SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 370: Racing Heart

Chapter 370: Racing Heart

Bruce watched her for a moment without speaking. The tension in her shoulders was subtle, she was too composed to let it be anything more, but he knew her well enough now to read what she didn’t put into posture or expression. The slight inward quality of her focus. The way her fingers rested against the bracelet a half second longer than necessary each time.

He reached over without ceremony and placed his hand gently against her upper back, the touch easy and warm, and guided her toward him until her head rested against his shoulder. She went without resistance, something she would never have done in almost any other setting, and the exhale she released was slow and slightly unsteady at the edges.

“Don’t worry, Sophie,” he said quietly, his voice low enough that it belonged only to the space between them. “I’ll handle everything.”

She didn’t respond immediately. But he could hear her heartbeat, too fast for someone sitting still, too irregular for someone as controlled as she usually was. It wasn’t like her. She carried rooms. She made decisions that moved thousands of lives and did so without visible strain. And yet here, in a quiet corner of a restaurant she had chosen herself, waiting for her father to arrive, her heart was running like she was bracing for something she couldn’t fully prepare for.

Bruce kept his hand where it was. He didn’t say anything else. There was nothing else necessary.

Slowly, gradually, and then with more certainty, he felt the rhythm of her heartbeat change. The pace drawing back from its edge, settling, evening out into something calmer. Her weight against his shoulder grew more natural, less held. The bracelet remained on her wrist, unchecked.

Whatever the restaurant looked like from the outside, in this particular corner of it, time was moving at a different rate.

When the food arrived, the waiter’s step faltered almost imperceptibly at the doorway of the private chamber, just for a moment, taking in the sight of them before she reassembled herself and moved to the table with professional efficiency. She arranged everything with careful hands, said nothing beyond the quiet names of the dishes as she set them down, and left with her cheeks carrying a faint, involuntary warmth that she clearly hoped hadn’t been noticed.

Sophie didn’t lift her head until the waiter was gone. Then she straightened, slowly, though she didn’t move entirely away from him, and turned her attention to the table.

The venison arrived in a deep, dark reduction that caught the amber light of the room and held it, the meat parting along the grain at the lightest pressure of a fork, releasing a slow curl of steam that carried something layered, the deep savoriness of the braise beneath, then the sharp sweet lift of the elderberry, and underneath both of them something almost earthy, as though the animal had been raised somewhere the soil itself carried flavour. The hearthgrain bread was warm at the center, its crust thin and yielding, with that faint smokiness on the palate that didn’t overpower but anchored everything else around it. Sophie’s silverfish rested delicately in its pale broth, the mana bloom tea lending it a quiet floral warmth that was less a flavour and more a sensation, a gentle clarity that moved through the chest the way a deep breath does.

Sophie picked up her fork. Then she set it down again, reached across the table, and took a small portion of the venison instead, cutting it cleanly and lifting it toward Bruce with the casual directness of someone who had decided not to overthink the gesture. He accepted it without comment, and the ease of the exchange, the complete absence of self consciousness in either of them, settled something in the atmosphere of the room that had needed settling.

She ate a portion herself, unhurried, and then set her fork down again.

“I’m like this,” she began, her voice quiet and even, “because when I told my father you wanted to meet him, that you’d suggested the restaurant, he didn’t react the way I expected.”

Bruce looked at her. “What did you expect?”

“Questions.” She reached for the glass of pale drink and held it loosely. “Concern. Some version of the conversation I’d been preparing for.” A small pause. “Instead he just said, alright, he’d be there.”

She offered him the glass, and Bruce took it, drank, and returned it to her hand. She continued, her thumb tracing the rim slowly.

“So I’ve just been wondering what’s going through that mind of his.”

Bruce considered this for a moment. He turned his fork through the reduction on his plate, watching the way it moved. “Your father isn’t the kind of man who reacts to things before he understands them,” he said finally. “If he said he’d be there without asking anything, it means he already knew everything he needed to know before you told him.”

Sophie looked at him.

Bruce met her gaze. “He’s not coming with questions, Sophie. He made up his mind the moment you said my name.”

Something moved through her expression, not quite relief, but adjacent to it. She held it quietly for a moment, then reached across and cut another piece of the venison, offering it to him again without a word. He accepted it again in the same way, naturally, without ceremony, and she smiled at her plate in the small, private way she reserved for moments she wasn’t performing for anyone.

They ate like that for a while. Unhurried. The drinks between them, the bread broken and shared across the table, the silverfish broth cooling slowly in its bowl. The instrumental music from the main room reached them faintly here, formless and unobtrusive. The garden beyond the window held its quiet. The pale blossoms drifted.

Then, between one breath and the next, the atmosphere of the restaurant changed.

It wasn’t loud. There was no sound to mark it. But the pressure arrived ahead of its source like the front edge of a weather system, a density in the air that hadn’t been there a moment before, and every person in the main dining room who carried enough sensitivity to register it went still in the same instant.