Chapter 368:
She met his gaze without speaking. The look in her eyes said enough. With everything ready, she made the first incision. Her hand stayed steady, each movement clean and practiced.
As the chest opened and the damaged heart came into view, alarms started blaring.
“BP’s crashing — 40 over 20!”
“02’s dropping — below sixty!”
“He’s fading fast! We’re losing him!”
Rylie didn’t flinch. Her hands moved with the sharp, exact rhythm of someone trained to work amidst chaos.
Rylie reached for the custom medical cooler and opened it. Inside rested a live heart, vivid in color and preserved for this moment.
It had been secured for Lochlan years ago — donated by someone with the same rare blood type who had been declared brain dead after a car crash. The organ had been flawless then, a rare find. But due to the lack of surgical readiness at the time, it had been cryogenically stored. Now, frost clung to its surface, and its vitality had deteriorated. The risk was high.
“The viability is poor,” the chief surgeon admitted, his voice tight. “Success isn’t likely. Are we really going through with this?”
Rylie didn’t hesitate. “With Snow Mint stabilizing his system, the heart only needs to be attached. It’ll take.” Without waiting for approval, she went straight to work.
The transplant advanced at breakneck speed. Her movements didn’t falter once. When she completed the final suture on the vessel, silence filled the room — then the machine flatlined. Rylie checked the clock, then the heart.
A faint twitch. A weak ripple. Slowly, the color deepened, and an erratic heartbeat registered on the screen. Then, all at once, the heart pumped hard. The waveform sharpened, then settled into a steady rhythm.
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“Oh my God,” whispered a nurse, her hand over her mouth. “We did it. He’s stable. The surgery can continue!”
With that critical step behind them, the procedure flowed more smoothly. But what came easy for Rylie pushed the rest of the team beyond their limits. Every few steps, someone gasped at her methods.
“So this technique actually works?”
“Why didn’t we learn it this way before?”
What had been expected to wrap up by noon stretched on for ten full hours. From morning until evening, the team powered through. By the end, their legs shook beneath them. When Rylie completed the final abdominal stitch, a wave of quiet swept across the room.
“It’s done,” she said. The air loosened. Every breath released felt earned.
One anesthetist glanced at the clock. “He’ll wake up in about thirty minutes.”
Rylie nodded. She checked Lochlan’s oxygen flow and placed a pill beneath his tongue. Then, she gently draped a white blanket over him and tapped a monitor. A loud alarm rang out.
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