Focus.
Thank God my attending physician wasn’t here. As a third-year resident, I usually started the patient encounter before telling my attending, who’ll see the patient on his own after I gave him the pertinent information.
If my attending were here, he would not have approved of how distracted I was. He could always tell when my head wasn’t in the game.
Clara had already checked Jules’s ABC’s—airway, breathing, and circulation—so I jumped straight into the questions, hoping they’d ground me.
“What happened?” I stared at my clipboard like it was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen. The less I looked at her, the less likely I was to cave like a cheap umbrella during a thunderstorm. I was still pissed at her. One injury didn’t change that.
She’s fine. It’s just a cut.
“I fell down the stairs,” she said quietly.
My hand stilled for a fraction of a second before I continued my notes. My heart thumped so loud it almost drowned out my next words. “How many stairs were there?”
“Maybe a dozen? I’m not sure.”
Fuck. Sweat coated my skin at the mental image of Jules crumpled at the bottom of a flight of stairs. I almost reached for her the way I would’ve had we still been dating, but I forced my personal feelings aside and examined her extremities for injuries.
I couldn’t find any physical wounds except for the cut on her forehead and a couple of bruises, but that didn’t mean she was in the clear.
The sweat intensified as the worst-case scenarios for all possible internal injuries flashed through my mind.
Stop. She’s your patient. That’s it.
“Did you hit your head?” It was an obvious question, given the cut, but I had to ask.
Jules nodded.
“Did you pass out?”
“Yes.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and ran through the rest of my questions.
Are you taking any blood thinners? No.
Is there any chance you’re pregnant? No.
“Are you hurting anywhere in particular right now?”
My question hung between us, thick with unspoken meaning.
Despite everything that happened between us, the thought of Jules hurt made it so fucking hard to breathe.
“My head, shoulder, and lower back.”
“What about your neck?” I felt along her C-spine and breathed a silent sigh of relief when she didn’t flinch. “Does it hurt?”
Jules shook her head. “No. It’s just the places I mentioned. Physically, anyway,” she added softly.
The air thinned while the ache in my chest intensified.
She was so close I could hear her breathing.
I’d forgotten how much I loved that sound—the sound of her just existing, reminding me that no matter how fucked up the world got, there was at least one good thing in it.
At least, there used to be.
I set my jaw and finished the physical examination as quickly as possible. “Right. I’ll order a CT scan, just in case.” My crisp words bounced through the fluorescent-lit room, erasing any hint of softness. “How did you fall down the stairs?”
A long silence passed before she answered. “Someone pushed me.”
I stared at her, sure I’d heard wrong. “Someone pushed you.”
Jules nodded, her lips tight. “I was walking down the stairs after my bar exam. I was distracted, so I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings. The person…surprised me, and they pushed me when I tried to get away. I hit my head and passed out. When I woke up, I was in the back of a taxi with a woman, someone I recognized from the testing site. She said she’d just entered the stairwell when she heard me fall, but she didn’t see anyone else. She dropped me off at the hospital and, well, here I am.”
She relayed what happened in a matter-of-fact manner, but the slight shake in her voice told me the incident freaked her out more than she let on.
Slow, poisonous rage oozed into my bloodstream.
I wasn’t a stranger to anger, but I’d never felt like this before.
Like I wanted to hunt down the person responsible and rip them apart with my bare fucking hands.
“Who?” My calm voice belied the violence brewing in my stomach. “Who did this to you?”
She said the person surprised her. Judging from her tone, it was someone she knew.
I guessed the answer before she told me.
“Max.” Apprehension crept into Jules’s eyes, like she was afraid of how I’d react to the name, and for good fucking reason.
Max. The guy who had a sex tape of her. Who blackmailed her into stealing from me. Who put his fucking hands on her and destroyed the only beautiful thing in my life…us.
My rage deepened, tinting my world a bloody crimson.
“I see.” I betrayed none of the emotion roaring through my chest. “I’m going to make some arrangements for your CT scan. I’ll be right back.”
I left the room and pulled out my phone. It took me less than two seconds to shoot Alex a text.
Me: I need you to find someone for me.
50
JOSH
The great thing about having a morally questionable best friend was that they didn’t question you when you did morally questionable things.
Alex didn’t ask why I wanted to track Max down; he just did it. It took him less than an hour because, according to him, Max left a trail of digital crumbs so obvious a blind Luddite could’ve followed it.
When we found him hoovering drinks at a dive bar like an alcoholic Dyson, Max was already three sheets to the wind, and it took only the promise of more booze, drugs, and girls to lure him with us.
I let Alex do the talking and took a separate car in case Max recognized me, but he was so drunk he didn’t notice anything was wrong until we entered a silent, secluded house on the city’s outskirts.
By then, it was too late.
“He must’ve really pissed you off.” Alex examined Max’s bound form the way a scientist would examine a particularly interesting specimen beneath a microscope. “This isn’t your usual style.”
I flexed my hands into fists.
Max sat tied to a chair in the middle of the basement, his mouth duct-taped shut and his body twisting in a futile struggle against his ties. His alcohol-induced haze had cleared, and I saw the stark reality of his situation reflected in his eyes.
Good.
I wanted him to feel every second of this.
“My usual style isn’t working for me.” The rage I’d suppressed during my work shift roared back, drowning out any reservations I might’ve had.
I was a doctor, not a fighter. I’d pledged to do no harm. But the Josh that made that pledge was different than the one in this room. Even memories of him were hazy, buried beneath the weight of the past week’s events.
I walked over to Max and ripped the tape off his mouth. I wasn’t worried about anyone hearing us. The house was Alex’s secret city hideaway, the place where he went when he needed to be alone but didn’t have time for a longer trip, and it was soundproofed and secured enough to make The Pentagon weep with envy.
“You recognize me.” It wasn’t a question.
Max’s awareness of my identity was obvious in the pinch of his mouth and the burning flame of panicked resentment in his eyes.