Page 24 of Fractured Devotion
And now that same precision is unraveling her.
I close the file and scrub my hands over my face. I haven’t slept properly in four days. Not since the last incident in trauma bay three—the one no one talks about. The patient didn’t die, but he won’t speak anymore either.
There’s a knock.
I straighten and say, “Come in.”
Harper leans in, wide-eyed. “Dr. Rennick, she’s in the observation suite.”
“She?”
“Dr. Varon.”
I stand.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
Harper hesitates. “No. She’s just… watching. No screens on. Just sitting there.”
I thank her and head down two corridors and through a locked stairwell. The observation suite is usually reserved for long-term behavioral monitoring. It’s sterile, silent, and mostly unused. But it has one-way glass looking down into Lab B, where we run baseline memory scans.
I find her exactly as Harper said. Alone. Still.
She doesn’t turn when I step inside.
“Staring contests with empty rooms?” I offer softly.
Her voice is even when she replies, “Sometimes silence tells more truth than noise.”
I move closer. But not too close. Never too close.
“You think someone’s lying?”
Celeste tilts her head slightly. “No. I think someone is listening.”
The way she says it doesn’t rattle me, though it should. But not from her. From her, it feels… correct.
“And what are you listening for?” I ask.
She finally looks at me. Her eyes are exhausted but clear.
“Confirmation.”
“Of what?”
She doesn’t answer.
We just stand there for a while, watching nothing.
Then she says softly, “The drawer wasn’t the only thing that felt out of place.”
I don’t ask her to elaborate. Not yet.
Instead, I sit.
We wait.
And somewhere between silence and suspicion, I realize something deeply unsettling.
