Chapter 6: The Surgeon's Remedy
The gin was cheap, burning a corrosive path down his throat that felt like justice. Jack sat slumped in a corner booth of The Rusty Scalpel, the wood sticky under his elbows, the air a humid soup of tobacco smoke and unwashed bodies. A faded lithograph of arterial branches stared down from the wall beside him, a mocking reminder of the delicate structures he usually worked to preserve. Tonight, he wanted to tear things apart.
He replayed it, again and again. The yellow-purple bloom on her neck. The flinch. The terrible, defeated gloss in her eyes when she’d said, “It’s a cage.” He took another swig. The glass was smudged. Everything was smudged.
“You look like a man who’s lost his last scalpel.”
The voice was light, lilting, with a hint of an Irish cadence. Molly, one of the junior nurses from the hospital. Pretty in a common way, with keen eyes and brown curls escaping her cap. She’d been giving him looks for weeks—appreciative, lingering glances in the ward corridors. A look that said she saw the man, not just the surgeon’s coat. A dangerous look.
“Misplaced it, more like,” Jack grunted, not looking up. “Up some nobleman’s arse.”
Molly slid into the booth across from him without invitation. Her smile was bold. “That kind of talk’ll get you in trouble, Mr. Dawkins.”
“Jack.”
“Jack.” She liked the taste of his name. She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, and the neck of her dress gaped slightly. A deliberate move. “Rough day in the butcher’s shop?”
“You could say that.” He finally looked at her. Her eyes were bright with curiosity and cheap port. She saw his anger, his drunkenness, and instead of being repelled, she was intrigued. It was a familiar dance from a lifetime ago—the magnetism of someone clearly on the edge. “Saw something today I couldn’t stitch up.”
“Some things aren’t meant to be mended,” she said, her foot brushing his leg under the table. “Sometimes you just have to feel the break.”
Her philosophy was as cheap as the gin, but it matched the roaring in his veins. He didn’t want to mend. He wanted to match the broken feeling inside him with something external, something he could control.
“You’re a long way from the dormitory,” he said.
“And you’re a long way from respectable,” she shot back, her grin turning wicked. “I like it.”
He stood, a bit unsteady, tossing coins on the table that clattered loudly. He didn’t ask her to follow. He just moved through the press of bodies toward the back hallway, past the privy, to the storeroom where kegs and crates were stacked in smoky darkness. He knew she was behind him. He could feel it.
The door clicked shut, plunging them into near blackness, slatted light from the main room cutting across sacks of flour. The smell was of damp wood and sour beer.
He turned, and she was already there, her hands on his chest, her mouth seeking his. Her kiss was hungry, practiced. He let her for a moment, the warmth of another human a shocking contrast to the cold fury inside him. But it was wrong. The lips were too soft, the hair brushing his cheek too dark.
In the gloom, he could pretend.
He spun her around, not gently. Her breath hitched, not in fear but in excitement. He pushed her forward until her hands were flat against a rough-sawn shelf, a bottle rattling beside her. He fumbled with the ties of her skirts, his surgeon’s fingers clumsy with rage and drink.
“Someone might come,” she breathed, but it was a thrill, not a warning.
“Let them.”
He didn’t prepare her. He didn’t kiss her neck. He just took her, driving into her with a single, sharp motion that made her cry out. The sound was swallowed by the tavern’s din. He set a punishing rhythm, his hands gripping her hips, then sliding up to clutch her shoulders, pinning her in place.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his lids, he saw golden hair, not brown. He saw the fine lawn of a lady’s dress, not coarse nurse’s linen. He imagined he was taking back what had been stolen. He imagined he was marking, claiming, repaying a violence with another kind of violence. His grip tightened on her shoulders, his thumbs pressing into the soft flesh where her neck met her collarbone. He was not thinking of her at all.
Molly moaned, a low, throaty sound of pleasure, arching back against him. She mistook his brutality for passion. She writhed, encouraging him, lost in her own sensation, completely unaware that the hands on her body were picturing another woman’s bruises, that every thrust was a silent, furious shout into the void left by Belle’s resignation.
It was over quickly, a raw and graceless release. He slumped against her for a second, the reality of the damp storeroom crashing back. The flour dust in his nose. The ache in his head. The woman beneath him, panting, pushing her curls back from her face with a satisfied sigh.
She turned, her eyes glittering in the dim light. She reached for him, wanting to kiss him again, to prolong the connection.
Jack stepped back, fastening his trousers with hands that felt like someone else’s. The disgust rose in him, sour and immediate. Not for her. For himself.
“That was…” she started, her voice husky.
“Don’t.” The word came out sharper than he intended.
Her smiled faded, replaced by a flicker of confusion, then hardening into understanding. She straightened her clothes, her movements suddenly stiff. “Right. Of course.”
She’d been a vessel. A warm, willing body to absorb his anger. And she knew it now. The clever nurse’s eyes saw the emptiness in him, the self-loathing that had just been momentarily quieted, not cured.
“Molly—” he began, some ghost of courtesy trying to surface.
“Save it,” she said, her chin lifting. She wasn’t hurt; she was insulted. “I’m not a fool. Just next time, maybe buy me a drink first. For appearances.” She brushed past him, opening the door and letting in a blast of noise and light before she disappeared into it.
Jack was alone in the stale darkness. His breath fogged in the cold air. He looked at his hands—the hands that healed, the hands that had just gripped a woman hard enough to leave bruises of their own. He could already see the faint, red pressure marks on his palms from the force of his own grip.
He hadn’t saved Belle. He hadn’t confronted Beaumont. He’d just taken his own feeling of powerlessness and inflicted it on someone else. The symmetry was ugly and perfect.
He leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the shelf. The drunken fog was lifting, leaving a crystalline, aching shame. He was a surgeon. He was supposed to fix things. But some sicknesses, he realized, went deeper than the bone. Some rot was in the soul.
And as the last of the gin’s false warmth drained away, a cold, clear thought emerged. Beaumont was leaving for Sydney in three days.
A week-long trip.
Jack pushed himself upright. The Artful Dodger, a ghost he thought he’d buried, stretched awake in the back of his mind. The Dodger didn’t feel shame. The Dodger saw a locked door and found a key. The Dodger saw a mark and planned a score.
He walked out of the storeroom, through the tavern, and into the night. His steps were steadier now, his mind no longer swimming but cutting through the darkness with a singular, dangerous purpose.
He wasn’t just a surgeon anymore. Not tonight. The game was on.