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She drew a slow breath, except her chest didn’t want to expand and the pressure of her panic hadn’t begun to ease.
She looked back to the doctor. Hitchcock, the gray-eyed man called him. “Tell me what I’m on.”
He gave her a solemn nod. “Fluids. Antibiotics.” He checked the bag hanging from the IV stand and adjusted the drip. “You’re septic. I’ll recheck your numbers in a few hours to make sure they’re trending the right direction. I placed a foam bandage on your wound to keep pressure off it.”
She closed her eyes. Septic. Underneath the panic and the pain, she’d known that already. She’d diagnosed herself with it three separate times over the last few days. Lying awake in the dark, she’d run through the list of symptoms every ER nurse learned to recognize in other people that she’d apparently been too stubborn to come to terms with in herself.
Mortality rates ran from ten to forty percent, depending on how far it progressed before treatment started. She’d quoted those numbers to worried families more times than she could count, always careful to soften the words.
She’d been damn lucky. And judging by the weakness in her body, she knew how thin her luck had been.
“Where am I?” she managed to croak.
Wyatt reached for a cup of ice water and held the straw toward her lips. Annoyed and grateful and stupidly touched at the same time, she took a sip. The icy water cooled her parched throat and she drew two more sips into her mouth, tears starting in her eyes at how good it felt to have such a small luxury as water from a straw.
When he set the cup aside, Hitchcock answered her question.
“You’re at the Black Heart Ranch.”
She took in her surroundings. It was pristine, new and better than most hospitals she worked at in her rotations. Odd to find a facility like this on a ranch. Unless it was one of those spa ranches where rich people came for tummy tucks and nose jobs and rehab.
But where was this ranch? How many people knew she was here?
That wild flutter in her chest began all over again at the thought of Lance finding her.
The man in the doorway cleared his throat, drawing her attention away from her own dark situation and back to him. “You’ve got half an hour before we talk to you.”
Talk to her? Oh god. She couldn’t be here in half an hour when he came back. What if these people were part of Lance’s group? The criminals who—
Her pulse spiked again, and the monitor screamed in complaint. Hitchcock reached out and quieted it just as Wyatt’s voice broke over the noise that abruptly cut off.
“Can’t this wait? Give her a day at least.”
“No.” The man in the doorway didn’t so much as glance his way, completely dismissing the request. “I had to search databases to find her. Pull her prints to identify her. It can’t wait.”
Her mind sprinted ahead of his words faster than her exhausted body could keep pace with. She’d seen forensics in the ER. After initial samples were gathered, detectives showed up the moment a patient was stable enough to answer questions.
She hadn’t committed a crime. She’d only witnessed one.
The man wore a closed expression too similar to the ones she’d seen in cops. Maybe he was a dirty cop too.
Wyatt brought her here to help her…but this man had found her name and traced her, completely undoing the two months she’d spent trying to erase herself.
Half an hour.
That was all the time she had to figure out how to escape, though her body told her she was so weak she’d collapse before she ever made it to the door.
She had half an hour to figure out whether these people—the stranger who’d carried her off a mountain, this doctor treating her like a person instead of a liability and this hard-eyed man who already knew her real name—were going to help her.
Half an hour to figure out if trusting them was going to save her life or end it.
Chapter Six
“I knew your name wasn’t Jolene.”
Wyatt stood beside the bed, studying the woman lying in it. Her face was as pale as the sheet pulled up to her breasts, and the hospital gown he and Hitchcock had managed to dress her in slipped off one bony shoulder.
She slanted a dark look his direction but said nothing.
