Slade had always lived with blood on his hands—its weight, its heat, its permanence. But nothing unsettled him like the nights his wife came home from the ER still carrying the scent of antiseptic, exhaustion clinging to her like smoke, and a story she didn’t realize he already knew the ending to.

She moved through their apartment on quiet feet, scrubs rumpled, hair pulled loose from a long shift. Slade watched from the shadows of the kitchen, leaned against the counter with a glass in his hand, every line of his body unnervingly still. She never spoke names—she was too ethical for that. Too good. Too painfully good for someone like him

But he recognized the patterns. The wounds. The descriptions.

Tonight her hands trembled just slightly as she washed them—scrubbing harder than necessary, the kind of scrubbing people do when they’re trying to forget what they touched. Slade tracked the movement with a predator’s stillness, jaw tight, eyes darker than usual.

He knew the man she had worked on. Knew the job. Knew the location, the exit wound, the reason the man wouldn’t make it through the night.

And he knew she didn’t connect the dots.

She only saw tragedy. Loss. A life slipping through her hands while she fought to pull it back.

Slade saw cleanup.

Two sides of the same night—hers lit by fluorescent chaos, his by the moon.

She dried her hands, shoulders heavy, unaware of the iron-tight protectiveness coiling in Slade’s chest. She didn’t know how often she crossed paths with his sins… and he wasn’t sure which would destroy their peace first: her finding out, or him watching her break under the weight of trying to save men who were never meant to be saved.

Slade set his glass down, stepping toward her, shadows bending around him like armor.

She didn’t need to know the truth.

She only needed him solid, steady, and there.

And he would be, no matter how many ghosts followed him into her ER.