Chapter 3: The Rival's Scalpel

Chapter 3: The Rival's Scalpel

The hospital was Layla’s kingdom. Within its sterile, antiseptic walls, the name Al-Fahim held a different kind of power—one she had earned not through birthright, but with a decade of relentless work, steady hands, and a mind that saw the intricate pathways of the human heart as clearly as a map. Here, she was not a daughter to be controlled, but a doctor to be obeyed. This was the fortress she had built, brick by painstaking brick, in fulfillment of a sixteen-year-old’s vow.

She stood before the illuminated screen of the cardiac imaging unit, her father’s heart beating in grainy monochrome pixels before her. The chaos of the waiting lounge had faded, replaced by the familiar, focused calm of diagnosis. Her vibrant abaya was hidden beneath her pristine white coat, her armor. She was analyzing the telemetry strips when the door to the consultation room swished open without a preceding knock.

“Dr. Al-Fahim.”

The voice was smooth, confident, and laced with an infuriating edge of amusement. Layla didn’t need to turn to know who it was. Dr. Zayd Al-Jamil. His very presence was an invasion. The Al-Jamils were their family’s oldest and most bitter business rivals, a feud stretching back generations. That Zayd was also the star surgeon at the competing Royal Metropolitan Hospital made him her natural professional adversary.

“My father insisted on a second opinion,” Omar explained, hovering nervously by the door. “From the Al-Jamils. I tried to argue, Layla, but he…”

“It’s fine, Omar,” Layla said, her voice cool as she finally turned.

Zayd was leaning against the doorframe, the picture of casual arrogance in his perfectly fitted blue scrubs. He was handsome in a sharp, predatory way, with eyes that seemed to dissect everything they saw. He was already looking at her not as a colleague, but as a specimen.

“Quite a performance out there in the lounge, Doctor,” Zayd began, his lips quirking into a smirk. “I must say, I’m impressed. Your composure is remarkable. Or is it simply years of practice at being publicly admonished?”

The barb was meant to sting, to reduce her to the humiliated daughter he had just witnessed. He expected a flush of anger, a defensive retort. He saw her as a pampered princess, her medical degree a vanity project, her composure a sign of weakness, of being thoroughly broken by her domineering father.

Layla offered him neither. She met his gaze, her expression unreadable, her posture radiating an authority he hadn't anticipated.

“Dr. Al-Jamil,” she said, her tone clipped and clinical. “If my father required a specialist in family dynamics, I would have called a therapist. He requested a cardiothoracic surgeon. I assume you have a relevant medical opinion to offer, or are you just here to observe?”

Zayd’s smirk faltered for a fraction of a second. He pushed off the doorframe and strode toward the display, his confidence resetting itself. He was on her turf now, and she had just reminded him of it.

“The arrhythmia is unstable,” he declared, tapping a finger on the screen, his touch proprietary. “The ventricular tachycardia is a clear warning sign. We need to be aggressive. I’d recommend an immediate electrophysiology study, followed by a catheter ablation. If we find significant coronary artery disease, we bypass. Anything less is malpractice.”

It was the classic gunslinger’s approach: bold, invasive, and designed to assert dominance.

Layla didn’t flinch. “An aggressive procedure without a definitive trigger is reckless,” she countered, her voice low and steady. “His troponin levels are stable, indicating no significant heart muscle damage yet. The telemetry is erratic, yes, but it could be drug-induced, electrolyte imbalance, or even a symptom of an underlying condition we haven’t found. To cut him open based on this alone is to treat the smoke while the fire rages unseen.”

They were no longer just two doctors debating a case. They were two masters of their craft, dueling with scalpels made of words. He saw a problem to be attacked; she saw a puzzle to be solved.

“So you’d rather wait? Let him risk another episode, one that might be fatal?” Zayd challenged, his eyes flashing. “Or are you afraid to operate on your own father?”

“I am a surgeon, Dr. Al-Jamil. Fear doesn’t enter into my calculations. Prudence does,” she shot back. “And my calculations tell me that we are missing a piece of the puzzle.”

For an hour they went back and forth, pulling up lab results, comparing scans, dissecting every beat of Khalid’s ailing heart. Omar watched them, pale and useless, as if witnessing a foreign language spoken with deadly fluency. With every sharp, evidence-backed rebuttal Layla delivered, Zayd’s initial prejudice began to erode. He had come here expecting to dismantle the arguments of a spoiled heiress. Instead, he found himself facing a formidable intellect, a will as strong and sharp as his own. The spoiled princess was a queen defending her territory, and he found himself grudgingly, infuriatingly, impressed.

Driven by a desire to find the flaw in her logic, to prove his aggressive stance was the right one, Zayd turned his focus from the scans to the minutiae of the patient logs. His eyes narrowed, scanning line after line of digital text with an obsessive focus.

“You preach caution,” he mused, more to himself than to her, “and tell me we’re missing a piece. Fine. Let’s look at the pieces you already have.” His finger traced a line on the tablet displaying the medication and vitals log. He stopped. He went back, his brow furrowing.

“Wait a minute,” he said, the argumentative tone in his voice replaced by something else: genuine confusion. He turned the tablet toward her. “Look here.”

Layla leaned in, her eyes following his finger.

“At 14:00 hours, his blood pressure was 100 over 65. Low, but stable,” Zayd explained, his voice losing its arrogant swagger. “But here, at 14:15, the attending nurse administered an increased dosage of his beta-blocker. That’s insane. You don’t increase a medication that lowers blood pressure when the patient’s pressure is already soft. It would guarantee hypotension. It would exacerbate any underlying arrhythmia.” He looked from the tablet to her, his sharp eyes searching hers. “Who authorized that order? It’s not just wrong, it’s… incompetent. Dangerously so.”

A cold stillness washed over Layla, silencing the world around her. He was right. It was a detail so small, so fundamentally incorrect, that in the storm of her family crisis and the public confrontation, she had glossed over it. It was a rookie mistake. But the nurse on duty was one of the most experienced in the cardiac wing. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Not unless the order was explicit. Not unless it was deliberate.

The implications crashed down on her. Her father’s sudden, dramatic collapse. The timing. The strange medication order that would create the very symptoms of a cardiac crisis.

Her father’s illness, the event that had dragged her back into this vortex of control and manipulation, might not be an illness at all.

It might be an attack.

Zayd watched her, the last vestiges of his smirk gone, replaced by a keen, calculating intensity. He had come here looking for a professional weakness to exploit. Instead, his rival’s scalpel had sliced through the surface of a simple medical case and exposed the first hint of a venomous secret coiled beneath. The woman he’d dismissed as a victim was standing at the center of a far more dangerous game than he could have imagined.