Chapter 2 - The Trauma Bay
The blue and red strobes of the ambulance painted the limestone columns of the country club in cold, frantic hues. I refused the stretcher, walking on my own two feet to the open bay doors, my silk bridesmaid dress stained with blooming dark patches.
"Vitals are steady, but she’s tachycardic. Scalp laceration, bleeding isn't clotting normally," the paramedic barked into his radio as we sped through the rain toward St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital.
My head pounded with a dull, throbbing ache that felt entirely unnatural. A cut from cheap costume jewelry should have stung like a papercut; this felt like an electric wire had been soldered directly to my skull, radiating down the back of my neck into my shoulder blades. My tongue felt dry, coated in a strange, metallic taste.
When the ambulance pulled into the trauma bay, I was transferred onto a gurney and wheeled under the blinding neon lights of Bay 4.
"Name is Sloan Montgomery, thirty-two," the nurse called out. "Blunt force trauma to the vertex of the skull, accompanied by a puncture wound."
A senior trauma physician, Dr. Aaron Vance—a man in his late fifties with sharp, analytical eyes and grey hair—stepped to my bedside. He gently parted my hair, which was matted with dried blood.
"All right, Sloan. I’m going to clean this up and take a look. Tell me what happened."
"My sister forced an altered tiara onto my head," I said, my teeth chattering uncontrollably as the adrenaline crash set in. "She claimed it was a joke. But there was something under the frame."
Dr. Vance frowned, shining a penlight directly onto the wound. He paused. His posture stiffened immediately. He reached for a pair of sterilized forceps and leaned down, his brow furrowing beneath his surgical cap.
"Nurse, get me the sterile tray and prep for a local anesthetic. Cancel the routine suture kit. I need the minor surgical pack and a lead tray."
"What is it?" I asked, gripping the edges of the hospital bed. "Is it glass?"
"It's not glass," Dr. Vance said, his tone shifting from clinical bedside manner to something distinctly guarded. "There is a foreign object deeply embedded in the periosteum—the connective tissue covering your skull bone. It didn't just scratch you. It pierced straight down. And it has a mechanical structure."
My breath caught in my throat. "A mechanical structure?"
"I’m ordering an immediate high-resolution CT scan before I touch it," Dr. Vance commanded. "If this object has barbs or an active reservoir, pulling it out blindly could shear the tissue or release whatever is inside it."
For the next forty-five minutes, my world was reduced to the cold clunking of the CT scanner. Inside the machine, lying motionless with my head strapped into the cradle, the silence was deafening. My phone, sitting inside my personal belongings bag on the counter, buzzed incessantly.
*Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.*
It was Laurelai. Then Hayes. Then a barrage of text messages from Delaney:
*Sloan, you psychotic bitch, you ruined my cake cutting.*
*Mom had to explain to Hayes’s parents that you had an episode.*
*Delete whatever you told the venue manager or we will sue you for breach of contract on the documentary waiver.*
I closed my eyes, tears finally slipping down my temples, mixing with the antiseptic solution on my cheeks. *An episode.* That was the narrative they were weaving. They were painting me as the emotionally volatile, jealous older sister who had a breakdown at the altar.
When they wheeled me back into the trauma room, Dr. Vance walked in holding a digital tablet displaying the three-dimensional cross-section of my skull.
"Look here," he said, turning the screen toward me.
At the apex of my parietal bone, clearly visible in high-density white against the grey matter of the scan, was a narrow, cylindrical metal shank. It was barely two centimeters long, roughly the gauge of a heavy veterinary needle. But the most alarming feature was the base: it had two micro-latches designed to expand upon impact, anchoring the tip into flesh.
"This is not a piece of a bridal headpiece," Dr. Vance stated grimly. "This is an engineered puncture spike. It’s surgical-grade steel, threaded at the base. It looks like it was custom-machined and disguised within the central comb of the tiara. The impact sheared it off its base plate, leaving the hollow needle buried in your scalp."
"Hollow?" I whispered, my heart slamming against my ribs. "Doctor... what was inside it?"
"We don't know yet," he replied, signaling to the surgical nurse. "We're going to numb you, make a two-centimeter incision to free the anchors, and extract it under fluoroscopic guidance. We are placing the object directly into an evidence container. And Sloan? I’ve already notified hospital security to call the precinct. Whoever put this on your head didn't just play a prank. They assaulted you with an engineered weapon."
The local lidocaine burned like fire as it entered my scalp, but the physical pain paled in comparison to the horror creeping through my mind.
Delaney was shallow, narcissistic, and spoiled. But she was not an engineer. She didn't possess the intellect or the technical resources to design an anchor-tipped surgical delivery spike.
Hayes Sterling, however, was the chief executive of a private biomedical venture capital firm.
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As Dr. Vance took up the scalpel, my hands curled into fists. They hadn't just tried to humiliate me for a reality television sizzle reel. They had planted something inside me.
***
