Undertow (Sweet and Sawyer Romantic Suspense #3)

Prologue

She smelled him before she heard him. That cologne—sweet and chemical and wrong, like something trying to pass for expensive. It preceded him down the corridor every night. One of the few routines that still stuck in her fuzzy brain.

The lock beeped. The door opened. A thin blade of hallway light crossed the floor and found the edge of her bed.

She kept her breathing slow. Kept her eyes closed. Kept her right hand curled around the thing in her pocket—a glass paperweight she'd stolen from the art therapy room after lunch. Heavy. Smooth. But would it do the job?

She shuddered. Her heartbeat ticked up hard. Had he seen the small movement?

The cologne got closer. She heard the soft click of the case he carried—the one with the vials and the syringes.

He leaned over her, his breath brushing her cheek. Her stomach clenched. The fabric of his lab coat swished as he raised his arm.

Now. Now. Now. Now.

She opened her eyes and swung.

The paperweight connected with his temple. A sound she'd remember for the rest of her life. He dropped sideways and hit the floor and the case went with him, spilling its contents across the linoleum in a scatter of glass and metal.

She was off the bed before he stopped moving.

For a terrible half-second she looked at the glass weight in her hand and couldn't remember picking it up.

Couldn't remember why she was standing, why her heart was hammering, why a man was on the floor.

Then it flooded back—the plan, the plan she'd scratched into the underside of her nightstand drawer with a hairpin on a morning when her mind had still been mostly her own.

Before the days started going soft at the edges.

Before the hours began disappearing like pages pulled from a book she couldn't hold open.

Something rolled against her foot. A vial. Small, unmarked, filled with whatever they'd been pumping into her veins these past weeks. She scooped it up and shoved it into her pocket.

Proof. She'd need it. If she survived.

The man on the floor groaned once and went still. His keycard lanyard had twisted sideways when he fell. She crouched, pulled it over his head, and stood. Her hands were shaking badly enough that the card chattered against its clip.

She was at the door when she stopped.

Turned back.

His jacket had ridden up on one side. The car key was clipped to his belt loop—a black fob with a single silver key. She unclipped it with stiff fingers.

The corridor was empty. The facility hummed—fluorescent lights on their dimmest setting, the distant murmur of the ventilation system, the soft beep of a call light somewhere in the east wing that nobody ever answered fast enough.

She'd memorized this building on a better day—a clearer day, when the numbers still stuck—and she'd scratched them into the wood with a hairpin because she'd already learned she couldn't trust her own head to hold them.

Thirty-one steps from her room to the medication station.

She was almost sure. Twelve seconds between camera sweeps in the main corridor.

She thought. One hundred and forty steps to the east exit, the one the maintenance crew left ajar on trash nights because the electronic lock stuck.

She prayed.

She moved fast and she moved quiet and she did not look back. Halfway down the corridor she forgot, for one lurching instant, which direction she was going. Left or right at the junction. Her feet knew. Her feet had rehearsed this route while her mind could still hold it.

The east door was propped open with a rubber wedge. January air hit her like a wall of cold water—salt and wet concrete and the deep Pacific smell of a coast that didn't care whether she lived or died. Rain drove sideways across the parking lot. She couldn't see fifty feet in any direction.

She went anyway, forcing herself not to run.

The parking lot was a small rectangle of gravel and cracked asphalt. Staff vehicles only—six of them, huddled under the security light like animals waiting out the weather. She pressed the fob. Thirty feet to her left, a sedan's taillights blinked once.

The gravel bit through the soles of the flimsy footwear she'd been assigned. She had no phone. No one to trust. No plan beyond the vial in her pocket and the car keys in her hand.

The driver's door opened. She fell into the seat.

The interior smelled like his cologne. She almost gagged but she shoved the key into the ignition and turned it and the engine caught on the first try—one mercy in ten months of none.

She gripped the wheel and for a moment couldn't remember what came next.

Drive, something whispered. The voice sounded like her own, from a day she couldn't quite reach. Drive and don't stop.

The headlights swept the parking lot as she reversed. Rain hammered the windshield. The wipers were on a setting too slow for this storm and for three seconds the world was nothing but water and white light.

Then the road appeared. Dark, narrow, winding north along the coast.