Chapter 5 #2
Ryan’s thumb traced slow circles on the condensation of his bottle, his forehead pinched as he looked at me.
The air shifted before he said another word, and I sensed where the conversation was headed.
I’d tried to prepare for it, practiced showing some kind of emotion.
Instead of feeling something, a blank wall slammed up inside me.
Ryan leaned back in his seat, the chair creaking. “Seven minutes, man. Seven fucking minutes without a pulse. The paramedic’s hands were shaking when they finally got you back.”
My throat tightened once. I swallowed it. A reminder of what had happened wasn’t what I needed right now. I dealt with those memories all the time.
I traced one of the multiple scars beneath my shirt. Just one of the many I’d earned that night. “My body recovered, but something in me died anyway.” I smirked.
The bottle creaked under Ryan’s grip. His cop-stare, the one that made perps confess to crimes they hadn’t even committed, locked on me. “Don’t you fucking smirk about this. This isn’t a goddamn joke, man.”
The smirk wasn’t humor. It was armor.
“I never said it was.” I stood straight, letting him feel the difference. “Dope flatlined. Ryker woke up.”
The ceiling fan ticked overhead in the silence.
“We thought you were a goner. No one expected …” His voice trailed off as he looked away. “We’re all glad you’re home.”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence. No one expected me to live. Hell, I didn’t recover because I had hope. I did it out of spite. Revenge.
I welcomed the darkness it took for me to learn to walk, to talk, and to fucking feed myself. Pain taught me how to wait. Rage taught me what to do once I found the son of a bitch who’d wrecked me.
“The witness statement …” Ryan’s voice dropped as he changed the subject. “She used a fake name. After what she saw? Shit, I don’t blame her.”
My mind snagged on it. A woman who ran. A woman who lied to survive. The kind I would chase.
It nagged at the edges of my consciousness, a radio station I couldn’t quite tune in. A half-remembered whisper, a shadow darting just out of sight.
Ryan leaned back, the chair creaking beneath his weight. His eyes never left mine. “Did you see her? Do you remember anything? A word? Her voice?”
I hated that I couldn’t give him anything. I hated worse that the hole in my memory felt deliberate. My eyebrow twitched upward before I could stop it. I forced my expression neutral, rolled my shoulders back. “Bass showed you the file?”
“Some.” Ryan’s knuckles whitened around his bottle. “The MRI scans. The neurologist’s notes.”
The MRI images flashed in my mind, dark patches where there shouldn’t be, and white matter that looked like static on an old TV. The neurologist pointing with her pen, explaining why certain memories might never come back. Maybe they would. She didn’t know.
Ryan leaned forward. “Do you remember who the Pied Piper is?”
Pain lanced through my skull with the name, and I went so still it seemed my bones had turned to iron. “Yeah.” I bit the word out. “That sick fuck who’s been playing us all like puppets on strings.”
Ryan appeared relieved that I could answer him. “Who did he target first?”
I recognized the technique. Establish a baseline, test for gaps. The doctors had done it a hundred times while I was recovering.
“We think Sebastian, but if you want to go back farther than that, his parents. The group of college friends.”
Ryan seemed satisfied with my answer. “Do you think he was behind your attack?”
Unsure why, I hesitated. “Most likely, but I don’t remember what …” I rubbed the back of my neck, willing myself to recall what had led me to those moments of dying. Nothing. Just a loud buzzing like an angry swarm of bees. I shrugged.
“All right, man, we can table the conversation for now. Maybe you’ll remember bits and pieces later. Just glad you’re still here with us.”
“Me too. It’s good to be back. For a while, I wasn’t sure I would ever get out of a bed, much less work out and move back here.” I was ready to put all that shit behind me, but I knew I couldn’t until I got revenge.
Ryan’s eyes cut to the window, restless. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
There was that familiar shift in him again, the same one that always showed up when Cami was even remotely in the air, like his attention had somewhere else it wanted to be before he’d even decided to move.
“Cami? I haven’t even seen her yet. I suspect you’re still in love with her even after two years apart. She’s changed, man. Ella has rubbed off on her in the best way. Let’s just say Cami doesn’t scare as easy as she used to, if you get what I mean.”
Cami was part of our close-knit group and Ryan’s ex-girlfriend. If you asked me, it was ridiculous they hadn’t worked things out. Before my sabbatical, the electricity between them, even when they didn’t speak, was enough to jolt someone back to fucking life. I kept that thought to myself.
“No.” It was immediate. Too immediate. He shifted in his seat, settling back as though he was trying to reset something that had already slipped. A flicker tightened his expression for a split second before he recovered.
“Did you ever give anyone permission to check on you while you were there? Share your medical records and info?”
“Sure, Bass, but I already told you that. I mean that was toward the end. I figured he’d do what he does and get ahead of a ton of questions before I came home.” I finally realized I was holding my protein drink and slammed the vanilla shake down.
He leaned forward, his fingers steepled under his chin. “Before that?” His expression was unreadable.
Where was he going with the line of questioning?
I wiped a drop from my lip with my thumb, tossed the empty container across the room. It hit the rim of the trash can, teetered, then fell in. “Not that I recall. There was a time that I didn’t remember anything. Probably due to the fucking meds they were giving me.”
“Fair.” Ryan’s tell, that slight twitch at the corner of his mouth, was there.
“Why?” Ryan never asked shit unless there was an angle.
“Because you had a visitor several times at the beginning. You don’t have a long-lost sister or ex-girlfriend, do you?”
I snorted, but my chest caved in like a grenade had detonated behind my sternum. Some secrets were better left alone.
Ryan’s voice pulled me back to the conversation at hand.
“I poked around a little. Whoever she is took great care to clean up her trail, but she missed something.”
The room went too still. Even the house seemed to be listening.
My gaze dropped to the bunny tattoo on my arm, and an itch I couldn’t scratch buzzed beneath my skin.
I hadn’t said shit to anyone about my biggest fear, and I wasn’t about to.
After what Kip had survived, the word impossible was no longer a part of my vocabulary.
Still, if I spoke it out loud, it would stop being fear and become fact. That couldn’t happen.
I flexed my fingers, anticipation slithering through me. “Who is she?” The question came out steady. My pulse didn’t.
“Not sure yet. But I know this: she got into your room with a nurse’s badge that wasn’t hers.”
My fingers went numb at the tips. That badge meant access. Access meant vulnerability. A woman got into my room once. Now another woman was getting under my skin. I didn’t like patterns I didn’t control.
Ryan’s jaw tightened. “One camera caught her from behind. Hat. Oversized dark jacket. She didn’t want a face on record.”
I didn’t blink. I couldn’t afford to.