“Dr. Pierce, you’re sweating. Let me get that,” Khloe purred, stepping forward with a cloth, treating my resuscitation like her personal runway. Preston didn’t push her away.
I am dying, I realized. But as the darkness swallowed my consciousness, the cold monitors fading into a distant hum, my mind locked onto a single, chilling thought. If I survive this night, Preston Pierce, I am going to dismantle your entire existence. Piece by bloody piece.
And as the final shadow fell over my eyes, I heard Preston whisper to the anesthesiologist, “Don’t bother with the rapid transfuser yet. Let’s see if she stabilizes on her own.”
When I finally surfaced from the abyss, I was staring at the pale, textured ceiling of a VIP recovery suite on the top floor. There were no flowers. There was only the sterile drip of IV fluids and the rhythmic hum of life-support machinery. Outside the blinds, the neon pulse of the city cast long, freezing shadows against the walls.
A dense, radiating agony flared from my lower abdomen, a hollow, echoing emptiness that told me everything I needed to know before I even touched my skin. As a veteran physician, I didn’t need a chart to calculate the devastation. The catastrophic blood loss from the Pitocin-induced rupture had triggered severe necrotic tissue infections. They had salvaged my life, but my uterus was a graveyard. I would never carry a child again.
The heavy door clicked open. The dayshift charge nurse—a former ER colleague who knew me well—slipped inside. Seeing me awake, she froze, her eyes instantly brimming with tears.
“Dr. Vance… you’re finally awake. Don’t move, the nerve blocks haven’t worn off.” She approached, her voice thick with genuine heartbreak. “Your son is in the NICU. Mild hypoxia, but he’s stabilized. He’s a fighter.”
“Where is my husband?” My voice grated like sandpaper against rusted iron, entirely devoid of emotion.
The nurse’s hand hesitated on the IV line. She couldn’t meet my eyes. “He… Dr. Pierce finished your repair surgery. He claimed he was having a hypoglycemic crash from the stress. Nurse Summers was crying hysterically in the hallway. So… he took her out to Le Bernardin to get some dinner. To calm her nerves.”
I stared at the ceiling. A wife walks to the absolute precipice of death, drained of half her blood volume, her organs mutilated to save her life. She wakes up alone in a freezing room. And her husband—her attending surgeon—takes his mistress for a thousand-dollar French tasting menu to soothe her anxiety over almost killing me.
I didn’t scream. My heart rate on the monitor didn’t accelerate by a single beat. When absolute despair crosses the threshold of human endurance, grief evaporates. What remains is a surgical, predatory logic.
“Fetch my phone from the locker,” I ordered flatly.
