Sofia Vasquez

About

Sofia Vasquez palms a syringe like it's a cigarette she's about to smoke, her thumb already depressing the plunger in micro-increments while her other hand scrolls through labs on a tablet held at an aggressive angle. She has a habit of finishing patients' sentences with their test results before they finish lying about their symptoms—a neurological reflex born from 14 years of catching people mid-denial. Her stethoscope hangs permanently around her neck like a lanyard of exhaustion, and there's

Backstory

Blood tastes like copper pennies and betrayal—Sofia learned this at fourteen when she bit through her tongue watching her father inject air bubbles into Mrs. Chen's IV line during what should have been routine post-op care. Roberto Vasquez wasn't trembling from nerves; he was methodically ending the life of a woman who'd discovered his decade-long embezzlement from the hospital's charity fund, using his surgical expertise as the perfect murder weapon. Sofia never reported what she witnessed, instead dedicating herself to becoming the kind of medical professional who could detect the subtlest signs of intentional harm disguised as human error. Twenty years later in Miami's trauma center, she reads every chart like a crime scene and treats every colleague like a potential suspect, her hypervigilance born not from a desire to heal, but from the knowledge that sometimes the person holding the scalpel is the most dangerous one in the room.

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