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The trauma bay erupted into controlled chaos at three in the morning. Dr. Jenny Williams moved through the storm of voices and alarms with practiced grace, someone who had made peace with disorder. Blood soaked through gauze faster than her hands could work, but her voice remained steady as she called out orders to the nurses beside her.

"Type and crossmatch for four units. Get me a chest tube kit, and page surgery now."

The patient beneath her hands, a woman barely past thirty, stared up with wide, terrified eyes. Jenny met that gaze and held it, her own expression calm and certain even as she worked to stop the bleeding from a jagged laceration that had nearly severed the femoral artery.

"You're going to be fine," Jenny said, and meant it. "Stay with me. What's your name?"

"Sarah." The word came out as a whisper.

"Sarah, I need you to keep breathing. You're doing great."

The monitors beeped in frantic rhythm, but Jenny's hands never faltered. She had learned to trust her instincts in moments like these, that inexplicable sense that told her where to apply pressure, when to act, when to wait. Her attending physician called it a gift. Jenny knew better. It was the beast beneath her skin, lending her senses she should not possess, reflexes too quick for a normal human.

She ignored that truth now, as she always did, and focused on the work. The bleeding slowed. Sarah's pulse steadied. Thirty minutes later, Jenny stepped back as the surgical team wheeled Sarah away, stable and alive.

Her attending, Dr. Marcus Chen, gripped her shoulder. "Exceptional work, Williams. I do not know how you always know exactly where to cut, but that instinct of yours just saved her life."

Jenny smiled, the expression automatic and well practiced. "Just lucky, I guess."

But luck had nothing to do with it. As Sarah disappeared through the double doors, Jenny caught a scent on the air that made her freeze. Fear and ozone, sharp and unmistakable. She turned toward the incoming ambulance bay, where paramedics were already rushing in with another patient, a young man seizing violently on the gurney.

Jenny moved before the monitors even registered the anomaly. She leaned over the patient, closed her eyes for half a second, and listened. Beneath the chaos of the seizure, she heard it: an irregular heartbeat, a rhythm too subtle for the machines to catch but unmistakable to her enhanced hearing.

"Possible arrhythmia," she said, her voice cutting through the noise. "Get me an EKG, six lead, and prepare adenosine. We need to see what we are dealing with."

Dr. Chen stared at her. "Based on what presentation?"

"His pulse," Jenny said quickly, touching the patient's wrist. "Too fast, too irregular. We need to rule out accessory pathway."

The monitors confirmed her suspicion thirty seconds later. Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a rare condition where an extra electrical pathway in the heart caused dangerous arrhythmias. The EKG showed the telltale delta wave she had somehow known would be there.

She administered the medication with steady hands. The seizure stopped. The young man's eyes fluttered open, confused but alive.

Dr. Chen shook his head in disbelief. "Your instincts are better than any machine we have."

Jenny turned away before he could see the fear that flickered across her face. Her gift was useful here, in this place where lives hung in the balance, but it was also dangerous. Every impossible diagnosis, every too-quick reaction, every time she heard what she should not hear, she risked exposing herself.

She scrubbed out in silence, watching the blood and antiseptic swirl down the drain. Her hands were steady. They were always steady. But inside, her wolf paced with restless energy, a reminder that no matter how far she ran, no matter how deeply she buried herself in this human life, she could never truly escape what she was.

By the time her shift ended at three in the afternoon, Jenny had saved three more lives and diagnosed two conditions that should have taken hours of testing to identify. She walked to her locker, exhausted but satisfied, and changed out of her scrubs in the empty locker room.

Her phone buzzed. Not her regular phone, the one her colleagues knew about, but the burner phone hidden in the bottom of her bag beneath three layers of fabric and a locked case.

Jenny stared at the bag for a long moment, her heart sinking. She did not need to look at the message to know what it meant. That phone only ever carried one kind of communication, and it was never good news.

She left the phone where it was, grabbed her keys, and walked out into the pale afternoon light. Whatever her other life wanted from her, it could wait. Here, in the hospital, she was just Dr. Jenny Williams, healer and human. She clung to that identity like a lifeline, because it was the only thing standing between her and the wild, dangerous truth of what she really was.