Chapter 5 – Doctor Renate
917 Words
A man in his early thirties sat in the chair by the bed. Dark hair cut close at the sides, longer on top, the kind of cut someone gets done quickly between long shifts. A soft-shell jacket over what looked like surgical scrubs. His medical bag was open at his feet. The hands resting on his knees were the hands of someone who lived inside protocol — clean, short-nailed, the faint calluses along the index-finger pads that surgeons get from tying knots all day. He had not come from a clinic. He had been pulled out of somewhere with sharper instruments and brought here directly.
He was younger than I would have expected for the situation. Not by much. By enough.
"Adrian Renate," he said, before I could ask. "I'm the doctor here. How are you feeling?"
I tried to answer that. The words went somewhere I couldn't follow.
"Try not to do that again," he said, watching me through the small failure with the patience of a man who had seen worse fail more spectacularly. His voice was lower than I had expected, level in the way trauma surgeons are level — not soothing, just adjusted for rooms where the temperature mattered less than the next decision. "You nearly fainted an hour after nearly fainting. It becomes repetitive."
"Where am I?"
"In a private residence in the hills. More useful to you at the moment: you're not concussed, the finger isn't cleanly broken all the way through, and you were smart enough to protect your flexor tendon by not fighting anyone with that hand."
"I didn't know I was doing that."
"Your body did." He had been cradling my injured hand while we spoke, gently rotating the splint to check the seat of it. His eyes flicked across the dorsum of my left hand and lingered, for the smallest fraction of a second, on the fourth metacarpal — somewhere I did not remember being struck tonight. Then he moved on without comment. "Do you usually lose this much blood in formalwear, or was tonight special?"
I said nothing.
He seemed unsurprised.
"You'll need imaging in the morning," he said. "For tonight we've cleaned it, stabilized it, and given you something for the pain."
"What did you give me?"
"Something mild enough that you'll remain suspicious, which appears to be your preferred mode."
That, against my will, almost made me smile.
Almost.
"Did he tell you not to take me to a hospital?" I asked.
"He did."
"And you listened."
"I work for him." He sealed a packet of sterile strips with absent economy. "Whether that fact offends your politics is not my department."
"Where is he?"
"Working, I assume. Brooding, if he's in a mood for theater."
His mouth twitched once, as if he regretted the joke the moment it escaped. He stood — taller than the chair had suggested, built lean, the kind of build long shifts gave a man and gyms could not — checked the dressing one final time, then nodded to himself.
"You should try to sleep for another hour," he said. "If the pain spikes through the medication, press the call button."
I looked at the wall. There was no call button.
He followed my gaze. "The button is metaphorical. Someone is outside."
"Someone."
"A woman for the first forty minutes. The driver after that. He objected less to being glared at."
My heart gave a strange, unhelpful turn.
"He stayed outside the room?"
"He stayed in the house," he said. "Which, for a man like that, reads to me as roughly the same thing."
He snapped his bag shut.
"One more thing," he added. "You are free to leave in the morning if you're medically stable enough to be stubborn somewhere else. No one said otherwise."
The information settled oddly.
Free to leave.
I had not realized until then that part of me had been waiting to learn I wasn't.
When he was gone, silence came back in carefully managed layers. Air-conditioning hidden well enough to be almost soundless. Tree-shadow against glass. A faint hum under the architecture that said large house, expensive systems, no expense spared where comfort could be engineered.
I pushed myself upright against the pillows with my right hand and immediately saw what I had missed at first glance.
My own clothes lay folded on a low bench across the room. Washed? No. Too soon. Arranged, then. My ruined shirt on top, cuff dark with dried blood. My phone beside it, screen down. My lanyard nowhere in sight.
My chest tightened.
The phone.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed before I had fully decided to do it. The room tilted, but not enough to stop me. Bare feet sank into thick pale carpet. One step. Two. The oversized shirt brushed my thighs. Somewhere in the house a floorboard didn't creak because houses like this were built not to confess anything.
By the time I reached the bench, I was breathing too hard.
I picked up the phone with my right hand and turned it over.
No lock screen notifications beyond the old alert. No missed calls displayed because I had silenced almost everyone months ago. No signs anyone had opened it.
I unlocked it anyway, pulse climbing.
Wallet balance unchanged.
No outgoing transfers.
No failed login attempts.
No fresh alerts.
Relief washed through me so suddenly it made my knees weak.
"You check your own pulse by looking at numbers."
I froze.
- Writer
