— Sera —
The emergency center was on the fourth floor of the Violet Tower, which I had walked past roughly three hundred times without ever noticing the discreet silver plaque beside the service entrance.
I noticed things like that now. The places that existed just slightly outside of where everyone else looked.
The interviewer was a woman named Dr. Park — efficient, sharp, the kind of person who asked questions and actually listened to the answers. We sat across from each other at a narrow desk and she walked me through patient intake protocols, triage assessment, treatment priority frameworks for multi-shift wolf recovery.
I knew all of it. I'd studied harder than anyone in my cohort because studying was the one thing nobody could take away from me.
The interview should have been nerve-wracking.
It wasn't, particularly.
What was strange was Dr. Park.
Every few minutes — not constantly, but regularly, with the kind of rhythm that suggested habit rather than accident — her eyes moved to the door on her left. The one set into the wall that had no visible handle from this side. She caught herself each time and looked back at me, perfectly composed, but the pattern didn't stop.
I didn't look at the door.
I answered her questions. I demonstrated technique on a practice dummy. I talked her through a mock triage scenario involving three wolves with overlapping injuries.
She offered me the position before I'd finished the last scenario.
"Senior intern rate," she said, sliding a contract across the desk. "Night shifts to start, with the option to move to day rotation after your first month. Does that work with your class schedule?"
Senior rate.
I'd looked up the pay scale before coming. Senior intern was two tiers above what they usually offered students.
I kept my face neutral. "Yes. That works."
I signed the contract.
Dr. Park shook my hand, and as she walked me to the door, her eyes went to that side room one more time.
I stepped into the hallway.
And didn't look back.
* * *
— Caelum —
I heard the whole thing through the wall.
I hadn't planned to be there. I'd had a meeting on the fifth floor that ran short, and I'd stepped into the observation room to review some equipment reports while Park conducted the interview. It was pure coincidence.
I told myself that.
She'd answered every question cleanly. No hesitation, no performing, no trying to impress. Just knowledge, delivered plainly, like she'd spent years preparing for a test she wasn't sure she'd ever be allowed to take.
At one point Park had asked her about pain management in high-resistance wolves — Alphas who metabolized standard sedatives too fast for standard dosing.
She'd paused for exactly three seconds. Then she'd described an alternative pressure-point sequence that I hadn't seen in any standard curriculum. Something old. Something she'd taught herself.
I'd stood very still on my side of the wall.
After she left, I stayed where I was for a while.
The room felt quieter than it should have.
I opened the file on my phone — the one I'd looked at once and told myself I wasn't going to look at again.
Sera Lane. Mother: Elena Lane, née Moonvale. Deceased.
I knew.
I had known since the morning after the hospital report, when I'd pulled the full record and found the death certificate from six years ago. Heart failure, the document said. The kind that happens when an Omega with no pack and no protection runs out of reasons to keep fighting.
Elena.
I closed the file.
I had not allowed myself to think that name in twenty years, and now it had come back twice in a week inside the body of a girl who answered questions with her mother's precision and looked at the world with her mother's particular brand of exhausted, undefeated dignity.
I owed Elena a debt I could never pay.
The least I could do was make sure her daughter had a salary and a roof.
That was all this was.
That was all.
