Judge Michaela Walters makes a surprising ruling in favor of omega rights proposal!
Experts begin to dissect correlation between breakups/divorces and the rising rate of omega suicides.
Noah Callahan had just started his shift in the ER of Falville University Hospital, and for once he was glad to have the night shift. It was relatively quiet and peaceful. He made his rounds as the interim director, still slightly proud of the title. Chloe complained that it made him unbearable, but he was just happy to have gotten out from under the thumb of the previous director, a tyrant who had quit without notice two days ago. How could Chloe complain? Noah was a much nicer director. He let the residents do their thing unless someone absolutely needed to step in, so none of them had any reason to hate him. He could not be unbearable if he was not hated, right?
Chloe rolled her eyes at him when he looked over her shoulder. "I'm not doing anything, Noah."
He pursed his lips, ready to comment on what she had been doing when his attention was drawn to an ambulance shrieking to a stop outside. He was already running for the door, Chloe close on his heels, as the paramedics jumped out and threw open the back doors of the ambulance, pulling out the patient and getting them inside. As always, Noah allowed himself to feel horror for one split second when he saw the patient's condition and then threw himself into fixing it. He got oxygen and IVs set up as Chloe took a tiny blood sample and then rushed off to the blood bank to pull a match for the bleeding man on the bed. He grabbed a pair of magnifying glasses from a cabinet along with a suturing needle and thread and set to work sewing together the man's nearly severed arteries and veins.
It was only after they had closed and bandaged every one of the man's wounds and another nurse was washing off his body and wrapping him in a hospital gown that Noah let himself take a deep breath. Then he turned to the paramedic who had stayed to give him a report. "Suicide attempt?" he asked tiredly. The ER had been getting too many of those lately.
The paramedic frowned. "Normally, this would be a classic suicidal attempt case, but stuff at the scene didn't align with that. The weapon was dropped near the entrance to the alley where we found him. With slashed wrists, there's no way he could have gotten over there and then back to where he was, not to mention that there was no trail of blood or any indication that he threw the knife."
Noah's eyebrows rose as Chloe gasped with a hand pressing over her mouth. "So, a murder attempt then."
The paramedic nodded. "We took pictures for the police and bagged the weapon with gloved hands to turn it over to them. The chief already called them, so right now we're just waiting to give all our evidence to them. Even if that guy doesn't want to press charges, the state will do it for him with the new omega protection bill that just passed."
Noah had completely missed that his patient was an omega. That had been Chloe's job after all, and he had simply trusted her to find out and do the right thing. He glanced back at the bed half-obscured by the curtain.
The male omega was pretty. There was no denying that. Who would want to hurt him except a sadistic bastard like a serial killer? And this slitting of wrists in an alley did not feel like a serial killer kind of move.
Noah blinked and then shifted to get a slightly better look at the patient. He knew that face, those features. He had met this omega here in this hospital mere months before. He frowned fiercely until the name came to him: Jeremy, Rowan's friend who had been oh-so-dissapproving of Rowan's choice to come back and save Darius. He quickly looked back at the paramedic. "Was there any ID on him? For his chart," he instantly added. Why had he said that? He was just asking per hospital policy. It was not like he was asking because he wanted to know for himself.
The paramedic nodded and handed over a wallet and its contents encased in a plastic baggy.
Noah set it on the table beside the hospital tablet and started entering the name displayed on the ID, only realizing after he typed it in that he had been right.
Jeremy was not the omega's name. His real name was Camille LeVieux.
LeVieux? The last name rang a bell in Noah's head. Wasn't that the family whose mansion had burned down in Maryland or somewhere over on the East Coast? Noah could not imagine being rich enough to own a mansion, so what was someone from that billionaire family doing in a Falville alley? And who would dare to assault and try to murder a LeVieux?
The paramedic grimaced when Noah looked back at him. "Yeah, we're all wondering the same thing. Why's a son of one of the richest families in the country slumming it here?"
"And who the hell would risk so much to try to kill him?" Noah ran his fingers over the smooth plastic encasing the ID.
"And who names their son Camille?" Chloe put in, sounding a little disgusted. "That's a girl's name. It's not even close to being gender neutral."
Noah shrugged, but his mind answered, Maybe that was why he introduced himself as Jeremy back then. Maybe he hates his name as much as Chloe hates it. He set the baggy down on the counter near the bed where Camille lay unconscious.
Camille. Somehow Noah could see how the name fit. He would never be able to explain it, but the sweet yellow hair and slender frame demanded that angelic name. Camille. He would need to look up the name and figure out what it meant.
For now, Noah pulled the curtain shut around the bed and motioned Chloe away while he thanked the paramedic and saved Camille's file to the system. Once he was alone there in front of the faintly patterned curtain, he hesitated. Then he forced himself to walk away. At the nurse station, he leaned against the wall and typed "meaning of name camille" into his phone's browser and scrolled down to the Wikipedia page. To his surprise, the first thing on the page was the statement that Camille was a unisex name. He smirked, making a mental note to show it to Chloe later, and kept scrolling but found nothing interesting other than long lists of famous people named Camille. Most of them were French, which made sense when he remembered that Camille's last name was LeVieux. A very French name. He snorted when he looked at the meaning of the name. "'Acolyte'?" he muttered to himself. "A 'young cult officiant'? What the fuck? Why would anyone name their kid that?" He slid his phone back into the pocket of his light purple scrubs, which Chloe had teased him about nonstop the first few times he had worn them because apparently only the gay nurses and doctors wore traditionally girly colors. Noah had just needed another set of scrubs that he could tell apart from his other two sets, and Amazon had been sold out of everything except pink and lavender. He was not a pink guy, which was his excuse every time Chloe came after him with that maddening smirk.
As if him thinking of her summoned her, Chloe rounded the corner and leaned against the wall next to him. "Were you looking him up?"
Noah shook his head, but that would be a good idea. "I looked up the name Camille. Guess what? It's unisex, so there goes your argument."
Chloe rolled her eyes. "You just love proving me wrong."
Noah grinned. "As always." He pulled out his phone and typed in "Camille LeVieux", but before he could search it, a nurse named Lloyd poked his head around the corner.
"Noah, the patient in bed 3 is waking up."
Noah pushed off the wall, slipping his phone back into his pocket. He would restrain himself to his role as a physician, but he was curious to see how much information he could pull out of Camille LeVieux.