Prologue
There was a moment, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, where I felt it.
That creeping sensation that I wasn’t alone.
The jacket I’d thrown over myself in the absence of a sheet had slipped from my shoulders, the room still holding on to the lingering heat of the previous day, the air musty, the click of the cheap plastic clock ticking from beyond the bedroom door, but there was something else too.
Not the sound of another person breathing – nothing so obvious as that.
Just the cold awareness that someone was lurking there. Watching me in the darkness.
Something inside me, some sense of self-preservation – a thing I’d never been short of – forced my eyes to snap open.
In the same moment, a sharp sensation seared beneath the nail of my big toe.
The figure stood still at the end of the bed, a hand clamping down, securing a vice-like grip around my foot, the silvery glint of the needle protruding from the tip of a thin syringe.
It took a moment for my eyes to focus on the face, too shocked to feel the fear that should have come.
‘You!’ I exclaimed. I followed her gaze to my foot, kicking out at her, though her grasp was surprisingly strong.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ she warned, pressing my ankle harder into the mattress, her fingers still gripped around the syringe forced into my flesh. The needle shifted beneath my nail and I winced as the steel collided with sensitive nerves, a jolt of pain shooting up the back of my calf.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
She flashed me a smile, then – before I could stop her; before I’d had a chance to think of a way out of this predicament – pressed her thumb down on the end of the syringe.
The effect was instant, her voice distorting in my ears as I felt myself sinking, the heaviness landing on my chest, robbing me of the ability to breathe.
‘Good…’ she said softly, her grip loosening as the needle slid slowly from my toe. ‘That deals with you.’
My eyes closed against my will, the image of my four-year-old son flashing behind my retinas, a warm heat spreading over my skin as the memory of his laughter echoed in my mind.
I was spinning… drowning… dying . The realisation was so obvious to me, and yet still there was no fear, no pain.
Somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, I knew it was a side effect of the drugs she’d flooded my bloodstream with, but I couldn’t fight it. I didn’t know how.
‘… not the first one I’ve had to dispose of,’ she was saying, an ethereal, alien tone tingeing her voice, making me wonder if this was even real. ‘Doubt you’ll be the last.’
I hadn’t thought her capable of it… Had never expected this. Not from her.
There was the sound of footsteps retreating as I tried and failed to suck in a breath. And then there was only darkness.