They Let Me Bleed Out for My Sister's Show novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: The Queue

Rafe's POV

On Saturday night I stood in the hospital pharmacy and watched Ivy's blood go into the queue.

It came out of Dr. Lowry's lab in sealed trays, each bag labeled in the same black marker, and a pharmacist scanned them one at a time.

Forty-one patients on the territory list.

The system sorted them by danger, the way the clinic's desk once had.

This time the queue ran in the right order.

The old woman with the fox bite was first.

The girl with the cut palm was second.

I leaned on the doorframe, and something in my chest that had been clenched for three years came loose.

"You did that," a voice said beside me.

I knew it before I turned.

The Alpha of Blackridge was a lean gray man of sixty in a canvas coat, and he had come up the corridor without anyone announcing him.

I had met him twice in my life, both times at funerals.

"Sir," I said.

"The chair tells me you wrote three reports."

"Yes."

"And that I never read them."

I said nothing.

"I should have," he said. "The council's secretary is gone as of this afternoon. I'm sorry it took a girl in a brace to make me look."

He watched the trays go by for a moment.

"I have an offer for you," he said.

"I'm listening."

"The territory is going to need that young woman alive and well for a long time. She'll have enemies. The clinic's lawyers, the sponsors' lawyers, people who want what's in her veins."

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