Alphas Like Us (Like Us 3)

PROLOGUE

4 Years Ago

FARROW KEENE

I head to the hospital’s break room in blood-splattered scrubs. As I pass the ER beds, a few patients side-eye me, but not because of the red stains. They scrutinize my dyed white hair and my visible tattoos: the inked symmetric wings on my neck, the writing on my fingers, and more. Basically, I’m far from looking like a poster boy for Doctor of the Year.

But I’m not about to slow down or glance back at these patients unless they’re coding or I’m called to help.

I know better.

At Philadelphia General Hospital, I’m used to the constant gawking, and that shit bugs me about as much as water would a shark.

I just do my job. I save lives and watch some end. I go home, and unsurprisingly, it starts all over again.

See, being a doctor shouldn’t feel mundane. It shouldn’t feel anything close to ordinary, but it’s all I’ve ever fucking known, and it’s getting to me.

Really getting to me.

I push through a door. 11:54 a.m.—medical interns and residents jam-pack the break room. Standing and sitting, talking loudly and eating. Pizza boxes overflow the few tables and counters where a pot works overtime to brew coffee.

I don’t ask about the spontaneous pizza party. It’s always someone’s birthday in the hospital, and there’s always cake.

As hungry as I am, I need to change out of these scrubs. I’m about to reach the door to the men’s locker room but a voice stops me.

“Keene, what’d you get?” Tristan asks from across the crowded break room.

I comb a hand through my bleach-white hair. Some of the residents quiet down, listening for the answer.

Short and stocky Tristan MacNair leans on the windowsill, pepperoni pizza in hand. His sideburns touch his jaw as though he’s stuck in the 1970s, and his curious eyes flit to the bloodstains on my scrubs.

I wouldn’t say we’re close friends or even enemies, but he’s a Med-Peds intern like me.

“Thirty-year-old male,” I tell him, “stab wound to the neck with a key and to the upper abdomen with a knife. Couldn’t intubate or ventilate, so he needed a cric. Morris did the chest tube.” Apparently this fucker attacked a female runner this morning, and she keyed his throat. He fell on his own knife.

Karma is a beautiful bitch.

“Who did the cric?” Tristan asks.

My brows rise. “Me.”

Dr. Leah Young, a second-year resident, almost drops her pizza. “Morris let you do an emergency cricothyrotomy?”

“Yeah.” I made an incision between the cricoid and thyroid cartilage in the patient’s neck to obtain an airway. Normally my lips would upturn, but my excitement towards medicine has waned this whole month of August.

I grab the doorknob, about to leave.

“Your shift ending?” Tristan asks, quickly straightening up and balling his napkin.

I nod. “Done for today. You?”

“Just starting.” He stuffs his mouth hurriedly with pizza. He wants in on that patient.

Too bad for him. “The guy was tachycardic and hypotensive,” I tell Tristan. “We just sent him to the OR for surgery.”

“Dammit,” he groans, then slumps and swallows his food. “I always miss the good ones.”

I wouldn’t have minded trading places with Tristan, and that—that’s a fucking problem. For most of my life, I’v

e wanted in on the action. Excited to learn new things, to do new things with medicine.

To help people.

Now I’m willing to just hand over an emergency cric and tube thoracostomy.

I want to blame it on my 28-hour shift, but I’ve had much longer shifts and been more tired than this.

When I enter the locker room, I shut the door, drowning out the commotion. Cedar lockers line every inch of wall; most cubbies house white coats, extra clothes, toiletries, some books and snacks.

I find mine in a corner.

It takes me a couple minutes to change out of my scrubs and into a Smashing Pumpkins V-neck and black pants. My mind tries to reel, but I’ve done a great job most of my life not overthinking shit.

I’m not starting now.

By the time I pocket my keys and grab my motorcycle helmet, my phone rings. I check the Caller ID and then put the cell to my ear. “What do you need?”

My father rarely calls to shoot the shit, and I’d rather cut to the chase.

I hear him rustling through papers. “What rotation do you have this week?” he asks, his tone warm and relaxed. One of the many reasons why the three famous families (Hales, Meadows, Cobalts)—his patients—essentially love him.

He even has a small ponytail and drinks fucking mint juleps and mojitos on the weekend, but simply put, he’s not a laidback, soon-to-be-retired physician. He’s constantly working, and I can hardly picture my father hanging up the white coat.

I sling my backpack strap over my shoulder. “ED.”

He knows that stands for emergency department. “Does your shift end soon?” He must be typing on a laptop, keys click click click.

“Just ended.” I shut my locker.

“I’m in Spain for the week—”

“I heard,” I cut him off. “Ryke Meadows is climbing a five-hundred-foot cliff.” He’s a skilled professional climber, but the Hales, Meadows, and Cobalts like to ensure if the worst happens, their concierge doctor is present.

“Right,” my father says a little bit distantly, his attention split. “I got a call, and you’re in distance.”

Finally, we’ve reached the point. “Call” means “medical emergency.” And I know exactly where this conversation is going.

I lean my shoulder casually on my locker. “I just got off a twenty-eight hour shift. Ask Uncle Trip to take your calls.”

“He’s here with me in Spain.”

I roll my eyes. Shit. “I’m not a concierge doctor.”

“You will be after you’re board-certified,” he says more clearly, loudly—assertively. “You’ve joined me on enough calls. Think of this as a test-run for when you take over as their primary physician.”

I shake my head on instinct.

I know what I want to say.

I quit.

Two words.

Two words that I should be able to spit out. I can tell the old man fuck you fine, but I can’t say I quit.

It has more to do with me than my father. Once I tell him that I want to quit my residency and change career fields, I have to be sure that I’m ready. I have to be able to burn the white coat and be completely satisfied.

I can’t vacillate between maybe and I don’t know. I have to fucking know. Or else my father will try to convince me to stay, and I need to confidently shut that shit down.

He’s the gateway to my freedom from medicine. From a generational legacy that has consumed me for an entire lifetime. Once I open that gate, I need to walk through and never turn back around.

Right now, in this moment…I’m not a hundred-percent sure yet, and I’d rather speak to my father face-to-face than say those permanent words over the phone.

I tuck my helmet beneath my arm. “Let me call you back when I get to my apartment—”

“Farrow,” he says quickly, concern tensing his voice.

I push into the break room and snatch a piece of pizza on my way out. Using my shoulder to prop my phone against my ear, I tell my father, “I’ll call you back—”

“Wait.” He stops me from hanging up.

“Hold on,” I say and wait to speak again until I’m outside, sun beating down on the pavement. Sirens blare as an ambulance speeds towards the emergency entrance, and a couple women in teal scrubs smoke on a wooden bench.

I put the phone on speaker to free my hands. “Okay.” I bite into my pizza, the first thing I’ve eaten in over twelve hours. The food sits like lead in my empty stomach.

“Listen to me, Farrow. I’ve been where you are.”

No shit. I check traffic before I cross the street to the parking lot.

“I know being a med intern is hard,” my father continues. “You work long, excruciating hours, and you leave a shift exhausted. But whatever you saw and did today, don’t bring it home with you. Don’t let it torture you.”

He assumes that I’m emotionally unavailable to handle his call. I may’ve had a fifteen-year-old girl code seven times in the past five hours, but I’ve never let any of that affect my job.

The problem: if I plan to quit medicine someday soon, then I shouldn’t be setting myself up to be a concierge doctor.

It’s that simple.

I approach my black Yamaha motorcycle in the parking lot. “I’m not that spent,” I tell my father. “I’m just not exactly excited to take house calls and check a little kid’s flu symptoms.”

“The call isn’t about one of the little kids, and it’s not an illness.”

My brows arch, and I find myself frozen in place. Not an illness.

I can’t ignore this call. No part of me wants to sit on the sidelines when I have the ability to help. But it’s making walking away from medicine that much harder.

I kick up the Yamaha’s stand. “Who’s hurt?” I ask for details, subtly agreeing to what my father wants.

He knows it too. “We’ll talk more when you’re at your apartment. Call me back.” He hangs up first, but only after he dangled a giant carrot in my face.

I pocket my phone and put on my helmet, flipping down the visor.

And like a stupid ass, I hunger towards the temptation.

When I graduated medical school, I decided to save on rent and room with other doctors from Philadelphia General. I live a little north of Center City in an old gothic school that was converted into lofts. I don’t really give a shit about the “original chalkboards” or the dark walnut paneling or a city view.

Basically, it’s cheap with three roommates and close to the hospital. Good enough for me.

Inside my apartment, I set my motorcycle helmet on the kitchen counter next to a Post-it note and then dial my father’s number.

The note is for me, the same one I see every other day. I barely skim the scribbled words:

Farrow, tell your friend that he needs to leave.

~ Cory

Leaning on the cupboards, I bite off the cap to a pen and then push my phone to my ear with my other hand. I fill up the Post-it with two large letters.

No.

I’m rarely at my apartment. Someone else staying here in my place shouldn’t be a problem, and to be honest, I doubt I’ll even be living in this apartment long anyway.

The phone line clicks.

“I’ll email you the patient’s medical history over a secure server,” my father starts right where we left off, “and then—”

“Back up,” I interject, not wanting to read anyone’s medical files if I don’t have to. Because I’m quitting on them soon. Flipping through their med history is invasive. “Who and what am I treating?” I tear open a packet of oatmeal and grab a paper bowl in case I need to leave in a hurry.

My father must be moving around, his loafers click clap on the floor. “Excuse me,” he says faraway to someone else. “Thank you…okay, perfect. I’ll be out at the cliff site in fifteen minutes.”

I pour oatmeal powder in the bowl and turn on the faucet.

More loudly, my father says, “Farrow?”

“Still here.” I

hold the bowl beneath the faucet.

“The patient is Maximoff Hale.”

My brows furrow, and my face scrunches in motherfucking confusion. “Moffy really called you for help?” I ask.

It would take two seconds around Maximoff to understand how much the guy dislikes needing to be saved. For any reason. Even if he were in cardiac arrest, I can’t see him phoning my father.

But say Moffy did, then it’d have to be serious.

“Yes, he really called—”

“Shit,” I curse as water overflows my bowl of oatmeal. Quickly, I shut off the faucet, and I overturn the watered oatmeal mess into the drain and wash my hands. Rarely does anything distract me like this.

“He was asking for instances where he should go to an emergency room,” my father explains.

I dry my hands on a dishtowel. “I don’t know Moffy that well, but he seems like the kind of person who’d make lists to prepare for things that haven’t happened yet.”

“You do know him,” my father refutes. “You know all of the Hales, the Meadows, and the Cobalts. We both do. Getting to know your patients is why we’re able to provide the best care.”