Page 58 of Blood & Ash

They’d had this fight already, ten minutes earlier, in this same room, with the same words in a different order. Del set out needles instead of arguing the science twice.

Marcus put both hands flat on the bench. The wood was cool under his palms. The grain was rough. He had scarred this bench himself, over decades of elbows, instruments and nights when the work was the only thing that kept him upright.

“I won’t watch you bleed out on my table,” he said. “Not for a mistake you didn’t make alone.”

Del went quiet. She looked at his hands on the bench, the knuckles white, then at his face, where the lines around his mouth had deepened. Her expression cracked.

The armor in her voice gave way to something quieter and more precise, the tone she used when she talked about components and the measures that mattered.

“I supplied the base,” she said. “For two years. Every Thursday. Oak gall at one-twenty grams. Iron filings at eighty. Birch bark at two hundred. Valerian root at two-ten.” The numbers came out flat. She recited them like inventory. “I knew what Arrow was. I voted against the deal. Rosalind’s hand went up first. Seven followed. My no sat on the table.”

Marcus didn’t move. His hands stayed flat on the bench.

“I kept filling his orders,” Del said. “I told myself the vote was enough. I told myself I’d done my part by objecting. I knew the ratios were wrong. I kept grinding.”

Her voice didn’t waver. She wasn’t asking for absolution. She was reading from a ledger only she could see. “This is the one thing I can actually do about it. I’m not asking your permission.”

The silence between them ran long. The reagent in the nearest vial made a faint settling sound, a soft click as the suspension shifted against glass. The lamplight caught the white particles and held them suspended in amber.

Marcus looked at her.

He really looked, more directly than he had let himself before. Her brown eyes were steady. Her dark curls had come loose from whatever she’d tied them back with hours ago. The cut on her palm had stopped beading. The line was thin and red against her skin. She held his gaze without flinching, without offering anything more than what she had already said.

Neither of them named what was in the room with them. It sat between the bench, the steel tray, and the cooling vials, with weight and edges. It was the thing Marcus had been carrying since the night she walked into his clinic with a folded scrap of paper and numbers written in her own hand. It was the thing Del had been carrying longer.

Marcus straightened up and exhaled once, a long breath that came from somewhere deep in his chest. His hands came off the bench.

“What time,” he said.

Del picked up the nearest needle from the tray. She turned it between her fingers. The packaging crinkled. She set it back down in its row. The gesture was final.

“Now,” she said. “Before sunrise. Here.”

That was the end of the argument.

They stayed in the clinic. Marcus cleaned the centrifuge. Del measured a fresh batch of sodium thiosulfate, seven grams on the brass scale, and folded the powder into a paper packet. She labeled it in her tight handwriting and set it beside the others. Marcus racked the failed slides. He didn’t throw them away. He kept them in order, sixteen through twenty-three, each one crossed out, evidence of what hadn’t worked and what they had tried.

They didn’t touch. Marcus moved around the bench and Del stepped left to give him room. Their shoulders didn’t brush and their hands didn’t reach, and neither of them tried to close the space between them.

They talked about the batch size. Twelve doses, the blood draw protocol, the monitoring equipment Marcus would set up, the heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation thresholds below which they would stop. Del nodded at each point. She didn’t argue the thresholds. She understood the math.

Outside, the night held. The window above the reagent shelf was black, empty of stars, empty of moon, just the deep dark that came before the earliest hint of dawn.

Marcus finished cleaning the centrifuge. He dried his hands on a cloth and hung the cloth on the hook by the sink. Del capped the last vial and set it in the wire rack. Her movements were measured and deliberate, the same rhythm she used moving through her shop on a Tuesday morning: checking stock, updating ledgers, doing the work that needed doing.

What had been said couldn’t be unsaid. Marcus had told her he wouldn’t watch her bleed out. Del had told him she had supplied the poison. Those words sat in the room between the bench and the shelves and the single lamp burning low. They were true in a way that smaller truths weren’t.

Neither of them was sorry for it.

Del didn’t reach for her jacket. Her satchel stayed where she’d set it, on the chair by the door. If they were doing this before sunrise, there was no version of tonight that ended with her walking home.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

He nodded. Once.

She crossed back to the worktable instead, the vials of prepared sodium thiosulfate lined up in their wire rack under the lamp. Marcus stood at the bench with his hands loose at his sides and watched her settle in across from him.

The decision was made, and nothing remained to do but wait for it to arrive.