Chapter Text
It had started innocently enough.
After a 14-hour shift at the ER, all Caitlyn wanted to do was doomscroll for a bit, then pass out until her next shift. She was scrolling through Chirper, looking at all of the horrible news, at pictures of vacations that her friends were on, and ads for crypto markets when she saw something that caught her eye.
A woman.
The phone blocked her face entirely as she held it up for a mirror selfie. But what Caitlyn could see was more than enough. A body shaped by effort, a hard, defined stomach, muscles still sheened from a workout, dark tattoos winding over both arms, and the faint trail of hair leading up toward her belly button.
Caitlyn stopped scrolling.
Her thumb hovered over the screen.
“Well...” she muttered to no one at all.
One could argue that there was nothing remotely improper in appreciating athleticism. A clinical admiration for discipline. The aesthetic result of commitment and good genetics.
One could argue that.
One would, admittedly, be full of shit.
Caitlyn clicked the profile.
Petal_Punch.
She scrolled down.
There was another photo. The same woman hung from a pull-up bar in what looked like some battered old gym. Her face was hidden again, this time by the angle of the shot and the fall of dark pink hair. The tattoos stood out even more clearly there, black against sweat-sheened skin, disappearing beneath the hem of a cropped top.
Caitlyn swallowed.
Next was a video of rock climbing. Broad wall, colorful holds, chalk on her hands. The woman moved with the kind of easy power Caitlyn had always found unfairly attractive. She reached, braced, hauled herself upward with a smooth economy. The muscles in the woman’s forearms flexed. Her shoulders tightened. Her core held steady.
Caitlyn watched the entire thing through.
Then a second time, though that time was purely for analytical purposes, obviously.
Another post, curls with a pair of scarred dumbbells. Another, she was flat on a mat after what had clearly been a murderous set of sit-ups, an arm flung over her eyes, stomach still tight from exertion. Another, planks, arms planted, body straight as she let out soft huffs of exertion.
No face in any of them.
Not one.
The absence turned each image into a puzzle, and Caitlyn had always been vulnerable to puzzles.
Who hid their face in every post but showed everything else with such shameless confidence? Who made an account purely to upload training videos and gym mirror shots and climbing clips? Why had she only started posting four months ago?
She scrolled back to the top of Petal_Punch’s profile.
The profile picture wasn’t a face, either. There was a black circle with a stark white VI in the middle. Then she let her gaze drift downward.
Fifty thousand followers.
Her eyebrows rose.
That wasn’t nothing. That wasn’t some tiny private corner of the internet where a woman uploaded a few workout videos for friends and stray admirers. That was an audience. A proper one.
Then she read the bio.
24 / Gym Rat / followed by a lesbian flag.
Caitlyn’s eyes widened.
“Oh,” she said aloud into the quiet apartment.
Not because it should have mattered, precisely. It was not as though a stranger’s sexuality altered the objective facts already before her. The tattoos remained attractive. The shoulders remained attractive. The climbing remained attractive.
And yet the little flag hit her with a swift, ridiculous jolt all the same.
A possibility, however theoretical, had been presented.
Then her gaze dropped to the next line.
Check out my Backer Account for followed by three red chili pepper emojis, and beside it, a link.
She should be sleeping.
She had another shift tomorrow. Her body ached. Her eyes were dry. Her alarm would come far too soon, and future Caitlyn—under-caffeinated and resentful—would have every right to curse present Caitlyn.
Still…
It wouldn’t hurt to look.
She clicked the link.
The page loaded into Backer. Caitlyn already had an account there, mostly because two medical podcasts she followed had decided to monetize their talk-back hour. So she was signed in automatically, her profile icon blinking into place in the top corner.
Then a prompt appeared over the page.
This creator’s content is marked 18+. Would you like to continue?
She clicked accept.
The page opened.
Caitlyn’s eyes moved across the screen and then stopped, as if her mind had tripped over its own feet.
There were rows of blurred thumbnails. Locked posts. Titles underneath them in plain text, suggestive in a way that made heat rush straight up Caitlyn’s neck.
Your girlfriend can’t sleep.
Bent over the desk by your assistant.
You’re mine.
Just got out of the shower.
Trust me, it’ll fit, princess.
Caitlyn stared.
“Well,” she croaked.
Her thumb twitched on the screen.
There were little labels on the posts. Audio. Video. Image. More of them than she had expected. Far more. Enough that the page went on and on when she scrolled, blurred thumbnail after blurred thumbnail.
And every single one of them was locked.
Caitlyn felt an absurd stab of disappointment.
It was ridiculous, entirely ridiculous. She had no business being disappointed by the respectable existence of a paywall. Artists and creators deserved compensation. That was the modern world. Frankly, good for Petal_Punch.
That didn't stop Caitlyn from staring at the locked icons as if they had personally insulted her.
She scrolled upward, downward, then upward again, eyes narrowing in tired concentration. There were over ninety posts. Ninety. In four months.
Caitlyn imagined the kind of discipline it would take. Recording, posting, maintaining a schedule. Responding, perhaps, though she had not looked that far yet. It meshed strangely with the gym account in her mind. Strength, repetition, dedication. Even this—whatever exactly this was—had the feel of training about it.
Caitlyn pressed her lips together and clicked over to the membership page.
There was only one tier.
Member — $10 a month
Caitlyn blinked at it.
Ten dollars.
That was almost offensive. Not because it was expensive, but quite the opposite. If the price had been outrageous, then at least principle could have taken the field. Outrageous sums were easy to reject. One could stand tall before a fifty-dollar indulgence and say, No. I am a woman of restraint.
Ten dollars was harder.
Ten dollars was coffee and a pastry. Two vending machine lunches at the hospital if one was feeling self-destructive.
Caitlyn stared at the screen.
“This is a trap,” she informed it.
The screen, having no conscience, continued glowing.
Ten dollars, and over ninety posts sat on the other side of the membership wall.
Caitlyn rubbed a hand over her face.
She was so tired.
Too tired, really, for this kind of decision. Exhaustion made fools of everyone, that was basic fact. Sleep deprivation wrecked judgment, there were studies on it. Entire bodies of research. If Caitlyn made a questionable financial and moral choice at one in the morning after fourteen hours in the ER, was that even fully her fault?
She looked again at the membership tier.
Then at the blurred thumbnails.
Then back at the price.
She didn’t remember typing her password or staring at the little spinning circle as the payment processed. Time collapsed into a blink, and then the wall of blurred images was gone, replaced by a gallery in sharp focus.
The first post she clicked was a video—You’re mine.
The video was a POV—the camera was set at eye level, looking upward. The woman was half in frame, lips parted, a thin white scar cutting her top lip.
“Stay still,” the woman rasped. “Be good for me.”
The voice alone was enough to ripple Caitlyn’s heart against her ribs, a vibration made of raw want. She watched, transfixed, as the woman pressed herself forward, the hard, tattooed lines of her arms flexing. The camera angle never wavered, never offered a glimpse of her face, but the woman’s mouth—plush and parted, a bead of sweat gathering at the apex of her philtrum—filled the frame. She was in motion, hips grinding in a purposeful rhythm. The audio was crystalline: the faint creak of some old mattress, the deeper timbre of breath and skin.
“God, you’re taking it so well.” A hand reached down—knuckles grazed the lens—as if to cup the viewer’s chin. “Look at you. Didn’t think you could, but you’re doing so fucking good for me.”
A bead of sweat had begun to prickle at Caitlyn’s hairline.
“You like it when I take control, don’t you?” The voice was lower, throatier. “You’re so easy. You want to be told what to do. You want to be—” A pause, the heavy wet sound of lips, “—mine.”
Caitlyn’s mind had always loved to invent, and every word, every low, confident order sketched in a perfect picture.
“Open for me,” the woman commanded, and Caitlyn’s thighs parted before she realized. Her hand was already beneath the waistband of her pajama shorts, fingertips damp at the seam, her breath coming in short, embarrassing little huffs. The woman’s virtual hand moved possessively, thumb smearing something invisible over the edge of the camera lens, and Caitlyn’s chest tightened.
“Fuck, I love how wet you get,” the voice said, unhurried and pleased. “Touch yourself while I fuck you and don’t you dare stop. I want you to keep going until I say you can come.”
Caitlyn’s hand moved against herself in time with the commands. Her cheeks burned as she listened to the video, to the measured click of the woman’s tongue in the silence between words, the scrape of teeth, the possessive, gritted endearments.
“Fucking beautiful like this. You know that, right?” the woman purred, as if responding directly to Caitlyn’s own rising heat. “Messy and desperate for me.”
Caitlyn’s jaw clenched. She squeezed her eyes shut, letting her mind color in the missing features of the woman above her. The sharp jaw, the snarl of pink hair, the tattoos she already knew by heart. With every word, the fantasy built itself out more.
“You belong to me now,” came the next line. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be claimed, to be used?”
Caitlyn wasn’t even aware she’d whispered it, “Yes, alpha,” nor that she’d said it aloud. Her skin prickled, scalp tingling as her hips rocked slowly, just as the woman on the screen had directed.
The woman’s voice grew rougher, more urgent. “Show me. Let go. I want to hear you.” The video’s audio caught a wet, staccato rhythm, and Caitlyn’s hand mimicked it.
She felt herself slipping—past shame, past reason, past the long day.
The video built toward a fever pitch, hips grinding, the woman’s head tipped back so her elegant throat came into view and her panting voice cut through the speakers.
“That’s it, so fucking perfect. Come for me.”
There was a crescendo, both in the video and in Caitlyn’s room—every muscle in her body locked in place as she obeyed, just as she was told. A desperate, half-choked gasp, and she was gone, shuddering through it with her hand clamped tight between her legs.
When it was over, the video slowed to a rolling stop. The woman leaned in, filling the frame with the dark blur of her hair, the shine of sweat on her cheeks, and a feral, crooked smirk. “Good girl,” she breathed, soft and low. “You did so fucking well for me.”
Then the screen faded to black.
Caitlyn blinked at the ceiling, at the spiderweb crack that ran from one corner to the light fixture. Her heart thumped, a drumming that should have faded but only seemed to intensify as the seconds ticked by. A patch of sweat cooled on her breastbone, then was replaced by the next wave as if she’d just spiked a fever.
She reached for the water glass and nearly knocked it over with her shaking hand. She swallowed, the liquid tepid and metallic. Her legs still trembled, nerves firing along the backs of her thighs. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the insistent, gnawing pulse low in her gut, that instead of receding with orgasm only replenished itself.
A flush swept over her cheeks and the back of her neck. She pressed her palms against her face and registered that her skin was clammy, her lips chapped.
God damnit, she was going into heat.
She lay back, stared at the ceiling, and tried to will the sensation away. It lingered. Anxiety curdled in her throat. She checked her phone: 02:12 am.
“Fuck.”
She really needed to take her suppressants and go to bed, but…
Caitlyn could watch one more video, one more orgasm, just to take the edge off. Yeah, that would be okay.
She scrolled through Petal_Punch’s account for a minute, finding a video—Thinking about you.
The camera was angled from the side and the woman sat squarely in the center, knees spread, hips forward, her perfect body on full display.
On her hips was a dark harness. It was the color of her hair, with angular straps that framed her thighs. The cock itself—large and slightly curved—was a glowing blue.
She squeezed the shaft with one hand, thumb brushing under the head with casual, unconscious confidence. Her other hand snaked up her bare stomach, lingered at the hem of her sports bra, and then she eased her chest free, rolling a nipple between her fingers, eyes never quite visible but mouth open, tongue wetting her lower lip.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” the woman rasped in sultry tone. She palmed her cock, stroking it. “You have no idea how bad I want this.” Her hand stilled at the base. “You want it too. I know you do.” She laughed, a short, cocky bark, then stroked herself harder, thighs tensing until the muscles stood out in sharp relief.
Caitlyn’s hand drifted back between her legs.
The woman leaned back, cock jutting upward, hand moving in a deliberate, measured glide. “Bet you’re already wet thinking about it,” she purred, words almost conversational. “Bet if I told you to spread your legs for me right now, you would. Spread and dripping, just how I like you. Isn’t that right, baby?”
Caitlyn’s hips jerked at the word—baby. It was ridiculous, how fast her mind and body conspired to betray her. She curled her toes against the worn sheets, grinding down against the friction of her own fingers, breath gone shallow and thin.
The woman’s hand moved faster, pumping the shaft in quick, hungry motions, her knuckles shiny. “I want you to fuck yourself for me,” she said, voice dropping into a purr that vibrated in Caitlyn’s gut. “Just like that. Pretend it’s my cock inside you. It’s so much bigger than you’re used to, isn’t it?”
A shiver tore through Caitlyn, and her fingers trembled.
“You’d look so pretty taking it,” the woman continued. “I could fuck you open, easy. You’re so tight, but I’d make it fit. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Caitlyn’s thighs shook, her back arching involuntarily. She heard herself make a sound, high and keening—she would be mortified except her mind was too far gone. The blue cock glowed in the dim light, a neon totem, and Caitlyn wanted it with a hunger that felt like madness.
“That’s it,” the woman crooned, voice smug and silky, “that’s my good girl.” The praise hit home and Caitlyn whimpered. “You like hearing that, don’t you? Makes you so needy. Go on, let me see how messy you get for me.”
There was a pause while the woman stroked herself, her thumb circling under the cock’s head. “God, you have no idea how much I want you.” Her other hand drifted up, teasing her nipple until it stood taut. “You’d feel so fucking perfect. Stretching around me, whimpering as I pump you full of cum. Is that what you want, baby?”
Caitlyn’s legs shivered. The words burrowed under her skin, wriggling straight down to the marrow. She twisted her fist in the sheets, desperate for more friction, too greedy to even feel shame. It was the blue cock, it was the brassy, smug assurance, the casual knowingness of it all—like the woman had reached out of the screen, carved a hole in reality, and peeled her open from the inside.
“Yeah, that’s it. Take it. Take it deeper for me.”
She pictured it, the harness digging into her skin, the blue cock splitting her open, the woman’s hands on her thighs, pinning her, holding her, forceful and gentle in the same breath. The fantasy built itself like scaffolding, each word from the video cementing her into place.
Caitlyn gasped, “God, breed me Alpha, please.”
In the video, the woman was stroking faster. The camera caught her chest, glistening with exertion, her mouth open and panting.
“Shit, you’re gonna make me come,” the woman snarled, all composure shattering. “Fuck. Take it all for me.” Her hand was a blur. “Be a good girl and come for me—”
Caitlyn came, her hand drenched and the sheets underneath her soaked. She gasped, head arching back, eyes rolling open to the sight of the woman in the video—back arched, jaw clenched, sweat streaming down her neck, the blue cock spurting glossy white across her belly. The woman raked her abs with her nails, smearing herself in the mess, a guttural moan curling from her throat that made Caitlyn’s toes flex and her cunt clench.
She lay there, splayed and shaking. The video ended on the woman’s crooked smile, and then a throaty, sated laugh. “Thanks for watching, baby. Sweet dreams.” The screen blanked, leaving Caitlyn adrift, her body still caught in the afterglow.
The orgasm ebbed her heat a little.
Caitlyn lay there for a few breaths longer, chest rising and falling in the dark, the phone gone dim in her hand.
“Christ,” she muttered to the ceiling.
The exhaustion she had been outrunning had caught up to her.
Caitlyn pushed herself upright with the stiff reluctance of a woman twice her age. Her muscles complained. Her shoulders felt full of gravel. She set the phone face-down on the mattress, then swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood.
The floor was cold beneath her feet.
She crossed the apartment in the dim wash of streetlight bleeding through the blinds and stepped into the bathroom.
Caitlyn turned on the shower and twisted the handle farther toward cold than comfort required. Pipes shuddered in the wall. Water hissed down in a hard, steady sheet.
Then she reached for the little orange bottle on the shelf. She shook two heat suppressant pills into her palm, dry-swallowed them, and stood there for a moment with a hand braced against the counter, waiting for the bitter ghost of them to leave her tongue.
Only then did she look fully at herself.
There she was.
Tired was too soft a word for it. Tired suggested something ordinary. Something cured by a decent night’s sleep. What looked back at her was more worn through. Her face had that stretched look it got after too many shifts stacked back to back. Her skin was pale beneath the bathroom light. There were faint marks where her glasses had sat all day. The sort of details nobody else noticed, perhaps, but Caitlyn did. Caitlyn noticed everything.
She looked lonely.
She looked exhausted.
And she was trying, as she always tried, to take everything she’d seen in the ER and cut it into neat little pieces small enough to stack and shelve somewhere inside herself.
The old man whose daughter hadn’t made it in time.
The teenager with blood on both hands insisting she was fine, she was fine, while shaking so hard.
The little boy who screamed until his voice gave out.
The grandmother with the failing heart, who had still thanked every nurse in the room before she went under.
Caitlyn closed her eyes.
She had gotten very good at not looking directly at that burden.
Work. Routine. Order. Distance. A little doomscrolling. A little distraction. Then she was as right as rain...
Caitlyn let out a soft breath and opened her eyes again. Then she straightened a little and gave her reflection a gap-toothed smile. The sort of smile she wore in hallways and elevators and supply rooms when someone asked how she was doing and didn’t actually want to know.
It looked terrible.
Thin at the mouth. Dead at the eyes. Convincing only if the viewer had never met a real human being before.
“Just get through the week.”
---
She had made it through the week.
Then the next.
And the next.
And the one after that.
Caitlyn was still standing. Still charting. Still moving from room to room with clean hands and clipped words and a face arranged into professional composure.
But the strain had started showing in the joins.
Her patience had thinned to paper. Little mistakes felt suddenly intolerable. A mislabeled blood sample. A delayed page. A resident fumbling a basic answer Caitlyn knew they knew. Each tiny thing landed on nerves already rubbed raw.
She snapped at a med student over a charting error so minor that, even as the words left her mouth, some part of her knew she was being unfair.
“Are we just hoping the right information magically appears if we squint hard enough?”
The young woman—Andrews, second month, cute mousy brown hair, doe eyes, eager and always hovering—went pale.
“I—I did, I just—”
“Well, you just what?”
The silence that followed was awful.
Andrews swallowed. Her eyes glistened. She looked down at the tablet in her hands.
Caitlyn felt the shape of her own ugliness then, but pride, fatigue, and momentum were a foul combination.
“Fix it,” Caitlyn said, quieter but no kinder. “Before it becomes my problem.”
Andrews nodded quickly and turned away.
Half an hour later, Caitlyn was reviewing labs at the station when one of the nurses paused beside her with the cautious posture of someone approaching a feral animal.
“Dr. Talis wants a word.”
Caitlyn closed the chart on the screen with more force than necessary and stood. The fluorescent lights seemed especially vicious today, glaring off every polished surface, turning everyone a little wan and overexposed. The whole ER hummed around her in its usual rhythm—monitors chirping, wheels rattling, voices layered one over another, the great machine of triage and treatment grinding on.
She found Viktor in one of the quieter side corridors near the staff offices, leaning against the wall with his cane angled beside him, a hand resting on the carved handle. He looked as he always did: rumpled but somehow deliberate, weary-eyed.
He looked up at her and said, “You’re done for the day.”
Caitlyn stopped in front of him. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
She opened her mouth to protest, and he cut across it before she could get the words out.
“You made Andrews cry. This is a teaching hospital, we don't demean those who are learning.”
Caitlyn sighed. “I—”
Viktor shifted his weight, leaned a little more heavily on the cane, and fixed her with that flat, level stare of his. “I know, I don’t need excuses. There's only a few hours left in the shift and tomorrow's your day off, I’ll tell the team you’re sick and take over your patients.”
Caitlyn almost argued on instinct alone. The refusal came up in her chest quickly—she could manage, she was managing, she only needed sleep, coffee, a personality transplant. But the fight ran out of her before it reached her mouth.
Because there was no point. He was right, and they both knew it.
“Sorry, Vik.”
Viktor pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers and closed his eyes. “Just sort out what’s going on with you. I need your head on straight.”
He lowered his hand from his face and studied her for a moment. In that pause Caitlyn had the absurd urge to look anywhere but at him, as if eye contact might peel the last layers off and expose the mess beneath.
“Caitlyn, I’m serious. Whatever this is, don't let it affect your patients. Or we’ll be having an official conversation. Understood?”
“Yes, of course.”
Viktor gave her one last look, then turned and moved back down the corridor, cane tapping softly against the floor in a rhythm that disappeared into the wider noise of the department.
Caitlyn remained where she was for a moment and closed her eyes, pressing her thumb against the heel of her palm until it hurt.
Then she turned toward the staff room.
Each step felt oddly detached, as though she were watching herself do it from somewhere slightly above and behind. She passed Andrews near the supply closet on the way. The student looked up, saw Caitlyn, and immediately tried for an expression of professional neutrality that only made the guilt worse.
Caitlyn stopped. “Andrews.”
The girl froze.
“I was out of line earlier,” Caitlyn said. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”
Andrews blinked, clearly startled. “It’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t.”
For a second neither of them moved. Then Andrews gave a small, careful nod.
“Okay…”
Caitlyn walked past Andrews before things could get more awkward than they already were.
The staff room was dimmer than the corridor, blessedly so. A few half-empty mugs sat abandoned near the sink, one of them growing some kind of ecosystem in the dregs. Someone had left a sweater over the back of a chair. The vending machine in the corner hummed to itself.
She opened her locker, took out her backpack, and stripped the hospital off herself in stages. Badge, stethoscope, pens, the small debris of a shift. Each one vanished into the bag, then she zipped it shut, slung it over her shoulder, and left.
Caitlyn made a quiet exit through the side doors like any other overworked doctor slipping out before the next wave hit.
Outside, the air in the ambulance bay had that late-afternoon bite to it, cool enough to sting in her lungs after the overheated press of the hospital. Sirens wailed somewhere not far off, then faded. An ambulance idled by the curb with its back doors open. Two paramedics stood near the rear bumper drinking coffee with the dead-eyed posture of people too tired to taste it.
Caitlyn moved toward the bike rack.
That was when she spotted one of the other residents leaning near the edge of the bay, phone pressed to her ear. Jinx. Not her real name, but one earned early and then never lost, as these things tended to go in hospitals. As an intern, she’d managed to break a portable ultrasound, misplace her own pager, and accidentally set off some kind of medication cabinet alert all in the same week.
She was in her second year now. Small, wiry, with dark circles under bright eyes.
“Yeah,” Jinx was saying into the phone. “I can bring something. See you soon.” Then she hung up, slipped the phone into her pocket, and glanced over just as Caitlyn crouched to unlock her bike from the rack. “Heading out early, Kiramman?”
“I’m sick,” Caitlyn said.
Jinx barked out a laugh. “With a case of bitchitis, I bet.”
Caitlyn straightened slowly from the bike rack and fixed her with a look sharp enough to draw blood.
Jinx cackled. Head tipping back, grin all teeth, wholly unrepentant. “I’m fuckin’ with you, chill out.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and rocked back on her heels. “What’d our glorious leader kick you out for?”
Caitlyn let out a breath through her nose and turned back to the lock, though it was already open. “I snapped at a student.”
Jinx’s grin shifted into interest. “Which one?”
“Andrews.”
Jinx’s face crumpled into exaggerated disbelief. “Oh, man. That’s like kicking a puppy.”
“I am aware.”
“No, seriously.” Jinx pressed a hand to her chest as if offended on the world’s behalf. “Andrews? She apologizes to doors when she bumps into them.”
Caitlyn pulled the bike free from the rack and held it by the handlebars, eyes on the concrete. “Yes. Thank you. I understand the point.”
Jinx watched her for a moment. The humor did not leave entirely, but it settled back a little, making room for something else. “Hey, if you’re off already... could you do me a favor?”
Caitlyn looked up.
Really, she ought to have said no on principle. She was tired, wrung out, embarrassed, and in no mood to be recruited into whatever nonsense Jinx had underway. Under ordinary circumstances, helping Jinx with a favor had the same general energy as accepting a gun from a bank robber.
But the apartment was waiting and the idea of going back there sat badly in her chest.
So Caitlyn heard herself say, “Sure. What is it?”
Jinx’s brows lifted slightly, as though she had expected more resistance. Then she grinned.
“Awesome, wait here.”
Before Caitlyn could ask what, precisely, she had just agreed to, Jinx had already turned and jogged back through the side doors, vanishing into the hospital.
Caitlyn stared after her. There was a very real chance, she reflected, that she had just made a serious error in judgment.
Jinx reappeared a minute later carrying a red medical transport chest, squared off and clinical, with a white label slapped across the front.
HUMAN BLOOD.
Caitlyn raised an eyebrow.
“My sister needs a transfusion,” Jinx said.
Caitlyn crossed her arms. “Why isn't this happening at a hospital?”
Jinx opened her mouth.
“No,” Caitlyn said, sharper now, the day’s professional instinct snapping awake all over again. “Absolutely not. I’m not doing some shady—”
“Relax, giantess. It isn’t anything like that.”
Caitlyn didn’t relax.
Jinx blew out a breath through her nose, glanced once over her shoulder at the bay doors as if checking they were unobserved, then lowered her voice. “Look... my sister has vampirism.”
Caitlyn frowned. “Is it safe?”
Jinx’s expression changed.
“Is she a feral?” Caitlyn asked.
Jinx scoffed, incredulous. “Jesus, you really do have bitchitis.”
Heat rushed straight into Caitlyn’s face. “That’s not what I meant,” she said, and heard too late how defensive it sounded. “I meant—” She stopped, because what had she meant? Is your sister dangerous? Is she starving? Is this reckless? Is this stupid? Is this something I should report? None of it sounded better aloud.
Jinx rolled her eyes, though not without some real annoyance under it. “She won’t bite.”
Caitlyn looked at the cooler in Jinx’s arms, then back at her.
“I’m sure,” Jinx said, voice dripping sarcasm now, “a big, strong werewolf like you will be able to handle it.”
Before Caitlyn could decide whether to be offended by the comment, Jinx shoved the chest into her arms. Caitlyn caught it automatically, fingers tightening around the side handles while the chill of the insulated plastic seeped into her palms.
“What’s the address?”
As if summoned by the question, an ambulance came screaming into the bay, siren cutting off in a yelp as it swung in too fast and braked hard by the curb. Both of them turned instinctively toward it. The rear doors burst open. A gurney clattered down. Voices rose in clipped bursts.
Caitlyn’s body twitched toward it by reflex.
Jinx did too, but she acted on it, walking backwards towards the patient. As she did, she pulled out her phone, thumb moving quick across the screen.
A moment later, Caitlyn’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
“You get it?” Jinx asked.
Caitlyn shifted the cooler awkwardly to one hip, dug out her phone with her free hand, and looked down.
An address for an apartment in the Lanes.
“Yes.”
“Good, I’m trusting you on this.”
Then Jinx turned and started to help the patient, following the gurney and paramedics back into the hospital.
Caitlyn looked at the address more closely.
Only a couple of miles.
She set the ice chest carefully on the pavement beside the bike rack and eyed the rear carrier on her bike with skepticism. It had held groceries, a satchel of books, once an absurdly expensive floor lamp she had regretted buying halfway home. It had not, until now, been asked to transport a cooler labeled HUMAN BLOOD into the Lanes at dusk.
“There’s a first time for everything,” she muttered.
The bungee cord tied under the rack took some maneuvering with one hand while she steadied the chest with the other. She threaded it through the handles, tightened it, tested the weight, adjusted it again. The cooler sat solid enough in the end, squared and secure, though no arrangement could make the whole business feel less ridiculous.
Then she pulled down her helmet over her hair and buckled the strap under her chin and lastly, she put in her ear pods and put on her biking playlist.
Caitlyn swung a long leg over the bike, settled her hands on the handlebars, and pushed off into the city.
