's already in the works. Hargrove's pushing hard they want to avoid having him on their books with this kind of risk profile. I'd say about ninety minutes. Maybe even less."

Ninety minutes. I glanced down at the spilled coffee soaking into the gravel path, the cup rolling lazily against the iron bench leg, and forced myself to think rather than feel.

"I need the full file. Imaging, labs, the consult notes from all three cardiologists, not just the summary. And I want Reeves's assessment before I step into that OR, not after."

"You're taking the case." It wasn’t a question, but there was an undercurrent of surprise, perhaps, that I hadn’t hesitated.

"I haven’t made any decisions yet. I want the file."

"It’s already in your inbox."

I hung up and stood still in the quiet garden, the one that seemed to have slipped from everyone’s memory, and allowed myself exactly ten seconds of panic before I tucked it away in the drawer where I kept things like that. Ten seconds. I counted them. Then I walked back inside.

---

Clara looked up the moment I stepped through the door, and whatever she saw on my face made her set the phone down right away.

"What happened?"

"Damien's being transferred here." I kept my voice low, glancing at Eli, still curled up in the cardigan, blissfully unaware. "To St. Clair. They’re requesting me by name."

Clara's mouth opened, then closed. She was quick, my sister, quicker than almost anyone I knew, and I watched her process the implications in real time, just like I had in the garden. "Does he know? About Eli?"

"I have no idea what he knows. I don’t know what anyone knows anymore." I rubbed my temple. "Someone identified him in that article. Someone's threatening legal action. In less than two hours, Damien will be wheeled into my hospital, and it seems I'm the only surgeon who can save him."

"That's not just a coincidence, Serena."

"I know it’s not a coincidence." My tone was sharper than I intended. I pressed my palm against the desk and took a deep breath. "I’m sorry. I know."

She crossed the room and knelt by the couch, gently brushing Eli's hair away from his forehead. The tenderness of her touch almost unraveled the careful walls I’d built around my emotions. "What do you need me to do?"

"Take him home. Please. I can’t have him anywhere near this place once Damien arrives." I hesitated for a moment. "And Clara, if anyone calls, anyone at all, asking about Eli, custody, anything..."

"I say nothing and I call you." She stood up, already picking up Eli's shoes from the floor. "I know the routine."

I almost chuckled, but nothing was amusing about it. "You make it sound like we’ve been through this before."

"We’ve been preparing for this for five years. I didn’t expect it to happen the same week he almost died." She lifted Eli with care, his small arms instinctively wrapping around her neck. . At the door, she paused. "Serena, are you really going to be able to do this? Operate on him?"

I thought about the file sitting unopened in my inbox, the vascular profile, the calcification patterns the Boston cardiologist had described with such dread. I recalled a boardroom table and a man collapsing mid-sentence, and the sight of lashes fanned across a small, sleeping face that had inherited them from somewhere.

"I don’t have a choice," I replied. "He doesn’t have anyone else who can."

---

The file was even worse than I had imagined. I almost exclaimed. I read it twice in the solitude of the surgeons' lounge, the door locked, while the rest of the hospital moved at its usual slow Tuesday pace around me, completely unaware.

The imaging results confirmed everything the anonymous cardiologist had hinted at, and the added details made my stomach drop. The involvement of the secondary vessel was worse than the rumors suggested. The calcification had advanced more than what three days should have allowed, which meant this wasn’t a sudden issue it had been quietly developing for months, maybe even longer, while Damien sat in boardrooms, commanding attention and ignoring the warnings his body was sending him, just like so many powerful men tend to do which is so much bad and needs to be worked on.

Reeves's notes were as blunt as only another surgeon's could be.

“Mortality risk unacceptable for standard approach. Recommend immediate transfer. Recommend Caldwell.”

He didn’t write that lightly. Reeves never made recommendations without serious consideration.

My pager buzzed right on cue at the ninety-minute mark Osei had predicted, the alert coming through flat and procedural:

“Incoming transfer, ETA 8 minutes, Bay 2, Cardiac.”

I stood up, smoothed my coat, and felt the version of myself that the hospital recognized took over, pushing aside the one Clara had just walked out on the steady hands, the clinical detachment, the Ghost.

I reached the ambulance bay with just two minutes to spare.

The doors swung open before the vehicle had even come to a complete stop, as they always did for critical cases, with paramedics already shouting out vitals before their feet hit the ground.

I glanced down to confirm the patient’s identity before looking at his face. I've been gathering enough courage for this.

And then I looked at his face, and all the careful walls I had built over five years crumbled in an instant, silent and complete, like something that had finally been given the go-ahead to collapse. To my greatest surprise, it was not Damien.