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But you are accusing me of hallucinating.
An unspoken response that cuts into her chest like a carving knife. Like ahuntingknife.
She looks up at the ceiling.
The fleeting thought of how she ended up in a private room at the hospital occupies her mind for the briefest of moments. But the answer comes just as quickly. Preston. Probably paid out of his own pocket for her to kept in here. And that’ll be why he wasn’t asked to leave by the nurses.
Is Kate here?
Just like that, an icy jolt of panic spears through her.
“K-K…Kayyy…”
Before she can even manage to try and sit upright, Preston has her by the shoulders again, keeping her down on the pillows. “She’s alive. Kate is alive.”
“Where…” Her question comes out in choppy breaths. “Where… is—”
“Billie, calm down. She’s alive. But she can’t have visitors right now.”
Her legs kick under the blanket, as though trying to fling it from her body, and she grabs at his firm hold on her shoulders.
“Billie, if you don’t calm down, I’ll call the doctor back in.”
His threat freezes her. The doctor might send Preston away or sedate her back into sleep, but she can’t sleep anymore, too much sleep has consumed her already, and she wants to see Kate—needsto see her.
“Kate is in ICU,” he explains. “She’s hurt. But she’s alive and they’re doing what they can—”
It’s all he can say before she’s snatching the wires on her chest and rips them clean off. “See her… See… her…” she mutters over and over, and her vitals monitor starts to beep frantically against the wall.
Preston stands, his hands leaving her shoulders, just as the door pushes open. He shouts something at the nurse, but Billie can only hear her own pounding heartbeat as she tries to fling off the blanket and throw her legs off the edge of the bed.
She gets one foot out into the cold air before the once-smiling nurse, now wrinkle-faced, is in front of her and—
Ouch.
A needle is pricked into her bicep.
Then a pulse dizzies through the whole hospital room, one that dizzies her and, slowly, she’s drifting back down onto the pillows.
Bitch sedated me.
In that last blink before unconsciousness steals her again, she sees Preston on the chair beside her, and feels his hand take her hand.
She blinks into darkness.
14
It’s night.
First thing Billie notices about the room as she stirs awake; darkness. A peaceful sort of darkness, where the faintest of faraway light from the moon gently dusts through the long, paneled window.
But Billie doesn’t feel peaceful.
Waking into the night, a pit of unease wakes inside of her, too.
Her lashes are heavy against the sedative Nurse Bitch injected into her. Grogginess presses down on her like a heavy blanket. But the stir of unease churning in her gut has her squirming upright on the hospital bed.
The killer’s been caught. Was stabbed dead by Preston. And her identity revealed.
