Monitors blinked to life. The cardiac machine emitted its steady, uneasy beeping. A nurse cut away Kiara’s cardigan and blouse with trauma shears.
Lauren leaned over her patient.
Pulse weak but present. Breathing shallow.
“Kiara? Can you hear me?”
No response.
Lauren’s eyes moved clinically over the body before her, but what she saw had nothing to do with stairs.
Two broken ribs. Bruising in various stages of healing. Faint scar tissue across the upper back—thin, pale lines mapping old wounds. The wrist fracture clearly older than tonight’s trauma. Burns small and circular, precise.
Not random.
Intentional.
“She didn’t just fall,” one of the nurses murmured under her breath.
Lauren didn’t answer, but her jaw tightened.
“Start fluids. Prep for X-rays. Full panel labs. Let’s move.”
Through the glass panel of the trauma bay, Lauren could see Derek pacing in the hallway. His hands were knotted in his hair. He was performing distress to an audience that wasn’t watching him anymore.
He checked his watch.
That detail stuck.
Lauren stepped toward the computer terminal and opened Kiara’s electronic medical record.
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