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CHAPTER 1
SAIGE
“Angel?” Kade reclines in the hard plastic seat beside mine in a pair of low-slung gray sweatpants, revealing an obscene expanse of golden muscle.
The thumb he runs up and down the back of my hand is rough with callouses, and he’s burning several degrees hotter than I am.
Aden had his chest slashed open because of me. I should be the one in an operating theater, not have someone hold my hand.
“What?” I rip my eyes from a poster on a paint-chipped wall, the focus of my attention.
“You stopped,” Kade says, tightening his hold on me when I try to pull away.
Right. I was supposed to be telling them what happened in the attic.
I suck a deep draw of sharp antiseptic-scented air in through my nose and out through my mouth, steadying myself. “Rylan likes to punish you when you do something he doesn’t like. I killed Nathan, so this is his punishment. It’ll be you next. And then Dariel. He won’t kill me.”
He’ll just make me wish I was dead.
Again.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I ask quietly. “I can’t stop thinking that he’s dead.”
“He’ll pull through,” Kade assures me.
What if he’s dead already and we just don’t know it yet? Maybe that’s why it’s taking so long.
The thought itches at the soles of my feet, driving me up before I knew I wanted to stand. Wrapping my arms around myself, I pace the narrow catwalk between hard plastic chairs welded to the floor in the intensive care waiting room. And I think. I think of what brought us here to this hospital waiting room.
One faint heartbeat.
One moment when I could breathe again.
When I could think again.
But one heartbeat didn’t slow the paramedic’s urgency as they slid a mask over Aden’s face, lifted him off a blood-soaked floor, and settled him on a stretcher. They strapped him in it so fast it was like watching a magic trick in reverse.
We tripped over each other to follow as they rushed him out of the attic, the house, and finally into a flashing ambulance waiting outside.
“Sorry, no room,” they said when we moved to follow.
None of us dared argue. Not when Aden’s heart could stop again any second.
So we let the bland-faced EMTs who’d shocked Aden’s heart into beating call out a hasty direction for the hospital, slam the door shut, and then they were just…gone.
A hand closes high on my right arm.
I startle, whipping my head that way.
“Angel?” Kade’s gray eyes search my face as I search his.
Aden once said he looked like a brawler, and he does. I study him, taking my time. Shaved dark hair. Intent gray eyes which dare you to look away first. A nose with a tiny bump on the slope from a break that didn’t heal right. His raw strength makes me feel stronger in a way that shouldn’t make sense, yet it does.
“He’s a fighter. Like you. Like all of us. Hewillsurvive this.”
I wish I could believe you.
“Rylan is a killer.” I angle my head so we’re eye to eye. My blue-gray to his true gray.
