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“You’ll have to meet us at the hospital,” one of them said as I watched until the door closed and Kelly’s face could no longer be seen. He told me which one, but I could hardly force myself to take a breath, let alone focus on what he was saying.
Rylan grabbed my arm, dragging me away as the ambulance took off, sirens blaring to get people out of the way.
“Come on, boss. Let’s get you to the hospital. We’ll call the O’Connors on the way.”
He loaded me back into his truck, but my mind wasn’t present.
All I could think of was Kelly.
She was here. She was alive.
She wanted to be dead.
14
LEE
With my hand on the door jamb of Kelly’s hospital room, I lowered my head and hesitated to go in. Felt like I’d ripped my heart straight from my chest and was watching it writhe on the floor. Bleeding and dying as I struggled to go on.
I wasn’t there.
I didn’t save her from this.
And she’d nearly lost her life.
My chest squeezed, like the universe was bound and determined to stop my breathing too. I tugged at my collar, gasping for the breath I wasn’t sure I deserved anymore. Then, lifting my head, I steeled myself.
Much as it killed me to do this, I had to. It was for the best.
For her as much as for me.
The first step through the doorway was the hardest. Like I was breaking down some invisible barrier. Once through, it felt like I was swimming through nearly solid mud, each movement slow and bordering on impossible.
It was a kick in the chest the minute I saw her. Her creamy skin that once had a healthy glow now looked ghostly pale in the dim lights of the room. Her wild, crazy hair was flat and had lost its luster. And her pretty blue-green eyes had lost the spark that had made me lose myself in her.
She flinched when she saw me, when she realized I was standing at the foot of her bed. Her arms curled until she had them wrapped around herself as far as the IV and wires would allow, as if she could hide from me behind them.
“What are you doing here?” Even her voice didn’t sound the same. There was a weakness in it now that hadn’t been there before. In her darkest moments—when I held her thrashing body in the middle of the night, when she cried and begged for her nightmares to stop—she’d never sounded so weak.
It was that weakness that drew me forward, even though I’d promised I wouldn’t do this. As I took a seat beside her bed, I knew coming here was a mistake.
“Needed to see you.” It was grit and gravel, my voice shaking when I finally spit the words out.
What I needed was to touch her. To feel her warmth and the pounding of her pulse beneath my fingertips. To know that she was alive and okay, that my heart could continue beating for her.
Kelly’s face crumpled and a single tear trickled down her cheek.
“What happened?” I knew the gist of it, had heard it from the police.
She’d been locked in that apartment, drugged out of her mind by the man who’d gone to the hospital with a gunshot wound to his gut. Another man, one whose fingerprints were on the gun they believed was used, was found dead on the floor beside her mattress, a broken crack pipe stabbed in his throat.
And Kelly…
She’d been near death, blood seeping from a self-inflicted wound across her wrist.
Too weak to follow through.
“I killed him.” She hugged herself tighter. “I watched him bleed out.”
