Chapter 3

“Have you lost your mind?!”

Evelyn’s roar echoed under the dome. She gripped the No. 10 scalpel still stained with my blood, her eyes blazing with the fury of someone deeply offended.

“I am the top neurologist in the United States! I get hundreds of ridiculous calls for help every single day! A lowlife addict who couldn’t even provide a basic medical file and only screamed about pain over the phone like a mad dog—what right does he have to accuse me of murder?!”

She spun around, chest heaving, and bellowed at the stunned dissection assistants beside her, “Turn him over! I want to see for myself whether this so-called ‘victim’ has the ulcerated injection damage of a chronic drug user on his back! I want all of you to see with your own eyes whether he was just social trash mutilating himself to scam pills!”

Two tall male assistants stepped forward trembling and grabbed my shoulders and hips.

Bang.

My ruined body was flipped over roughly. My unsupported head struck the hard steel with a heavy crack, then dropped face-first onto the cold stainless table.

At that exact moment, the entire room inhaled sharply in unison.

The anatomy theater, quiet enough a moment ago to hear breathing, erupted into a wave of uncontrollable gasps. A few young medical students in the front row even clapped their hands over their mouths and gagged.

Even Evelyn staggered back half a step, her heel slipping. The scalpel nearly fell from her hand.

What lay exposed was something from hell itself.

A grotesque mockery of modern medicine.

There was not a single intact patch of flesh left on my withered back. It was covered in bedsores so deep they showed bone. Because I had spent so long lying in urine and filthy basement water, parts of the flesh had fully necrotized and turned black. In some places, my spine was clearly visible beneath rotting tissue.

But what truly horrified the room full of elite doctors was my warped rib cage and my hands.

“This… this is…” Evelyn murmured. For a moment, professional instinct overrode her fury, and her voice trembled despite herself. “Multiple severe infections across the back… three old multi-fragment rib fractures… all ten finger bones… healed in shattered deformity…”

She jerked her head up and stared at Sarah.

“How is this possible? Even untreated bedsores don’t cause trauma like this! It looks like he was fed through a meat grinder!”

I floated near the harsh halo of the surgical light and closed my eyes in despair.

Mom, are you shocked by how ruined this body is?

You still don’t know that every one of these injuries was branded into me because you exiled me to that hell with your own hands.

“You called him a pill seeker, didn’t you?” Dr. Sarah let out a cold laugh and climbed the steps one by one. Her black mourning dress looked like a tear cut through hypocrisy under the blinding lights. Tears fell uncontrollably from her reddened eyes onto my pale spine.

“Dr. Hayes, welcome to the bloodiest version of the Midwestern opioid exploitation system.”

Sarah’s trembling finger pointed at my warped, protruding broken ribs. Her voice sounded like it was crying blood.

“His uncle and aunt—those monsters wearing human skin—took every dollar of disability money this paralyzed boy had. They stole every single powerful painkiller prescribed to him and used them for themselves or sold them on the black market for drug money!”

Evelyn’s pupils contracted violently. Her breathing stopped for a second.

“And once the pills were gone, that bastard uncle would put on steel-plated hard-soled boots and stomp this boy’s ribs broken while he was too weak to even roll over!”

Every word Sarah spoke landed like a slap across the face of Evelyn’s precious medical righteousness.

Floating above them, I felt the agony all over again. The freezing basement air. The crack of my ribs snapping under his boot. The way my ten fingers were crushed one by one when I tried to protect my chest.

“They broke his ribs. They crushed his fingers. All so they could drag him back into the emergency room and scam a new fentanyl prescription!”

“Because of your arrogance. Because you refused to treat him! He endured the worst complications of SCA-7 neural tearing for three full years—the kind of pain that feels like ten thousand red-hot needles stabbing through the brain at once!”

Sarah lunged forward, grabbed the clean collar of Evelyn’s sterile gown, and screamed through tears, “Do you know what yesterday’s toxicology report said?! That boy you called an addict died with not even one microgram of pain medication left in his blood! He was tortured to death by pain!”

The room fell silent.

Only the faint hum of the surgical lights remained, like a final lament for me.

I looked at Evelyn.

All the color had drained from her lips. Beneath her perfect makeup, her face had gone paper-white. Her chest rose and fell violently, and in her eyes burned a new fury—the righteous fury of someone hearing an unforgivable injustice.

“Animals… absolute animals!”

Shaking all over, Evelyn shoved Sarah away and turned to the microphone. In the voice of the nation’s leading specialist, she delivered a sentence of judgment.

“People like that—family members like that—belong in the highest-security federal prison! I will use every social connection I have to make sure they rot there! I will make sure they spend every day repenting in hell!”

Like a righteous savior, she whipped back toward Sarah.

“Tell me! What was this poor child’s name? Who were his guardians? Give me the file!”

Sarah stepped back and looked at the outraged Evelyn before her.

In those grief-red eyes appeared something unbearably cruel.

A kind of pity so cold it was terrifying.

“You want to know who he was?”

Sarah grabbed the paper bag Evelyn had dismissed as “garbage” and hurled it onto the dissection table without mercy.

Rustle—

The bag split open. Its contents slid slowly down the slanted steel surface.

First came an old photograph, its edges worn soft, stained with dark dried blood.

That was my only salvation in all those nights when the pain got so bad I nearly bit my tongue off—clutched to my chest with broken, twisted fingers.

In the photo, a young, beautiful Evelyn was holding a five-year-old boy and smiling with absolute joy.

Then a yellowed Social Security card slid out after it.

Evelyn’s eyes locked onto it as if a snake had sunk its fangs into her.

The ink had faded.

But the capital letters were still unmistakable beneath the blaze of hundreds of operating lights.

SAM HAYES