Rise of a Silenced Wolf

Vance-1

Killian

By the time I finally stepped out of the operating room, I had been dead on my feet for nearly eight hours straight.

As the circulating nurse helped me pull off my surgical gown, my fingers were trembling slightly from exhaustion. The liver repair I had just completed turned out to be far more complicated than expected. The patient, a construction worker, had been impaled by a rebar on site. Once we opened him up, the internal damage was worse than what the CT scans had shown. It took me four hours just to control the bleeding, and I even had to call in a trauma consult.

I leaned my head back against the worn leather of the old sofa, closing my eyes to rest, but my mind refused to shut off. It kept rewinding to July’s face.

I had performed her spinal stabilization surgery myself. The procedure went flawlessly, without a single hitch. But what truly haunted me was the moment right before we put her under. She had been lying on the operating table, a broken mess of blood and mud, her vocal cords so badly damaged she could only manage a faint, raspy wheeze. Yet, through all that trauma, her right hand had instinctively curled over her lower abdomen.

I had seen that exact posture countless times on the table. It was a universal maternal instinct. When faced with absolute terror, a mother’s first move is always to shield her baby.

Ultimately, I failed to convince her to prioritize her own life over her baby. It was an impossible choice for a Mum. Even though I dealt with weeping patients daily, seeing the tears pool in the corners of her eyes had cut me to the quick.

Her husband, on the other hand, had been very calm. Faced with a critically injured wife and a lost child, his grief felt performative. It made me wonder if he was just naturally detached, or was he desperately trying to hold it together?

And there was another puzzle piece that simply didn't fit. How on earth did July fall out of her ICU bed?

For a patient who had just undergone major spinal surgery, rolling from a flat, supine position and plunging to the floor without any outside help was practically a physical impossibility. She had metal pins holding her together, her lower body was completely paralyzed, and her core rotation was heavily restricted. To make it over the safety rails and crash onto the tiles, she either had to be intentionally pushed... or she had summoned a terrifying burst of willpower to throw herself off.

Neither option boded well.

I closed my eyes tighter, rubbing my temples to soothe a growing headache. Then, my thoughts drifted in a completely unprofessional direction—the memory of how it felt to touch her.

Examining a patient was supposed to be pure muscle memory, no different from scrubbing in, draping a sterile field, or gripping a scalpel. It wasn't supposed to carry any emotion. But the moment my fingers brushed against her bare skin, a strange, electric jolt had rippled through my senses. I had found myself handling her with gentleness more than it required. This woman somehow made me become more protective.

I needed to figure out why, and fast. I prided myself on treating every patient exactly the same. I couldn't allow her to become an exception to my rule.

Maybe I’m just running on fumes, I reasoned, trying to shake off the lingering sensation. I couldn't afford to over-empathize. A quick power nap would clear my head.

I was just drifting into a heavy, dreamless sleep when a sharp argument out in the hallway snapped me wide awake.

I immediately recognized Enya’s voice. Whenever my little sister got fired up, her pitch would jump an octave. She wasn't one to scream or make a scene, but she had a lethal, sarcastic tongue that could make anyone wish the earth would swallow them whole.

I stood up from the sofa and cracked the breakroom door open, curious to see who was currently on her hit list.

At the far end of the corridor, right outside the OB ward, Enya was squaring off against two middle-aged women in hospital gowns and a man. The trio looked like they had been caught red-handed. Their faces are a perfect mix of guilt, annoyance, and forced innocence.

"As I was walking up, I couldn't help but hear you discussing my patient," Enya said, her voice dripping with icy sarcasm. "You called her an irresponsible, reckless mother who had no business wandering around somewhere so high while pregnant, blaming her for falling off a cliff, and claiming her husband would’ve thrown her out if the baby hadn't miraculously survived. I’m dying to know, where exactly did you get your medical degrees to make that assessment?"

One of the women, a busybody with tight perm curls, sniffed defensively. "Everyone is talking about it. It’s not a secret. A woman who is three weeks pregnant should be resting at home, not gallivanting around dangerous heights! She was so careless, plunging off a cliff like that. She’s lucky that baby is indestructible, because if it hadn't made it through the surgery, her husband definitely would have dumped her—"

"Are you her?" Enya cut her off. The curly-haired woman blinked, stunned. Enya stepped closer. "You have no idea how much trauma her body endured when she plummeted off that cliff. You don't know how much blood she lost, or how desperately she risked her own life on the operating table just to protect that baby's heartbeat! You don't even realize that right now, she can't even breathe without a machine doing it for her."

Enya took another step forward. My sister wasn't tall, but her fierce aura made the woman instinctively take a step back. I couldn't help but smirk, feeling a swell of brotherly pride.

"With absolutely zero medical background and not a single shred of firsthand facts, you’re standing in a hospital hallway using your twisted morals to judge a heroic mother who barely escaped death to save her child. Do you honestly think that’s appropriate?"

The woman's face flushed a deep, violent crimson. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water before she turned to the man for backup.

The man cleared his throat nervously, nudging her arm. "Come on, let's go. Don't lower yourself to her level."

"Lower yourselves to my level?" Enya throws her head back and laughs. "Please. The two of you combined don't have half my level."

Sufficiently humiliated, the man hurried away, and the two women scurried after him like scolded dogs. Enya rolled her eyes before turning on her heel and marching straight toward the break room.

She didn't look surprised to find me standing in the doorway. She shoved a brown paper bag into my chest with a little more force than necessary, clearly taking out her leftover adrenaline on me. "I knew you'd forget to eat. It’s almost ten o'clock. Were you planning on surviving on black coffee again?"

"Thank you," I said, offering a small smile to soften her mood.

She waved it off, pulling out a chair and slumping into it. "I need you to do me a favor, Killian."