I had a rule.
I did not cry at work. I did not eat at work. I did not fall in love at work, I did not complain at work, and I absolutely, under no circumstances, died at work.
I broke the last one at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday.
In my defense, I was very busy dying for someone else first.
The man on my table was forty-three years old with three kids whose photos were rubber-banded to his wallet. I knew because the nurse told me when they wheeled him in and I had spent the last four hours pretending I did not know because surgeons who think about wallet photos make mistakes.
"Pressure's dropping, Dr. Yuna—"
"Mm."
"The bleed isn't responding—"
"Mm."
"His heart rate is—"
"I know."
I always knew. That was the thing nobody tells you about being good at something. You start knowing all the bad news before anyone says it out loud. You feel it in the room. In the particular quality of silence that settles over a surgical team when they have already grieved the patient and are just waiting for the doctor to catch up.
I never caught up.
Catching up meant letting go and letting go was something I had simply never learned how to do. My mother said it was a character flaw. My ex-boyfriend said it was exhausting. My attending said it was the reason I hadn't lost a patient in eleven months and also the reason I hadn't slept properly in three years.
All three of them were probably right.
"Clear."
I pressed the paddles down. Everyone stepped back with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this too many times. I did not look at their faces because their faces said things I did not want to hear.
Shock. Flat line.
"Again."
Shock. Flat line.
"Yuna." My attending's voice, careful and low. The voice he used when he was about to say something I was going to ignore. "His pupils are—"
"Again."
The third shock lit up the monitors and lit up nothing else.
I started compressions. Both hands, full weight, counting under my breath the way I had ten thousand times. Thirty compressions two breaths thirty compressions two breaths, the rhythm so deep in my muscle memory it lived somewhere below thought.
I was on the nineteenth compression when something happened to my own chest.
Not pain exactly. More like a door closing. Quietly. Firmly. The soft click of something that had been open for twenty-nine years deciding it was finished.
That's strange, I thought.
Then the floor tilted.
I caught the table edge on the way down. Didn't help. Someone grabbed my arm and I heard my name from very far away and then I was on the cold floor looking up at the lights, thinking about the most useless things. Whether I'd left my phone charging. Whether I'd returned my friend's jacket. Whether my plant was going to die without me because I always forgot to water it and had genuinely been meaning to do better about that.
And then, because my brain had apparently decided my final moments should be spent on unfinished business, I thought about the novel.
The one on my phone. Eighty-seven chapters in, three hundred more to go, the most addictive thing I had ever started and never finished. Cultivation world. Ancient war. A half-beast warlord that even the gods refused to fight, so terrifying that entire sects burned their own archives rather than leave records of how to find him.
I had stopped reading when the plot got complicated. I always meant to go back.
I never did.
Typical, I thought, and almost laughed. Which was probably not a dignified thing to do while dying on a surgery room floor.
The lights blurred. Someone was crying, one of the younger nurses, I thought, and made a mental note to tell her it wasn't her fault before I remembered I wasn't going to get the chance.
Darkness came in from the edges like a tide.
I let it.
---
I woke up on cold dirt with leaves in my hair, golden characters burning across my right palm like a brand, and the worst headache of my life.
And something behind me.
Something enormous.
Something that was breathing.
Slowly, I turned around.
He was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen and I had once performed emergency surgery during a blackout.
Seven feet tall if he was an inch. Silver hair wild around a face cut from something harder than bone. Eyes that glowed gold in the dark, not metaphorically, actually glowed, and fixed on me with the specific expression of someone who had just been handed something they did not ask for and could not decide whether to destroy it.
Chains hung from his wrists. Broken. Still rattling.
The golden mark on my palm flared bright.
The golden mark on his chest, directly over his heart, flared back.
We stared at each other.
"What," he said, very quietly, "did you do."
It was not a question.
I looked down at my palm. Looked up at him. Looked back at my palm.
Seven years of medical training. Four years of residency. Twenty-nine years of refusing to panic under pressure.
"I have absolutely no idea," I said.
His eye twitched.
And that was how I accidentally leashed the most dangerous man in a world I had never even finished reading.