Inside the sterile, high-pressure environment of the operating theater, the air felt heavy, vibrating with a subtle, low-frequency hum that the hospital’s sophisticated monitoring equipment couldn't register.
Dr. Thorne, who had initially sprinted into the room to protest, now stood paralyzed in the corner, his mouth agape. He was watching a violation of everything he had spent twenty years learning at the world’s most prestigious medical universities.
I didn't care about his shock. My world had narrowed down to the six inches of skin above Elias’s collarbone. I could feel the microscopic pulse of the damaged artery beneath my fingertips, a fragile, bursting river that needed to be diverted before the brainstem suffered total necrotic failure.
I reached for the final needle—a longer, sl
