A Smile That Is Not Mine: Ayuna, Diary Entry 4 | The Bloody Tulip

Subject: Dr. Ayuna Hartman

Document: Type: Personal Diary Extract

Original Date: Day 2653 of Restraint

Location Found: Private Study, Hidden Drawer

Security Level: RESTRICTED

Authentication: VERIFIED

The Insider’s Briefing: Critical deterioration documented. Subject displays territorial aggression masked as professional courtesy during patient discharge. Surveillance captured extended observation of patient and companion—subject remained in corridor 4.7 minutes post-departure, behavioral anomaly for efficiency-driven surgeon. Possessive language escalates: “what I save, I own.” The restraint framework is collapsing. Jealousy no longer theoretical but operational. Administration remains unaware that their “miracle surgeon” views patients as acquisitions. Recommendation: Escalate monitoring. The fracture approaches completion.

Her private thoughts…

The smile I gave Gabriel today was a theft, not a gift.

It carried warmth, but inside it trembled with hunger. I watched him laugh with Olivia—that ridiculous “Jinx” moment, so innocent, so effortless—and felt something uncoil inside me. A serpent waking. His laugh sounded like glass chimes shattering in my chest.

When she rolled her eyes at me, I should have ignored it.

She is beneath my refinement, a childish woman who mocks because she does not know how else to exist. Yet jealousy is a living thing. It gnaws. It spreads. It whispers that she should not be here, that she does not deserve the space she occupies in his sight.

His laugh with her was not the laugh he gives me.

With her, he is light, unguarded, transported into some shared memory that has nothing to do with me. With me, he trembles. His gratitude weighted, his eyes lingering too long before they dart away. That tremor belongs to me.

I held his life in my hands once. Balanced between two beats, between two breaths. My gloves slick with the crimson evidence of his mortality. She only held his hand.

Which of us is closer to him?

Which of us knows him more truly?

She cannot see the fragility of his heart the way I have. She cannot know the silence that came before life returned. She walked beside him into the evening air while I stood in the sterile corridor, watching them leave. The outsider. Again.

Gabriel is mine—not as a lover yet, not even as a possession, but as a soul I have touched in ways she never could. I can still smell the faint trace of antiseptic clinging to him in memory. I can still see his blood staining my gloves. He is alive because of me.

Yet still, she gets the sunlight. She gets the easy laughter. She gets to walk out beside him while I remain behind these hospital walls where I have kept him breathing.

The smile I wore today hid a darker vow: I will not let her eclipse me.

The hunger that grows inside me is no longer simply for art, or beauty, or even the act of healing. It is for him. Specific. Singular. Consuming.

She dares to laugh in my shadow, as if her presence means more than my precision, as if her childish affection could ever compare to the surgery that reconstructed his heart. She held his hand. I held his life.

What I save, I own.

And I saved him completely.

…

📖 Referenced Stories:

Tangled Secrets: The Bloody Tulip – Part 3

🎭 Related Dark Verses:

The Smile I Borrowed

Sterile Hunger

👉 Investigation Timeline:

Return to The Insider’s Files

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