Chapter Text
Nora Wells may not be certain of much anymore, but she does know this for a fact.
She should be at school, studying her final year of college, preparing for grad school, for a future as a psychologist or maybe even a therapist.
If not at school, then at home, with mom and dad and Aiden, talking over dinner, laughing at one of mom’s bad jokes.
Maybe even with Jia, the nine year old she’d met at the hospital whom she’d quickly bonded with.
She should be anywhere but here.
Lying in bed next to Dr. Isaak Talbot, once her bone cancer doctor who also moonlighted as The Angel of Death, silently killing terminal patients.
Sometimes not even patients, she reminds herself.
After all, he had killed her older brother. She knows this, knows that the drugs that had killed him were planted, that her brother was not an addict.
Talbot was a murderer, and now he’s her abductor.
Now he nuzzles his nose against the back of her head, still asleep.
One hand rests on her bruised hip.
The other hand is on what’s left of her left leg, similarly bruised.
How the hell did I even get here? She wonders. What could I have done to prevent this?
Nothing, another voice says. There is nothing you could’ve done. He set his eyes on you, chose you, and that is not your fault.
But it is, another voice whispers. If you hadn’t opened your eyes that night, none of this would’ve happened.
Nora suddenly remembers that night, a year ago. She’d been recovering from the surgery that saved her life and stole her left leg.
She’d been having trouble sleeping after having been asleep for so long.
She’d heard a noise, and turned her head, still groggy and even a little half-asleep.
Only to wake up immediately as she registered what she was seeing.
Dr. Talbot’s light gray eyes in the pitch darkness of the room, switching out her roommate, Dana’s, medication in her IV.
Her heartbeat was so loud, she isn’t sure if that was what alerted him to her or if she had gasped or sucked in a breath.
She doesn’t know.
But that doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that in that pivotal moment, their eyes connected, and her life changed forever.
She could hear both their heartbeats pounding, hard and fast and loud, in the silence of the room.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she swears she saw him smile, and she does know she saw him bring a finger to his lips, shushing her quietly.
He finished changing the medication and left the room.
Barely an hour later, she heard Dana begin gasping for breath, loud beeping noises as her heartbeat fought to work, saw the rush of nurses and doctors come for her.
Dana never returned.
That next day, she told her brother, an intern at the hospital, exactly what had happened.
Not even a month later, she’d been attending his funeral.
And that was how her downfall began.