Chapter Five

 

Anya was just debating whether to give herself another energy stimulating shot or not when her e-assistant buzzed with an e-memo from Kromin.

Meet me in the break room, stat.

Anya glanced up at the digital clock on the wall of the hospital room she was sitting in. The room belonged to the little boy who had had the appendectomy, and he had begged Anya to stay with him while he slept. It turned out his mother was a single mom with two smaller children and no one else to watch them. A neighbor had agreed to take the two younger kids for the duration of the surgery, but then the mom had had no choice but to leave and get the other kids, leaving the little boy alone in the hospital.

Anya had been happy to sit with him as long as she could, which had been quite a while. Things had been relatively quiet here overnight, which had been nice. The patients all seemed to be recovering well, and it looked like most of the miners would be able to go home today.

Right now, the clock read seven a.m. Anya hoped that Kromin would send her home to rest so that she wouldn’t have to take another energy stimulating shot. She didn’t like to take more than one of those in a twenty-four hour period, but if she had to stay here at work much longer, she was going to need another shot to be functional. The lack of sleep was catching up with her.

Anya stretched and rose to leave the room, looking back for one last glance at the sleeping little boy. She had warned him that she might not still be there when he woke up, but she still hated to leave him. He was such a tiny little thing, and all alone. Duty called, however. Anya knew Kromin would not be amused if she took a long time to show up in the break room. She didn’t want to lose whatever good will she had accumulated by staying here all night, and so she hustled as fast as she could across the hospital.

When she got to the break room, the look on Kromin’s face told her that any words of thanks she had expected would not be forthcoming. His eyes were dark and angry, and his mouth was set in a tight line like it always was when he was about to lose his temper.

Suddenly, Anya had had enough. She’d been working her ass off here, learning as much as she could and helping out as much as she could. She hadn’t had to stay all night last night. She could have declined the night shift altogether, or at least made Kromin cover part of it. But did she get any thanks? No, of course not. All she got was a handsome yet angry Zocronian man who apparently couldn’t go more than twelve hours without finding a reason to be pissed at her.

“What’s wrong now?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips and standing in front of the table where Kromin sat. She refused to sit down with him. She kind of liked the fact that she was towering over him right now. He needed to learn that she wasn’t afraid of his alpha tendencies.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in an incredulous voice, as though it should have been obvious. “What’s wrong?”

“You heard me. I’ve been here nearly twenty-four hours, working my ass off for your hospital. I’m not in the mood for your games, so if you want to say something, then spit it out. Otherwise I’m going to go home and get some rest.”

Kromin’s eyes widened to an unbelievable size, but somehow he managed to look even sexier with that expression. Anya studied him for a moment, wondering how it was possible for her to be so attracted to him and hate him so much at the same time. The sight of his face made her heart flip-flop and turned her whole body warm. Why did she respond to him like this when he was so obnoxious all the time?

Before she could ponder this question very long, Kromin was reaming into her.

“What’s wrong is that you gave one of the miners a double dose of his steroid shot yesterday morning.”

Anya faltered for a moment in feeling self-righteous. “Wait, what?”

“You heard me. What’s worse is that it looks like it was your very first patient of the day, so you should have been completely fresh and completely on top of your game. Not tired at all. But somehow you still managed to screw up.”

Anya felt her heart plummet. She thought back to her first patient. He had been the one teasing her about her looks. Had she gotten distracted by all of that teasing and made a huge mistake? “Is he…is he okay?”

Kromin’s scowl deepened. “Luckily for you, he’s fine. He’s one of the biggest, toughest miners, and the extra dose didn’t do any damage. But if you had given a dose that strong to the wrong person, or had given a double dose of some other sort of medicine, things could have ended very badly.”

Anya took a deep breath to steady herself. Okay, so she screwed up. That was bad, but at least no one had been seriously harmed by her screw up. This wasn’t going to help Kromin’s view of her any, which was definitely not a good thing. But surely, one little mistake wasn’t going to undo all of the good she did last night?

“Kromin, I’m really sorry. There’s no excuse for that, but thankfully there was no harm done this time. I’ll learn from it, I promise.”

“Yeah, you’ll learn from it. You’ll learn from it when I tell Daxar what happened and he agrees to let me fire you.”

Anger burned in Anya’s chest. “Are you crazy? You’re going to fire me over one mistake? Don’t you get it, Kromin? You don’t need to be firing me. You need to be hiring more people. What would you have done without me yesterday? You had two major surgeries and then a grieving family to deal with. How would you have handled all the other patients on top of that? You’re being crazy. Full out crazy. You can’t do this by yourself.”

“I wouldn’t have messed up a dose on a steroid shot, even if I was here by myself.”

“Oh, so you’ve never made a mistake?”

Kromin only glared at her, and Anya knew she’d hit a nerve. Of course she had. Everyone had made a mistake at some point or another. She didn’t know what Kromin’s mistakes were, but she knew he had made them. When he didn’t say anything, she refused to back down.

“Well?” she prompted. “Tell me honestly, to my face, that you’ve never made a mistake, and I’ll leave this hospital right now and never come back.”

Kromin stood, and pointed his finger right at her chest. Now he was towering over her, and Anya had to admit that the proximity of his finger to her breasts was causing a strange thrill to run through her. It’s like no matter how non-romantic and serious a moment between Kromin and her might be, she couldn’t help but be turned on when he was in close physical proximity to her. It was so annoying.

“Listen, human,” he said. But he never got to finish his sentence. At that moment, Daxar and Jarmuk both came bursting into the break room. Their faces were covered with sweat, and they were breathing heavily as though they’d been running a long distance at top speed to get here.

Anya whirled around to look, and fear struck her when she saw the panic on their faces. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did something happen to Nova or Maisie? Or Ayaan?” Oh god, please no. Let Ayaan be okay. He’s just a little baby!

“Nova and Maisie are fine,” Daxar said. “But there’s a guy down at the mines who was hit in the side by a big piece of Zekkardite. The guy who called in the emergency says he thinks his skull is cracked, and there’s a lot of blood. They’re doing first aid as best they can, but they really need a proper doctor. And the guy isn’t in stable enough condition to get back to the city dome. Someone needs to go to him.”

Kromin was already running toward the door. “I’ll go right away. Can someone fly me over? A rover will take forever to get there, especially the way the storms have been.”

Jarmuk frowned. “The storms are too bad right now for anyone to fly. Our military pilots told us it would be a suicide mission to send someone up into the air right now. You’ll have to take a rover, even though it takes longer.”

Kromin cursed, but Anya stepped forward. “Did you ask Evie?”

Daxar and Jarmuk both looked doubtful.

“No,” Daxar replied. “But if even our military guys won’t fly, there’s no way Evie is gonna go up.”

“Sure she will,” Anya said. “Evie isn’t scared of flying in crazy shit like this. Ask her. I bet she’ll do it. But on one condition. I want to come too.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Kromin roared at her. “You expect me to let you go after how things went yesterday? Besides, someone has to stay here and watch the patients in the hospital.”

Anya was tempted to point out in that moment that Kromin did need more help, but she held her tongue. Now was not the time to stir up trouble. “Kromin, everyone here is in very good condition. Nova or Daxar can handle watching over them. I would volunteer Jarmuk, too, but I imagine he’s a little busy at home at the moment, since he has a newborn. But you don’t know what you’re going to be facing at the mines. You might need to do some emergency procedures or surgeries that require an assistant. Don’t put a man’s life in jeopardy because you can’t swallow your anger or pride.”

“This isn’t about anger or pride!” Kromin said. But then, suddenly, he stopped, and seemed for the first time to be truly aware of the way he was acting. Anya wasn’t sure what had changed in him all of a sudden, but he threw his hands up in the air and surrendered, just like that. “Oh, sludge it. Fine. Come with me if you want. Let’s just get going. The longer we sit around here discussing this, the worse that miner’s condition is going to get.”

“Exactly,” Anya said, starting to run toward the door as well. “I’ll call Evie right away.”

Anya was going to get this show on the road before Kromin had a chance to change his mind. Maybe this would be her chance to show Kromin that he couldn’t judge her based on one measly mistake.