Chapter 119 – Cataleya
Ethan had just gotten back to his room and was thinking about knocking on John's door to check whether he'd returned yet when the room's landline rang.
He picked it up.
The voice on the other end carried the Continental's characteristic register — professional, measured, the specific warmth of an institution that had perfected the presentation of hospitality without allowing it to become informal.
"Dr. Rayne. A guest requires medical services. Are you available to accept a patient?"
"Does she know my rates?" Ethan asked.
"Yes." A brief pause. "She requested the best available treatment."
Ethan didn't deliberate. "Fine. Give me the room."
A waiter was waiting at the corridor junction when Ethan stepped out — the specific kind of waiting that looked like coincidence but wasn't.
Ethan provided the room number. The waiter didn't ask for elaboration, simply made a please follow me gesture and moved through several connected corridors at the unhurried pace the Continental apparently mandated for all staff movement regardless of urgency.
In front of a dark door, the waiter stopped, gave the slight formal nod that served as both arrival announcement and dismissal, and left.
Ethan knocked. Three times, even.
A pause.
The door opened.
The girl who opened it was young — early twenties at the outside, possibly younger. She wore a dark tank top and jeans that had been washed enough times to have developed their own character. No jewelry. Nothing decorative. The absence of ornamentation was so complete it read as a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
Her build was lean in the specific way that came from sustained physical training rather than circumstance — the shoulder line clear, the arms carrying definition that was functional rather than aesthetic. She moved with the controlled economy of someone who had been taught, at some point, exactly how much effort each movement required and had learned not to spend more than that.
Her right arm was splinted. The restriction in her movement was visible in how she held herself — the slight compensation of someone working around a constraint they were trying not to announce.
Her eyes moved when the door opened: Ethan's face first, then a rapid downward check — confirming the absence of visible weapons — then back to his face. All of it in less than two seconds.
"Hi." Ethan kept his tone easy. "I'm Ethan Rayne. You needed a doctor?"
"You're the doctor?" She said it with the skepticism of someone looking at a person who appears significantly younger than their stated profession.
Then something shifted.
"Wait." She looked at him again. "Ethan Rayne? You're Ethan Rayne?"
"Last I checked," he said. "What's the problem?"
She studied him for a moment with the focused attention of someone trying to reconcile what they'd heard about a person with what the person actually looked like standing in front of them.
"You didn't bring anything," she said finally.
"I don't need to."
"First time in Rome?"
"First time in Rome, first time at the Continental Hotel," Ethan confirmed. "How should I address you?"
She looked at him for two more seconds — the lingering assessment of someone making a final check.
"Cataleya," she said.
Ethan nodded and shifted his attention to the splinted arm.
"Diagnostic fee is one gold coin. Treatment is additional, starting at ten. Given that you're standing and talking, ten will cover it."
She'd known the rates already — he could tell from the slight absence of surprise — but the number still produced a brief expression.
"That's expensive."
"You asked for the best."
"What if I'm not satisfied?"
"File a complaint with the Continental Hotel. They take those seriously."
She made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a dismissal. "Fine. Let's see it then."
She stepped back from the door.
The room closed behind him.
The particular quiet of a Continental Hotel room settled around them — the specific silence of a space that had been engineered for discretion so thoroughly that even the city noise outside seemed to have been asked to keep its distance.
"How do you need me positioned?" Cataleya asked.
"Sit." He gestured at the sofa.
He produced a pair of examination gloves from his jacket pocket — the only medical supplies he'd brought to Rome, which was either confidence or irresponsibility depending on your framework — and pulled them on.
He worked through the standard assessment without ceremony. It took under a minute.
Right arm: fracture, currently splinted. Left abdomen: gunshot wound, bullet removed, treatment applied after the fact. The work was functional but not fine — someone had done what was necessary under conditions that probably hadn't allowed for what was careful.
He noted the way she tracked his movements throughout the examination — not hostile, but completely consistent, the habitual vigilance of someone for whom maintaining environmental awareness was deeply automatic.
"There's one more," she said.
She raised her hands and pulled the tank top off over her head in a single, efficient motion — the brisk movement of someone who had long since stopped attaching self-consciousness to functional actions. Her shoulder muscles tensed briefly as the fabric came over the injured arm.
The knife wound on her left chest was new and clean — the specific precision of a cut made by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. A professional mark.
"The incision is clean," he said, completing the visual assessment. "Shallow, but there's significant tension in the tissue. Standard treatment would be debridement, disinfection, sutures or adhesive closure, antibiotics, pain management. Three to four weeks minimum before full function."
She looked at him. "How long your way?"
"A few minutes."
Ethan raised one hand. The Healing Spell came up in his palm — warm, steady, the specific gold of afternoon light.
"You might feel slightly drowsy," he said. "It passes quickly."
He applied it.
The results were visible in real time.
The swelling in her right arm receded in the way that swelling receded over days in normal medicine, except compressed into seconds. The fracture site — he could feel it through the Holy Light — realigned with the specific correctness of bone finding its proper position. The deep ache in her left abdomen, where the gunshot wound was still inflaming the surrounding tissue, simply stopped. The knife wound's tension released, the skin drawing together without drama.
Cataleya went briefly still.
Then she came back hard — the snap-back of someone whose training had identified a momentary lapse and reasserted itself. She was on her feet, turning in a short, fast radius, scanning the room.
Only Ethan.
She looked down at her right arm. Raised it. Rotated the wrist through its full range. Raised it again. Extended it.
Complete. No pain. No restriction.
She stood with that information for a moment.
The expression that replaced her standard composure was something he hadn't seen in the forty-five minutes since she'd opened the door — genuine, unguarded disbelief.
"That's not possible," she said.
"You asked for the best," Ethan said. "This is the best."
She pulled her shirt back on and walked to the mirror, lifting it to check the chest wound. Smooth. No mark. No indication that anything had been there.
She turned sideways, checking the angle. Nothing.
She looked at the abdominal site. The same.
She turned away from the mirror and looked at him with the specific expression of someone recalibrating their understanding of a situation they thought they had assessed correctly.
"What are you?" she asked.
"A doctor," Ethan said. "One who charges appropriately."
She held his gaze for a moment longer.
Then she reached into her pocket and counted out eleven gold coins.
"I'll come to you next time," she said.
He took the coins. "I'm only in Rome for a few more days. For ordinary injuries, there are better options nearby." He paused. "If something's beyond what they can handle—"
He produced the clinic's information.
"Brooklyn. 7th Street. Rayne Clinic. You'll find me there."
"You're based in New York?"
"Yes."
She looked at the address for a moment — the brief, complete memorization of someone who filed information rather than wrote it down.
"I'll remember that," she said.
Ethan removed his gloves, dropped them in the trash, and headed for the door.
The corridor was exactly as he'd left it — quiet, carpeted, the Continental's specific quality of stillness that suggested nothing had ever happened here and nothing ever would.
He looked at the eleven gold coins in his palm.
He thought about the clinic's patient flow in Brooklyn — the Tuesday afternoons, the walk-ins, the people who waited forty minutes on a waiting room chair for a problem that had taken him thirty minutes to address.
He thought about the girl behind the door who had needed three separate injuries addressed simultaneously and had been fully functional within the time it took to drink a cup of coffee.
Why, he thought with genuine curiosity, have so few of these people found the clinic yet?
He closed his hand around the coins and started back toward his room.
After he left, Cataleya stood in front of the mirror for a while longer.
She'd sustained the right arm fracture in a fall during an extraction that had gone wrong. The abdominal gunshot wound had happened approximately six hours before she'd checked in. The knife wound on her chest was from the same incident, delivered by the person she'd subsequently ensured would not be delivering knife wounds to anyone else.
She'd been calculating recovery time in her head since before she'd made the call to the front desk. Three weeks minimum for the arm. Two for the chest wound if she was aggressive about the treatment. The abdominal injury was manageable but would limit her speed for at least another week.
She'd been wrong by approximately twenty-one days.
She checked the arm's range of motion one more time. Extended, rotated, pressed against a resistance point. No restriction. No signal from the bone that anything had ever been wrong.
She stood with this for a moment — the very specific experience of being a person whose operational understanding of physical recovery had just been made obsolete.
She was pulling clean clothes out of her bag when the door knocked.
Julius stood in the corridor.
"I apologize for the interruption. I'm the hotel manager."
His eyes moved through the room in the specific way hotel managers' eyes moved — cataloguing without appearing to catalogue.
They settled on Cataleya's right arm.
No splint. No support. Her posture was symmetrical, uncompensated. She'd been moving the arm while she talked.
Julius paused — barely. Less than a second. But it was there.
"I wanted to confirm that you were satisfied with the medical service."
"Very satisfied." She raised the arm and moved it in a slow circle for his benefit. "The recovery was significantly faster than I expected. Considerably faster."
Julius looked at the trash can near the sofa. A pair of examination gloves, discarded. Nothing else.
"The doctor has already gone?"
"Yes."
He nodded. "The Continental Hotel remains available for any needs during your stay."
He left.
In the corridor, Julius maintained his pace.
His face, in the privacy of the turn at the corridor's end, did something brief and specific. Not alarm. The specific expression of a man who has just been handed the piece of information that completes a picture he'd been looking at with a significant section missing.
He thought about the notification from three hours ago. The Reverse Bounty. The two-tier structure. The specific, extraordinary amount that had gone out on Global Bulletin.
He thought about a pair of discarded gloves in a trash can and a woman whose fractured arm was functioning perfectly after forty minutes with a doctor who had apparently brought no equipment.
He understood, now, at least the outline of what the contract was protecting.
He continued down the corridor toward his office.
He had some calls to make.
[500 Power Stones → +1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 Reviews → +1 Bonus Chapter]
Enjoyed the chapter? A review helps a lot.
P1treon: Soulforger (20+advance chapters)