Episode 2

My mother used to say that nothing good happens after midnight. If only I knew how true that was now.

As I followed the men down the mansion's endless hallway, I felt every beat of my heart as if it were hitting me in the ribs. My footsteps echoed on the polished marble floors, and the slight squeak of the wheels of the stretcher where the so-called Mr. Reginald lay felt like an alarm that only I could hear.

I didn't know what awaited me… but I would never have imagined this.

When the double doors at the end of the hallway opened, I thought I was hallucinating.

What I saw was an operating room. A real and complete operating room. High ceilings, sterilized walls, high-end articulated surgical lamps, perfectly arranged steel surgical instruments on metal trays, turned-on vital signs monitors, and a hydraulic stretcher prepared in the center. The air had that same penetrating antiseptic smell that one learns to love and hate during the residency years.

And yet, we were not in a hospital.

We were in a mansion. In the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by silence and threats.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

"How…?" I muttered, not really expecting an answer.

One of the men nodded for me to move forward.

I felt like an actress entering a stage where she didn't know her role, with a script that changed every second. But I moved forward.

They pointed me to a small dressing room on the side, with a surgical gown hanging and sterile gloves prepared on a metal tray. I locked myself in there for a few seconds longer than necessary, just so I could breathe. I leaned against the cold wall and tried to find in myself that version of myself that had earned every merit, every shift, every surgery. I had to show up. Because if I failed, I wasn't just going to lose a patient. I was going to lose my life.

I tied my hair back with trembling hands, then washed my arms, my fingers, my nails, with the automatic precision of someone who has done this a thousand times... but never under these conditions.

When I returned to the room, the stretcher was already ready, the patient uncovered from the chest down and three figures were waiting for me.

An anesthesiologist—tall, thin, young, with a tense expression—manipulated the tubes and controls of the respirator. Next to him, two nurses—a middle-aged woman with deep dark circles under her eyes, and a man with tattoos on his forearms who tried to hide his nervousness behind a false sense of security—prepared the trays with scalpels, the electrocautery, and sutures.

I greeted them with a nod.

"Good evening…" I said, and I could barely hear myself. "I'm Dr. Rivas."

They nodded, wordlessly.

The anesthesiologist was the only one who dared to speak.

"Gabriel."

"Clara," the nurse chimed in.

"Mateo," the other replied.

The three of them looked at me as if I were their only hope… and I could see in their eyes the same thing I felt in my gut: fear. Real, tangible fear, as heavy as lead.

This was not just an operation. This was a sentence suspended by a surgical thread.

Then, a voice interrupted the silence like a knife.

The door opened, and there again was the woman who had greeted me.

She took only one step closer, with her silhouette outlined by the dim light of the hallway behind her.

"Doctor," she said with a venomous calm. "That man on the table is my son, my only son."

Her voice had a hidden edge that chilled the skin.

"If he lives, we all live."

She paused.

"If he dies… there will be no door, tunnel, or prayer that saves you. Not you, nor those who are here."

She said this last and closed the door with a dry click.

No one spoke.

No one breathed for a few seconds.

The monitors beeped with their regular sounds. The patient, unconscious, had several bleeding wounds in the abdomen, one on the right thigh, and another, more worrying, just below the sternum, which was bleeding even more, not too much, but enough to worry me.

I took a deep breath once more and looked at the team.

"We're going to work fast and precise. Gabriel, I need you to keep the patient stable and adjust the ventilation to 14 per minute. Clara, pass me the scalpel and have the clamps ready. Mateo, I need you closer for suction."

They looked at me. They nodded.

For an instant, the fear dissolved into the familiarity of the surgical ritual.

"Scalpel," I asked, and Clara handed it to me without hesitation.

And there, under the white lights, with the pierced chest of a stranger in front of me and the life of everyone in my hands, I remembered that it didn't matter where I was, or who he was.

I was a surgeon.

And someone was going to live—or die—because of what I did in the next few minutes.

And although my legs trembled inside… my hands remained steady.

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