Chapter 169: CLXIX

Isabelll's POV

The emergency bay at six in the morning looked exactly like it had looked three days ago, and the day before that, and the day before that.

More injured wolves, more silver wounds, more pack members who had been on border patrol and had met something that was faster and stronger and more organized than anything they had faced before the Covenant's advance force started moving.

I pulled on gloves and went to the first bay.

The patient was a male wolf, mid-thirties, with a deep laceration running from his left shoulder down across the top of his chest.

He had shifted partially during the attack, which complicated the wound because the tissue was caught between two states, human and wolf, and couldn't fully commit to either healing process while the silver was still interfering.

"I'm going to need to sedate you," I told him.

"The tissue needs to be stable for me to work on it properly."

"I don't want sedation," he said through his teeth. "I need to get back out there."

"You need to let me close this wound or you won't be going anywhere for considerably longer than the twenty minutes this will take,"

I said. "Your choice."

He looked at me for a moment with the particular frustration of someone whose body was not cooperating with what they needed it to do.

"Fine," he said.

I sedated him and got to work.

The next three hours moved in the rhythm that emergency medicine imposed when there was enough incoming to prevent any pause between patients.

I moved from bay to bay with the focused efficiency that the work required, cataloguing each patient, assessing priority, making decisions and acting on them and moving to the next.

Dr. Chen came through at eight, checked in, reorganized the triage structure to account for the volume, and said to me quietly as he passed, "You've been here since five."

"There have been patients since five," I said.

"You are not a machine," he said.

"I will remember that when the waiting room is empty," I said.

He gave me the look he reserved for when he disagreed but had accepted that arguing was not going to be productive, and moved on.

At nine-thirty I had a twenty-minute window between patients and I used it to stand in the staff room with a cup of tea and not think about anything specific, which was a skill I had developed over years of long shifts and which was essentially the medical professional's version of turning the brain off briefly so it could restart with more capacity.

It worked for about twelve minutes then I thought about Aria. About her face when she told me about the dreams about the way her hands moved the blocks.

About her sitting still while I did her plaits and asking, in that direct uncomplicated way she had, whether I was going to tell her.

It is okay I already know you can just say it when you're ready. Six years old and she was waiting for me to be ready.

The tea had gone cold. I put it down and went back to the ward.

By early afternoon the acute phase had passed. The wounded were in recovery or in surgery, the critical cases stable, the ward running at the sustained lower intensity of ongoing management rather than emergency response.

I was doing chart work at the nurses' station when my phone rang.

Zoe.

I answered immediately, stepping away from the desk and into the quieter corridor toward the staff room.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," she said, and her voice had the quality of someone who had been waiting for a reasonable hour to call.

"How are you doing? Jack heard from Marcus that there was another attack."

"There was," I said. "I have been treating people since five."

"Of course you have." A pause.

"Isabellla, how are you really doing? Not the medical professional version. The actual version."

I stood in the empty corridor and leaned against the wall.

"Zoe," I said.

"I need to tell you a lot of things. Some of them are very difficult to say and will probably be very difficult to hear and I need you to let me get through all of it before you respond because if you respond in the middle I might not be able to finish."

A beat of silence. "Okay," she said. "I'm listening."

I told her I told her everything in the order it had happened. Xavier in the hospital café. The coffee shop, Vanessa, the blackout. Xavier arrived at my door soaked from the rain.

The portrait. Aria called me mommy about what Xavier had said about the Covenant and the Aldric bloodline and what I had given up twenty-seven years ago.

The DNA test Aria was my daughter.

I said it clearly, those four words, in the middle of an empty hospital corridor with the sounds of the ward at a distance, and Zoe was silent for a long time after I said them.

I kept going. I told her about Levi's apartment, about training, about the cost the last time and the possibility it could be the same cost this time.

About Aria's vision of Vanessa about all of it, everything, in the order it had landed on me over the past several days.

When I finished, there was a long silence.

"Isabellla," Zoe said.

"I know," I said.

"You have a daughter," she said.

"Yes."

"A six-year-old daughter who has been dreaming about you."

"Yes."

Another silence then Zoe's voice came back and it was full of something she was not fully managing to keep contained. "She knew the song the one your grandmother made up."

"Yes," I said. "She sang it back to me in the dark."

I heard Zoe exhale, a long shaking exhale. "Okay," she said.

"Okay, I'm not going to cry because that won't help you right now."

"You can cry," I said. "I've already done it extensively."

"I'm going to cry later," she said firmly.

"When I'm alone right now I'm going to ask you one practical question."

"Go ahead."

"Have you told her?"

"Not yet," I said.

"When?"

"Today," I said. "I think today."

"Good," Zoe said. "Because that little girl has been waiting long enough."