“No,” James repeated, his voice equally firm. This wasn't something that he was going to budge on, and he didn't care that Jack Cassidy was going to have some kind of vendetta against him for it. Moving up a surgery for no reason other than money was unethical and Elizabeth Charles' parents were already on their way to say goodbye. He and Gabriel and everyone else who worked at the hospital were simply doctors, men and women who had no right to play god and James would stand by that practice. If Gabriel wanted him off of the surgery for his refusal to do the dirty work, so be it. There were many other hungry residents in the program who would have taken his place in a heartbeat—no pun intended.

He grasped Hannah's chart in his hand, prepared to hand it over to Gabriel when he asked, but the man seemed to relent and perhaps this wasn't a lost cause after all. He listened to the other man and whatever hope he had for the situation being turned around was quickly fading away. The blonde doctor knew exactly what men like Jack Cassidy were capable of; he'd grown up around it and his father was one of those men himself. The smug look on Gabriel's face made James want to come clean with his lie, one up the other doctor and tell about where he [i]actually[/i] came from. D.C. was a disgusting place, wrought with white collar crime and gilded streets that hid the filth below. It made New York look small time, like it was nothing.

The talk of suicide caught James' attention, and perhaps if he had been aware of the conspiracy beforehand, he would have reconsidered his refusal. The suicides had happened years before James had ever been to New York, and it had been a local thing, not an issue that would have made it to the national news. He had been hard at work and studying in Chicago at the time, and he hadn't even had a spare moment to pick up a newspaper, let alone get involved in any kind of discussion about suicide. James didn't like the tone that Gabriel was taking with him, and even if he would have understood the gravity of the situation, he still wouldn't have liked it. 

Eyebrows furrowed, James tilted his head. “Are you threatening me?” he asked, making sure to keep his voice down, although he was sure that Hannah was out cold. “What are you going to do? Tell that old fuck that I'm not going to change the surgery around and then toss me out the window?” He gestured over to the large window that overlooked the city, quite the drop. “I'm still not doing it,” he decided. “I'd rather quit right now than hurt people like that for nothing.”