Chosen By the BRATVA Heir (The Bratva Crown Trilogy #1)

Sadie

I've been following the moving van's tail lights for ninety miles.

Red, steady, pulling me forward like a tether. I haven't let myself look at anything else. Just those two red squares and the promise of a new apartment on the other end of them.

My hands ache from gripping the wheel. I make myself loosen them, one finger at a time.

"You can do this," I say out loud, because the car is too quiet. The radio's been off since I pulled out of the storage unit at dawn. I didn't want anything to drown out my own thinking. I wanted to hear myself.

I'm twenty-six years old. My parents are dead.

My boyfriend is behind me. Everything I own fits in the back of a ten-year-old Corolla and a rented moving truck, and the rental agreement for my new place is folded in the glove compartment along with two granola bars, a bottle of water, and a prescription receipt I haven't thrown away yet.

I'm free.

I keep telling myself that word like it's a spell. Free. Free. Free.

The van's brake lights flare.

I tap mine in response, slowing, and my eyes flick up to the overpass ahead. Something is wrong. The way the cars in the far lane are drifting sideways, the way one of them is already turning, already wrong, already—

A sedan clips the median and spins.

I have time to think oh God and nothing else.

The sedan hits the SUV two lanes over. The SUV spins wildly.

Metal screams, and the sound is worse than anything I've ever heard, high and shearing and alive.

The moving van ahead of me swerves right, cuts across a lane, and speeds through a gap that closes too fast for me to follow.

A pickup in front of me has already slammed its brakes and I'm too close, I'm too close, and my foot is on the brake but the road is—

Impact.

Something hits me from the left and the whole world rotates ninety degrees, then the airbag is in my face, and my ears are full of a sound that isn't sound, it's just pressure, and bright white.

I don't know how long I sit there resting against the airbag.

Maybe seconds. Maybe a minute. My brain is trying to catalog my body the way I've been trained to catalog other people's; airway, breathing, circulation, and everything seems to be working.

I can breathe. I can move my hands. My left ear is ringing but I can hear a car horn somewhere, a long continuous note that means someone has slumped forward onto their wheel and isn't moving.

That sound gets me out of the seat.

I shove the airbag aside. My door is dented but it opens when I throw my shoulder against it. I stumble onto asphalt and the world rights itself in pieces. Blue sky, black smoke rising from somewhere ahead, glass glittering in daylight like someone spilled a jewelry box across four lanes.

My hands are shaking. My knee hurts enough that I'm limping, but it's tolerable and holding my weight.

I open the back door of the Corolla and drag out the first aid kit, the real one, the good one, the one I spent money on when I had none because I needed to know I could take care of myself in an emergency.

The blood pressure cuff, rolls of gauze, trauma shears, a pack of tourniquet straps, a sharpie and saline pods.

Candy. I grab the candy too, out of habit, and shove a pack of glucose tabs in my back pocket because I can already feel my hands trembling in a way that isn't just shock.

I chew one, breathing slowly through my nose.

Then I walk into the wreckage.

The first car is the SUV. There's a woman in the driver's seat unconscious against her seatbelt. Her face is slack. In the back, strapped into a car seat, a little girl is crying, a small wet sound that's somehow worse than if she was screaming.

"Hey," I say, crouching by the window. "Hey, sweetheart. Can you look at me?"

She lifts her big brown eyes to me. There's a cut on her forehead that's bleeding into her eyebrow but isn't deep.

"I'm going to help your mom," I tell her. "What's your name?"

"Emma."

"Hi, Emma. I'm Sadie. You are so brave. I'm going to put a band aid on your head, okay?"

I reach through the window and clean the cut with an alcohol wipe.

She flinches but doesn't pull away. I cover it with a band aid with small images of puppies dancing across them.

I bought them a year ago for a friend's kid and never used them.

Emma looks at me with her big, wet eyes and says, very seriously, "Thank you. "

"You're welcome, baby. I’m going to help your mom now, okay?" I’m moving fast, but steady, trying to keep Emma calm while I turn to her mom.

“Do you know your mom’s birthday, hon?” I ask, and Emma shakes her head no. “What about her name?”

“Christina.” Emma’s little voice is starting to bubble with the beginning strains of crying, so I give her a gentle smile.

“Hey, Emma, what’s your favorite song?”

She sniffles, but manages to tell me a song name I’ve never heard of.

“Oh wow! I bet your mom loves that one too, huh?”

Emma bobs her head, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her red cardigan.

“Can you sing it for her?” I ask, praying it will distract her from crying and also help her mom wake up.

Christina’s pulse is thready but present. BP low but stable. I write the numbers on her forearm in black Sharpie, along with the time: BP 90/60, P 118, unconscious, no visible bleeding, 2:37 PM. So, the paramedics don't have to guess or waste the minutes.

“I’m going to help someone else now, Babygirl. Help is on its way. You keep singing, Emma, your mom will be so proud of you.”

I reluctantly move on. Part of me not wanting to leave the scared little girl, but knowing I have to help others.

The man in the pickup is conscious, clutching his dislocated shoulder.

I tell him not to move, help is coming. An older couple in a minivan, both shaken, both fine.

I take their vitals anyway, writing them on their arms. My hands have stopped shaking.

My hands always stop shaking when there's work to do.

It's the only thing my body has ever been good at.

The last car is a black sedan.

It's long and low and expensive, the kind of car you don't see every day, and the back end is crumpled inward like a soda can. The driver's-side window is spiderwebbed. I can see a man slumped against it, blood on his temple.

I pull at the door but it doesn’t open. I try the back door. It opens, revealing another unconscious man behind the front passenger seat. I climb through to the front and deal with the driver first.

He has a weak pulse. Obvious head injury, which I clean and tape a wad of gauze to. I write his vitals on his arm and climb between the seats to the back.

This man is huge. That's the first thing I notice, because even folded against the door he takes up too much space. Dark hair. Dark suit, the jacket open over a white shirt that's soaked red on the left side near his shoulder. His head is tipped back against the headrest and his eyes are closed.

"Sir?" I say. "Can you hear me?"

Nothing.

I press two fingers to his throat. His pulse is there, stronger than the drivers, and something in my chest unclenches.

"Sir, I'm going to check your injury. Can you hear me? I need you to stay still."

Still nothing.

I take the trauma shears from my kit and start cutting along his jacket sleeve, carefully, peeling back the fabric to see the wound. It's a laceration, deep but not arterial, running along the outside of his bicep. A glass cut, probably. I can work with this. I press gauze against it.

A hand shoots up and closes around my jaw. Hard.

Hard enough that I feel every one of his fingers against my skin, and when I look up, his eyes are open, and they are the coldest thing I have ever seen.

Gray. Not blue. Gray like weather in winter. He's looking at me the way a wolf looks at something it hasn't decided about yet, and his hand is steady even though he's bleeding and concussed and should barely be able to sit up, let alone grip.

My pulse kicks hard against my ribs.

I don't move.

"Sir," I say, and my voice comes out even, calm, the voice I use with patients who are frightened. "My name is Sadie. You've been in a car accident. I'm helping you. I need you to let go of my face so I can dress the wound on your arm and take some observations."

His eyes don't leave mine.

For a long second, neither of us breathes.

Then his fingers loosen slightly. They slide down to my throat, and for a moment I think he's going to close them there, and my heart does something I don't have a word for. Then his hand drops to the seat beside him and he lets out a slow, controlled breath.

"Sadie," he says. His voice is low. Rough. There's something in it, an accent maybe, a shadow of one. "Go ahead."

I do.

I cover the wound and tape the gauze in place.

I try to ignore the way he is looking at me as I take his pulse and his blood pressure.

I write the numbers on his wrist while he frowns at me: BP 130/85, P 96, conscious, laceration L upper arm, possible concussion, 2:54 PM.

His skin is warm under my hand. He watches me do it.

He watches me the entire time, and I keep my eyes on my work because I don't know what will happen if I look at him again.

When I'm done, I reach for the door.

"Sadie."

I stop and turn to face him over my shoulder.

"Yes?" My heart gallops when our eyes meet, and I ignore it.

"Thank you,” he says.

I don't know what to say to that, so I nod and say nothing. I climb out of the sedan and the first siren is cresting the overpass now. I walk toward the sound with my kit in my hand and my glucose tabs in my pocket and every hair on my body standing up.

The paramedics find me at the shoulder. I give them the brief, six vehicles, three critical, vitals written on the patients, child in the SUV is stable, and they look at me like they're trying to figure out what I am.

A bystander? A first responder? I don't wait for them to ask.

I point to each car in turn, tell them priority order, and then I step back and let them do their jobs.

I don't look at the black sedan or the man in it. But I can feel him looking at me.

A police officer eventually walks me to a cruiser and tells me I can sit. Someone brings me a foil blanket I don't need. My Corolla is totaled. The moving van is gone. My new apartment is still twenty miles away and I have no way to get there.

Panic is trying to claw its way into my mind. I watch as Emma is carried from the car, her mom awake now and strapped to a stretcher.

And I'm thinking about gray eyes and a hand on my throat that didn't squeeze. I'm thinking about the way he said my name, like he was committing it to memory.

A paramedic kneels in front of me and asks if I'm hurt.

I tell her no, it's just a banged-up knee. She points to the glucose tabs I’d forgotten I was holding and asks if I'm diabetic.

I nod and say yes, Type 1, and she nods and hands me a juice box from her kit with the matter-of-fact kindness of someone who does this every day.

I drink it.

Somewhere behind me, doors slam and voices rise, then the stretcher rolls past with the woman from the SUV on it. Emma sees me. She lifts her free hand and gives me a small, solemn wave, and the puppy band aid is still on her forehead.

I wave back.

The black sedan crunches as the firemen use machinery to cut the top off and unpin the man from the back seat, and I see the driver being loaded into a second ambulance.

The passenger follows minutes later. His jacket is off.

His shirt is ruined. His head turns, and his eyes find me across the wreckage as if he's known exactly where I am this whole time.

We're just strangers, I think to myself. I'll never see him again.

So why does my body feel like I'm lying?