Nathan’s eyelids drooped heavily, his head nodding repeatedly as crippling exhaustion washed over him. He’d just pulled a backbreaking, nonstop shift in the emergency room, and the last place on the entire campus he wanted to be stuck in was the cold, lifeless morgue. But as the newest and youngest nurse on staff at Saint Luther’s Hospital, he was always the first one roped into covering unwanted duty—even when it meant confronting his deepest, most dreaded fear.
Saint Luther’s Hospital was notorious far and wide for being chronically understaffed and overburdened. All nearby local clinics had shut down permanently, sending a relentless flood of patients pouring through its doors, doubling the usual daily caseload overnight. The entire facility felt like a ticking pressure cooker, stretched thin to its limits, and not a single member of staff could afford even a minute’s break. Nathan’s first month on the internship had been a chaotic, overwhelming blur, but nothing could have prepared him for the horror he was about to face.
Working the morgue detail was never part of Nathan’s plans. Saint Luther’s was the only medical facility within a twenty-mile radius that had accepted his nursing internship application. By just his second week on the job, he’d already been assigned mandatory morgue night shifts. The endless rows of the deceased, the bitter bone-chilling cold, the suffocating silence—any ordinary person would be unsettled by it all. But Nathan had no idea back then that the frigid temperature of the morgue would soon be the least terrifying thing he’d have to face.
