Chapter 2: Pressure
The hospital air was a different kind of sterile. It didn’t smell of hidden blood and fear, but of floor wax and diluted bleach, undercut by the faint, sweet odor of illness. Romi moved through the bright, humming corridors on autopilot, her body present but her mind a fractured thing. The lack of sleep was a physical weight behind her eyes, a low, constant buzz in her skull.
She’d been up most of the night after Shouma left, staring at the ceiling of her tiny apartment, the feel of the suture needle in her hand and the sight of his blood on her gloves playing on a loop. Then, a 5 a.m. alarm. A cold shower. A bitter coffee choked down on the train. Now, rounds.
“Kitsuhara.” Dr. Ishida’s voice was a sharp probe. “The laceration on Bed 4. How would you assess it?”
Romi blinked, pulling herself to the present. She looked at the elderly man in the bed, a clean, sutured gash on his forearm. “Linear, four centimeters. Non-contaminated. Simple interrupted sutures appear well-approximated. No signs of infection.”
“And the follow-up?”
“Suture removal in ten to fourteen days. Monitor for any redness, swelling, or purulent discharge.” The words came out by rote, clean and clinical. A world away from a flickering basement clinic and a yakuza bleeding on her table.
Ishida gave a curt nod and moved on. Romi followed, the starched white of her coat feeling like a costume. She was playing a part here, the diligent, almost-doctor. The real her was the one who took cash in envelopes for patching up criminals. The one whose father was sleeping in a hospital much like this one, his life depending on that very cash.
During a lull, she ducked into a supply closet, the door clicking shut behind her. The silence was immediate, muffling the hospital’s heartbeat. She pulled out her phone. Three missed calls from the care facility. Her stomach dropped.
She called back, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“Miss Kitsuhara,” the administrator’s voice was politely neutral, a tone she’d come to dread. “We’re just following up on the payment for this month’s supplemental treatments. The invoice was emailed last week.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s being processed. I’ll have it to you by the end of the week.” The lie came out smoothly, coated in a desperation she hoped wasn’t audible.
“Of course. We just need to keep the accounts current. You understand.”
She understood. She understood that current accounts meant her father got the drugs that kept his pain manageable and his cancer from advancing at a gallop. Delinquent accounts meant phone calls, then letters, then discharge papers.
She ended the call and leaned her forehead against the cool metal of the shelving, taking a deep breath that shuddered in her chest. The envelope of cash Shouma had given her was tucked in her backpack, hidden in a textbook. It was more than enough for this month. It was blood money, paid for with a line of stitches and a decade of silence. She both craved it and hated it.
The rest of the shift was a blur of tasks. She sutured a child’s knee, the mother weeping with gratitude. She checked vitals, filled charts, nodded at instructions. But her hands, usually so steady, felt alien. These were the same hands that had cleaned Shouma’s wound, that had felt the hard, defined muscle of his abdomen tense under her touch. He was just a patient, she told herself. A complicated, high-risk, morally ambiguous patient. But the story was there, in the scar over his eyebrow, in the way he’d looked at her—not with the fear or aggression she’d expected from a man like him, but with a weary recognition that mirrored her own.
Finally, blessedly, her shift ended. She changed out of her scrubs in the locker room, the chatter of the other students washing over her without meaning. She should go to the library. She had a neuroanatomy exam in forty-eight hours. The information was a tangled mess in her head.
Instead, she went to her father’s facility.
His room was on the third floor, overlooking a small, manicured garden he never looked at. He was asleep when she entered, his body a slight ridge under the thin blanket. The cancer had whittled him down to this: pale skin stretched over delicate bone, his hair gone from the treatments. He looked ancient, not like the vibrant man who had once laughed with Shouma’s father over glasses of whiskey.
She sat in the chair by his bed, just watching the slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest. The machines beeped softly, a soundtrack to his slow retreat from the world. This was why. This was the entire, terrible reason. Every envelope, every lie, every moment of fear was for this. To keep him here. To keep him comfortable. To maybe, just maybe, buy enough time.
A nurse came in to check his IV. “He had a good day,” she whispered to Romi. “Ate a little more at lunch.”
It was a small victory, a tiny raft in a vast, dark ocean. Romi nodded, a lump in her throat preventing her from speaking.
She stayed until visiting hours were over, until the sky outside the window turned a deep, bruised purple. She walked out into the cool evening air, the city lights blurring as tears she wouldn’t let fall finally welled in her eyes. She was so tired. The kind of tired that sleep couldn’t fix.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. A single, unknown number. A text message.
>The clinic. Tonight. 11pm. Tanaka is still out.
It wasn’t a request. It was a summons. She stared at the screen, the bright letters searing into her retinas. Another job. Another wound to stitch, another secret to keep.
She looked back up at the lighted windows of the hospital, then down at the phone. The choice was already made. It had been made the moment she took their first deal.
She typed a single character.
>K.
The basement corridor was silent, the only sound the scuff of her worn sneakers on the concrete floor. Romi wasn’t sure who the message came from since Tanaka was out but she showed up anyways. The flickering bulb from her first visit had been replaced, casting a steady, unforgiving white light that made the peeling medical posters look ghastly.
She pushed the door open, the familiar scent of antiseptic washing over her. Shouma was already there, leaning against the examination table, his arms crossed over his chest. He wasn't bleeding this time. He just looked tired, the scar over his eyebrow a stark line in the harsh light.
"Punctual," he said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet room.
"When the message says jump, you ask how high on the way up," she replied, dropping her backpack by the door. "What's the emergency?"
"No emergency. Just a check-up." He unfolded his arms and turned, lifting the edge of his shirt to reveal the line of her sutures. The skin around them was pink and angry, but clean. No sign of infection.
She pulled on her gloves, the snap echoing sharply. "You could have looked at this in a mirror. You didn't need to summon me."
"I needed a professional opinion." He watched her as she bent to examine the wound, her fingers gently probing the tissue. "You look more tired than I do."
"Long day saving lives that don't involve knife fights." Her touch was clinical, efficient. "Healing looks good. No redness, no swelling. The dissolvable stitches are doing their job. Try not to get stabbed again before they vanish."
"A solid plan. I'll run it by the guys." A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips before fading. He let his shirt fall back down. "You're good at this. The patching up part."
"It's the part I signed up for." She ripped off the gloves and tossed them away. "We done here?"
"Not quite." He reached into his jacket and pulled out another envelope, thicker than the last. He held it out to her. "For your father. The treatments."
Romi stared at the crisp white package. It represented another month of stability, another month of peace for her dad. It also felt like a hook, sinking deeper into her flesh. "That was fast. I haven't done anything to earn this one."
"Consider it a retainer." He didn't withdraw his hand. "Tanaka's out for a while. Complications. We need someone reliable."
Her ethical compass, the one she’d honed through years of study, spun wildly. This was the line, the one she’d sworn she wouldn't cross from temporary fix to permanent employee. But the image of her father, so small in his hospital bed, eclipsed everything.
She took the envelope. It was heavy. "What kind of complications?"
"The kind that keep you in a hospital bed." He watched her tuck the money away, his gaze unreadable. "There's a car outside. Another patient needs your… discreet expertise."
"This isn't what I agreed to."
"You agreed to help." He moved toward the door, holding it open for her. "The help is needed now. Come on, doctor."
The word felt like an accusation. She slung her backpack over her shoulder, the weight of the textbook and the envelope a bizarre combination. She walked past him, out into the dim corridor, the door clicking shut behind them with a sound of finality. The car, a sleek black sedan, idled at the curb, its passenger door already open.
The car’s interior smelled of leather polish and something else, something coppery and faint beneath the air freshener’s pine scent. Romi slid onto the cool seat, the door thudding shut with a solid, expensive finality. Shouma got in the other side, his presence immediately making the spacious sedan feel cramped.
The driver was a hulking silhouette, his knuckles scarred and one ear a mess of cauliflower flesh. He didn’t look back.
“Where are we going?” Romi asked, her voice tighter than she intended.
“A place.” Shouma stared straight ahead as the car pulled smoothly into the late-night traffic. “The patient isn’t one of us. He’s a… business associate. It got messy.”
“Messier than a knife fight in a back alley?” She clutched her backpack on her lap, feeling the thick envelope inside. Her retainer.
“Different kind of mess.” He finally glanced at her, his eyes catching the passing streetlights. “You just look at the wound. You don’t ask about the story behind it. That’s the job.”
The city blurred past, the bright, orderly storefronts of the main avenues giving way to narrower, darker streets. Romi watched her reflection in the window, superimposed over a tangled web of neon signs and shadowed doorways. She was a long way from the hospital’s fluorescent halls.
The car eventually turned into an underground parking garage, the tires echoing in the concrete silence. They stopped in a far corner, isolated from the other vehicles. The driver killed the engine.
Shouma turned to her. “Remember. Just the medicine.”
He got out and opened her door. The garage air was cold and damp, smelling of exhaust and stale water. A single metal door stood a dozen paces away, painted a grimy, peeling green. The driver positioned himself beside the car, a silent, imposing sentinel.
Shouma led the way, his shoes scraping softly on the oily concrete. He didn't knock, just pushed the door open and held it for her.
Romi took a breath, the scent of the garage filling her lungs.
She stepped across the threshold.
The air inside was thick and warm, heavy with the cloying sweetness of cheap perfume trying to mask the stench of sweat and stale cigarettes. It was a small, windowless room, with a stained mattress on the floor and a single bare bulb dangling from a wire. The woman lay curled on her side on the mattress, her sequined dress hiked up, her body trembling in violent, silent shudders.
It was a woman bleeding from her rectum. She was raped. She was one of the regular yakuza escorts.
Romi’s medical training snapped into place, a cold, automatic protocol that bypassed the horror churning in her gut. She dropped to her knees, her backpack hitting the floor with a thud. “I need clean water, towels, and my kit from the car. Now.” Her voice was a surgeon’s scalpel, sharp and sterile. Shouma didn’t move, his form a dark silhouette blocking the door. “Shouma. Now.”
He turned and barked an order to the driver outside, the sound harsh in the suffocating quiet. Romi’s hands, which had been so steady stitching Shouma’s clean knife wound, hovered over the woman. She saw the brutal tearing, the vivid, angry bruising already blooming across her thighs. This was not a disagreement over a parking spot. This was a violation etched into flesh.
“Can you tell me your name?” Romi asked, her tone softening as she carefully brushed the woman’s sweat-dampened hair from her face. The woman just whimpered, pressing her face into the stained mattress. Her breathing was a ragged, hiccupping thing.
The driver shoved Romi’s kit into the room and retreated quickly, avoiding looking at the scene on the floor. Romi worked with frantic efficiency, tearing open antiseptic wipes and packages of gauze. The metallic smell of blood was overwhelming here, a visceral counterpoint to the floral perfume.
“I need to stop the bleeding and prevent infection,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. Her fingers, in their nitrile gloves, were gentle but decisive as she began to clean the wounds. Each flinch from the woman felt like a personal failure. This was medicine, but it wasn’t healing. It was just damage control.
Shouma finally spoke, his voice low and gravelly. “Can she work?”
Romi’s head snapped up. She stared at him, the envelope of cash in her backpack feeling like a lead weight. “Are you serious?”
“It’s a simple question.” His face was in shadow, but his posture was rigid. “This is a business. We need to know the downtime.”
A cold fury, clean and sharp, cut through her shock. She looked from his impassive expression back down to the broken woman on the mattress. The moral calculus she’d been struggling with—her father’s life for her soul—suddenly felt grotesquely simple. There was no calculus here. Only right and wrong.
“No,” Romi said, her voice dangerously quiet. “She cannot work. She needs a hospital. She needs a rape kit, antibiotics, and someone who isn’t you.”
“That’s not an option.”
“Then what is your option?” She finished applying a pressure dressing, her hands now stained a faint pink through the gloves. “Let her lie here in her own blood until she gets an infection? Or just dump her somewhere when she becomes inconvenient?”
The woman on the mattress let out a low, guttural moan. The sound seemed to crack the sterile professional shell Romi had built around herself. She remembered the feel of the suture thread pulling through Shouma’s skin, the professional distance she’d maintained. There was no distance left here.
Shouma took a single step into the room, the light finally catching the hard line of his jaw. He looked at the woman, then at Romi, his eyes holding a conflict that hadn’t been there in the clinic. He saw the bloody gauze piling up beside her, the tremors that Romi was trying to hide.
“We’ll get her to a private doctor,” he said, the words sounding hollow even to him.
“A doctor who won’t ask questions,” Romi finished for him, the bitterness like acid on her tongue. She stood up, peeling off the bloody gloves. She felt dirty, complicit. “Just like me.”
She packed her kit with jerky, angry movements. The retainer fee in her backpack felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric. This was the reality of the money that was saving her father. This was the cost.
She walked past Shouma without looking at him, out into the relative freshness of the garage. She took deep, shaking breaths, trying to get the smell of blood and perfume out of her lungs. He followed her out, closing the green door on the nightmare inside.
The driver was already in the car, the engine running. Shouma stood beside her, the silence between them heavy and charged.
“I’ll have someone take you home,” he said finally.
Romi looked at him, really looked at him, seeing the boy from her past buried deep beneath the yakuza enforcer. The conflict in his eyes was the only thing that kept her from screaming.
“That woman back there,” Romi said, her voice barely a whisper. “She’s someone’s daughter.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She turned and got into the back of the sedan, pulling the door shut herself. As the car moved through the dark streets, she stared out the window, seeing only the image of the trembling woman on the stained mattress, a ghost now permanently etched beside the image of her own frail father in his hospital bed. The two faces, two different kinds of victims, and her trapped in the middle.