Lawrence Gordon was never a man of sublime passions or noble causes. He was driven by routine and the inertia of a doctor who learned too early to feign empathy and pretend to be something he was not. Arrogance sustained and defined him. Yet, in the darkness of the second life he had embraced, he discovered something that made him feel alive: the precision of intervening at the origin of decay and the nearly surgical cleanliness of removing the tumor at its root.

The brief, sweaty nights he shared with Carla—plagued by a desire that never reached fullness—were nothing compared to the ecstasy of holding in his hands the skin of a man destined to undergo a test. That was the true pulse of his existence: The needle piercing tissue and blood coursing through it like an inevitable river. There he found his meaning.

Pain had chiseled him in all its forms. Not only the loss of his foot—that phantom memory that burned with every step—but also the intimate fracture of a demolished home and the emptiness where his wife and daughter once existed. He became an exile, a loner who no longer expected solace. Until, in the uncertain reflection of another gaze, he found something—not redemption, but companionship. An extension of himself, an apprentice. And maybe — just maybe a way to feel needed again.

Now, his hands moved with unnatural calmness. The sedated man breathed with a calm rhythm, like a wounded animal unaware that it would soon awaken in a cage. Lawrence held the curved needle with a confidence that seemed innate. He pierced the sensitive skin of the eyelid with relentless patience, sewing the young man's eye shut. It was terrifying, considering he had inserted a key only minutes ago.

'The sedative could keep an elephant asleep for a whole day,' Gordon quipped with the dry irony that characterized him. You, incredulous, barely raised an eyebrow. He noticed. Though he didn't show it, he was inwardly pleased.

The needle sank again. The surface tensed and offered resistance but yielded docilely in the end, like warm butter. Blood gushed out in thin, dark threads, which he withdrew with the same meticulous gesture with which he once cleaned operating rooms.

"You see?" His voice, low and quiet, barely broke the room's dense silence. "The margin between the eyelid and the eyeball is minimal. If you go in too far, you'll pierce the wrong thing. Trust me, you don't want to clean up that mess. Take a good look."

He was not tender. Never had been. But his teaching was accurate. It was an odd, sterile form of care, born of the necessity for you to learn the indispensable. He wasn't doing it for you, wasn't doing it for the victim either, he was doing it by the order of a man who would soon be nothing but dust and an epitaph.

Time was an invisible knife that hung over you, cutting every second into tiny, precious pieces. No one had any to spare. Least of all you, under the tutelage of Dr. Gordon, who, once upon a time, was someone respectable.

"Hand me the antiseptic."

His tone was so flat and clinical that, for a moment, you forgot this was a crime. He could have been in an operating room, dictating orders to an intern. The needle continued its course, closing the incision with precision, robbing the man who would soon be forced to grapple with his most primal instincts of his sight.

But you could hardly concentrate on the victim. The tension gravitated elsewhere: to the way his shoulder rubbed against yours, to the penetrating smell of surgical alcohol mixed with his faint perfume, and to those eyes that seemed to dissect you with the same coldness with which he opened bodies. His every gesture drew you in as if watching him work were a ritual from which you couldn't escape.

"Hey..." His voice cut through your self-absorption like a scalpel through flesh. There was an imperceptible tinge of annoyance beneath the sterilized mouthpiece. "Are you listening to me? The antiseptic."