Page 13

And then, apparently, I fell asleep. Face down on the keyboard, in a little puddle of tabloid horror, like the world’s least professional detective.

* * *

I woke to my alarm screaming and the letters Q, W, E, R, T, Y pressed backward down one cheek.

Nothing wakes a girl quite like the picture of a serial murderer still glowing on her laptop screen, a number on her arm and a time on her phone both agreeing that she was in trouble. My sugar had also dipped in the night, the way it loves to do the second I trade a real meal for a night of bad decisions. Oh, and joy of joys, the clock said I had roughly six minutes to become a functioning medical professional again.

Excellent. Wonderful start, Miss Fake Name. Very boring. Very forgettable. Very much not asleep-on-your-laptop-reading-about-a-serial-killer.

I did the whole morning routine at a dead sprint. A splash of water on my face, a hurried brush through my hair, a frantic grab of fresh clothes dragged over my skin like it was an Olympic sport. Glucose chews shoved in my bag, insulin kit, the works. Then I drove to Ashlock with a chew clamped between my teeth like a nervous retriever. I hit the parking lot with my blood sugar still grumbling and my nerves eating whatever the sugar put back.

By the time I had been processed through and checked, I was flustered and a good half hour late. The guard who walked me to the infirmary mercifully didn’t try to make conversation. As God only knows what my responses would have been without morning caffeine.

And then, for two hours, absolutely nothing happened.

That is the part nobody warns you about with prison nursing. The mornings are pill counts and paperwork. Oh, and let’s not forget a sick call list of men with headaches, most of whom mainly wanted ten minutes out of their cell and somebody to talk to.

So I did my rounds. I restocked the cart. I signed for a delivery of gauze I had already counted twice, because Dr. Halloran counted nothing and somebody had to.

And all the while my blood sugar went sliding quietly down toward the number that makes my hands untrustworthy. Which was nobody’s fault but my own, seeing as I had traded breakfast for a night of tabloid horror and a puddle of drool on a keyboard.

By nine forty I had given in and gone into the emergency stash.

Which is to say that when I finally came back through that door, I was doing the exact one thing I had told myself all night I would be far too composed to do.

I came in eating a candy bar.

“Oh, good, you’re back.” Dr. Halloran didn’t so much as look up from his chair, which I was learning was his natural resting state.

“Your patient’s in. It’s a gash on the arm. I started the chart.” He waved a hand toward the bed like a man discussing a small change in the weather.

“It’s the transfer. You’ll be fine. Shout if you need me.” And then he was gone, off to the little office he kept at the far end with the door shut and the radio on. Shouting for him was going to be about as useful as shouting for the Pope. Which, with Halloran, meant I would not under any circumstances be shouting if I needed him.

As for me, I had a fun-size bar half gone in my mouth and my professional veil only about sixty percent applied when I lifted my gaze and found his glacier eyes staring at me.

Oh, and I would have loved to tell you that I was cool about it. But then I would be lying and on an epic scale at that. No, instead I stopped dead. The chocolate turned to glue on my tongue. And the stupid, half-melted little bar slipped straight out of my fingers and hit the floor, because apparently even my hands had opinions about him.

I bent, snatched it up, and dumped it in the trash can by the bed like it had personally betrayed me… Smooth Anna… So smooth. First-day-of-nursing-school smooth.

He watched every second of it. Of course he did. Cuffed to the bed, one impossibly muscular forearm dark with dried blood, taking up the whole cot. Oh, and taking up most of the air in the room with it. And Jesus Christ but those eyes. The palest blue ringed in navy, tracked me through every clumsy moment like I was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in years.

“Tsk, tsk, missing your breakfast, little nurse?” His voice was a low, unbothered timbre, but there was something under the flat American vowels I still couldn’t place, and I hated how much I wanted to dig at it.

I didn’t answer. I had promised myself that much on the drive over. Professional. Blank. Furniture doesn’t chat. I snapped on a fresh pair of gloves and reached for the chart instead, and I let the silence be my whole reply.

Furniture. Be furniture. Furniture does not have a pulse he can hear from three feet away.

His brow was bare. I had closed that cut myself yesterday and there wasn’t a strip left on it. No, now there was just a healing line and a pink mark where the adhesive had been pulled off early.

I drew breath to say something about that.

He raised an eyebrow, the split one, and I closed my mouth again like a good girl. Apparently, we weren’t discussing it.

That was when I saw the arm properly.

Somebody had wrapped a t-shirt around it, his own by the look of it, because nobody had tied it or even tightened it. It had gone stiff and dark, now stuck to him in places. So, when I peeled it away, the gash ran half the length of his forearm. It was a clean slice and half clotted, showing through a long tear already split in the sleeve of his jumpsuit. I would have to open the fabric to clean it. I turned for the scissors on the tray.

“Here, let me help you with that.”