Page 12 of Vetted for Vengeance
Close again.
Somewhere through the wall, Rhys is preparing to dissect two men, and my brain is trying to treat it like background noise.
I always liked his voice more than I should. I never tried to deny how I imagine he's talking directly to me when he says ‘who's a good boy then?’
Now I'm glad every word is directed at the brothers instead of me. For a moment, it’s easy to pretend this is just another episode. That smooth voice, giving a running commentary on an operation, the gentle click of instruments in the background. Those sounds are everything I've trained my body to fall asleep to. But now I picture Frank lying on the cot, Rhys leaning over. My ears strain for every sound.
Footsteps, regular and rhythmic as Rhys sets up. The scrape of metal moving. The worst sound is the silence. The moment when there’s nothing.
Nothing to anchor my mind to the situation. No clue what he's doing in there.
Minutes pass. Or maybe seconds. Time stretches when you’re waiting for someone to start dying.
I focus on the sounds Rhys is making.
The quiet clink of metal. The faint scrape of something sliding across steel. The soft hiss of something pressurized. The same noises I hear during complicated surgeries on the show.
Except tonight, I know the patient isn’t meant to survive.
The squeal of Derek's voice shatters what little calm I’ve managed, bringing me back to wide awake with just one curse word. I was imagining the wrong brother suffering first. I would have started with Frank.
“What the hell?”
Derek's whimpering isn't much of a sentence; he's just making sounds. But I have an overactive imagination, and I'm perfectly capable of working this out for myself. If he was looking at Rhys operating on his brother, he'd be angry, swearing in complete sentences. The fact that Derek can only manage squeak-like words leads to the unavoidable conclusion that it's not his brother under the knife, but him.
For a split second, my head turns in search of the camera, but I don't see one. When my mind catches up with the action, I give a sigh of relief. I don't need the image of my vet actually doing this seared into my mind. My imagination is quite capable of providing that horror for me.
“Why me?” Derek croaks.
“That’s what you get for being so uncaring,” I practically growl into my silence.
“We can hear you. Pet,” Rhys calls out in return.
“Oh, shit, fuck. No.” I gasp, throwing my hand across my mouth with a sharp slap sound they can definitely hear.
My stomach drops.
Of course he can hear me.
Of course the speaker still works both ways. I’ve just heckled a man while he’s performing a live autopsy.
“Noah?” Derek croaks out. “Help… me…”
“Help you?” I choke. “Like you help those dogs?”
“That's… not… you little shit… help me.”
“You want the sympathy you show the dogs when they're struggling to deliver their pups?”
“I don't think we can compare the two situations here, Pet,” Rhys chuckles.
“They have to squeeze their insides onto the outside. Pups, intestines, what's the difference?”
“You are a very perceptive young man,” Rhys praises.
I hate myself for it, but I smile. This man praises me and calls me Pet. He drugged me and dragged me away from my home and job. From the dogs. And yet, he has treated me with more respect and decency than my parents ever did. Definitely more than Derek and Frank.
Derek keeps whimpering in pleading words. Occasionally he mutters my name, but it's Rhys’ voice I'm paying attention to. He's talking clearly, projecting his voice as if this were a regular podcast. Each time he names an organ, I know it's not a passing observation. I know he's pulling them out one by one.
