The cold-room alarm chirped again—3:12 a.m.—sharp and insistent. I set my coffee down, grabbed the clipboard on instinct, and tucked the heavy stapler into my palm like a weapon. I braced against the deep-freeze air and shouldered open the door.
A man crouched in front of the O-negative rack, one precise hand sliding a bag of blood into place. Vintage wool coat, wire spectacles, a fog of frost on the lenses. For a split, drowsy second I thought he was just another sleep-deprived med resident. Then he looked up. His hair was dark and neat, mouth oddly soft around the line of one visible fang, denting his lower lip. I blinked. Not possible.
"Ah," he said, voice low and smooth, as if we’d met in a library. "This looks bad."
Bags clinked faintly as he returned a second blood unit—O-neg, of course. My section. My missing bags. "You’re putting them back?"
"Returning them. With interest." He gave a rueful smile and, with strange care, slid a folded hundred-dollar bill beside the pile. "Please don’t scream. My name is Silas, and I’m being framed."
I flexed my grip on the stapler. This was a hallucination. A prank. Anything but what he was. But the chill radiated from him as much as the freezer—cheekbone pale, eyes dark and sharp behind the spectacles. Not a hallucination.
Behind us, the CCTV screen flickered, blue and staticky in the cold. I glanced back in reflex. On the loading dock camera, a figure in loose surgical scrubs—face turned away—hurried across the snow-dusted concrete, a white-and-red cooler clutched to their chest. Not Silas. Someone else, stealing in plain sight.
"That’s them," Silas said, quietly urgent. "The real thief. If the council thinks it’s me, I’m dead by sunrise. If you’re caught, you’ll be blamed for helping."
The camera showed the figure fumbling with the lock, glancing over their shoulder. I could run for the exit, call Theo for backup, or stand here and let it all slide past. The cold seemed to close around my spine, too sharp to be just from the freezer.
Silas’s eyes fixed on me, unblinking. "Please. Help me."
I stood there, clipboard shaking slightly, heart thudding in my throat. The security feed showed the thief vanishing into the snowy alley, and Silas—real, impossible, desperate—waited for my next move.