PART 4
What followed was not pretty.
Medicine never is when death is close.
There was blood.
Orders.
Hands moving with brutal precision.
One nurse cried silently while squeezing a pressure bag.
A resident nearly dropped an instrument, and I caught his wrist.
“Breathe,” I told him. “Then work.”
He did.
Nancy stayed outside the trauma bay, useless for the first time in a room she usually controlled.
When Eli’s heart slowed, I put my hands where memory told me to put them.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Not after coming all this way.”
The monitor dipped.
Flat.
For one second, the room went hollow.
Then I remembered the desert.
The smoke.
The radio static.
Eli yelling my name.
The blast that threw me into darkness.
The official report that said Captain Harper Vale died evacuating Task Force Raven.
But I didn’t die.
I was hidden.
Not rescued.
Hidden.
Because someone inside the chain of command had leaked the mission route.
And the people investigating it needed the enemy to believe Valkyrie was gone.
I lost my rank.
My records.
My old life.
And I got a hospital badge that said float nurse.
Eli’s heart line jumped.
Once.
Then again.
“Don’t you dare,” I whispered.
The monitor found rhythm.
Weak.
But there.
Dr. Patel looked up, eyes wide.
“We’ve got him.”
The room exhaled.
One of the soldiers outside the bay lowered his head and cried into his gloved hands.
The lead operator closed his eyes.
I stepped back, blood on my gloves, my chest tight with the kind of relief that hurt.
May you like
Eli was alive.
But the secret was not.
