I sat chained to the vinyl chair beside her bed, a modern-day Orpheus in scrubs, watching machines fuck life into her lungs with the cold, rhythmic insistence of a piston in a high-end brothel. Each mechanical breath rose and fell like a paid performance—precise, dutiful, utterly devoid of desire.
The screens flickered their cruel little numbers, turning mortality into a goddamn balance sheet: heart rate, O2 sat, ICP—spreadsheet cells that decided whether a girl got to keep breathing or became another tragic line item in the universe's ledger of "almosts."
Hours.
I'd known her for mere hours.
One fevered day, a handful of a stolen hour in her gilded prison—that third-floor mausoleum with its floor-to-ceiling windows flaunting views richer than bloodlines.
Moonlight had poured in like liquid silver, licking across her bruises and turning them into abstract art: violet blooms, yellowing edges, the kind of canvas that would fetch millions if only the pain weren't real.
