“If you have a headache, don’t go to sleep. You need to let someone know as soon as—”

 

“Seriously? Olly, I’m a freaking doctor.”

 

Oliver stops swabbing the multitude of tiny cuts that mark my face, pausing to give me a displeased look. “Oh, you are, are you? Funny, that. I haven’t seen you around here for a while now. I thought maybe you’d ditched all of this and joined the circus or something.”

 

I try to smile, but my face hurts. “Wouldn’t you? Better hours, and the food’s actually edible.”

 

“Yeah. I bet.” He chucks the swab into the HAZMAT bin and folds his arms across his chest. With me sitting on the gurney in the emergency room, I suddenly get to see how disconcerting it is when a stern-looking doctor is looming over you. I’m never this grim, though. At least I hope I’m not. “Are you going to tell me where you’ve been, Sloane?” Oliver asks.

 

I cringe. “Hawaii?”

 

“Alright, fine. You’ve been in Hawaii.” He snaps his rubber gloves off and throws them in the bin, too. He turns to leave.

 

“Oliver, wait? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

 

He spins around, his sneakers squeaking on the linoleum floor. I find myself leaning away from him when I see his drawn-together brows and the firm set of his jaw. “Remember that kid we treated for photodermatitis last year?”

 

“The kid who was allergic to daylight?”

 

“Yeah, that one. You look like her right now. You haven’t been sunning yourself on a beach in Hawaii, Sloane. You look like you haven’t stepped foot out of Seattle in the last ten years.”

 

“Well, you’re wrong. I did leave Seattle.”

 

“But you didn’t go on vacation, did you?”

 

I bite my lip. I hadn’t expected the third degree from Oliver. He’s a friend, a good one if I’m honest with myself, but I’ve never considered that he’d be this bothered about what I’m doing with my time. “So what, Ol? Does it matter?”

 

He leans down, placing his hands on his knees, bringing himself lower so that his eyes are level with mine. “Yes, it matters, Sloane. It matters when I receive a panicked phone call from you, and then I find out you’ve been brought into the ER in a fucking ambulance. It matters when I see a circular of a guy, a dangerous fucking guy, tacked to the notice board in the locker room and I recognize him, Sloane. I recognize him as someone I’ve seen you talking to in the hallway. It matters when the Monterello guy who was shot and brought into the ICU, the one the cops were warning us that very same guy you were talking to might want to kill, is then murdered the same night. It matters when you disappear from work unexpectedly without telling anyone where you’re going, when you don’t answer your phone or reply to your email, or let anyone who cares about you know that you’re safe. And it especially matters when you then lie to me.”

 

Fuck. Monterello was killed? And Oliver did recognize Zeth. That stupid circular that the cops brought around—Oliver hadn’t seen it properly when they pulled us aside, but I hadn’t even factored in the possibility that Zeth’s mug shot might be pinned to a damn notice board. That Oliver might see it later on after passing me and Zeth in the corridor, and recognize him. I don’t say anything. I’m too busy trying to come up with a way to get out of this without compromising myself or Zeth.

 

Oliver straightens up. “You don’t want to deny the fact that you know this guy?” he asks.

 

“No. I do know him. And I know he didn’t kill Archie Monterello.”

 

“How can you be so sure?”

 

“Because he left town right after seeing me. I watched him drive away.”

 

“Oh, right. So you watched him drive away. And there’s absolutely no way he could have parked up somewhere, gone and eaten a delicious steak dinner and then come back and slit one of our patient’s throats later on, then?”

 

“Someone slit his throat?”

 

Oliver’s body tenses, his arms folded across his chest again. “There was arterial blood on the fucking ceiling, Sloane.”

 

My stomach twists. We see a lot of things in the hospital, but I’ve never seen someone who’s had their throat cut. Shot and stabbed, but never that. “He didn’t do it, Oliver. You have to trust me on that.”

 

Oliver laughs. “I do trust you. But I don’t trust that you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into here. You can’t know this guy properly, Sloane. The police have an APB out on him. They told us he spent time in prison for killing a guy, and guess what? His throat was cut, too. Doesn’t that ring any alarm bells for you?”

 

So that’s why Zeth was in jail. He killed a man? And in the exact same way Monterello was killed. And I already know he killed Frankie. My head suddenly feels very full, packed tight from the inside, like a huge, living pressure is trying to force its way out. “Am I okay to leave?” I ask.

 

Oliver huffs out a deep breath. “You should probably stay overnight, but I know you’re not going to.”

 

“No, I’m not.”

 

“Then will you at least go back to my place. You can crash in my bed; I’ll take the couch. At least that way I know I can check on you when my shift is up.”

 

I get to my feet, trying to usher some strength into them as they threaten to buckle straight out from underneath me. I’m lightheaded and my massively bruised shoulder is throbbing like a bitch. “I’m gonna be fine. I’m not in any danger, Oliver.”

 

He shakes his head, rubbing his hand across his jaw in a frustrated fashion. “But you obviously are, Romera. You just can’t accept it yet.”

 

My phone begins to ring; it rang at least eight times on the way over here but the EMTs wouldn’t let me answer until they’d finished checking me out. I collect my purse and rifle amidst the tiny square cubes of windshield glass that have found their way inside. My cell seems to have survived the crash in one piece. I was hoping for Zeth, but the single letter on the screen is an M instead of a Z.

 

“I have to take this, Ol.”

 

Oliver rolls his eyes, sighing. “Just…the moment you realize that you’re in way over your head, come see me, okay? Don’t leave it too late.” He gives me one last unhappy look, and then he turns and walks away.

 

I don’t waste any time; I hit answer. “Hello?”

 

“Where are you?” It’s Michael. The sound of his voice is a relief, but then I register the clipped tone and panic sets in again.

 

“What’s going on, Michael? Someone just tried to run me off the road. I nearly died!”

 

The line is silent for a moment, as though the man on the other end of the phone wasn’t expecting this news and it’s complicated matters. “Are you okay?” he eventually asks.

 

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m fine. I didn’t hear from Zeth, so I was on my way to the hospital. My car’s a write-off, though. Where the hell is your employer?”

 

“He’s been hurt. He needed a doctor. I tried to get ahold of you but no one answered.”

 

It feels like my heart stops dead in my chest. “What do you mean, hurt?”

 

“I mean stabbed in the abdomen. Where are you?”

 

A feeling overcomes me that I’ve never experienced before. I felt something like it the day Lexi went missing, but it was nowhere near as intense as this. A panic, mixed in with a falling, nauseous, paralyzed feeling gripping hold of my senses. Zeth’s hurt. He’s…he’s been stabbed? Oh my god. Was that why he didn’t come for me? How bad is it? Where is he? But I don’t have time to ask these questions. I can’t. I just have to get to him. “I’m at St. Peter’s.”

 

“Thank god. We need blood. Can you get it?”

 

My mind feels like it’s firing blanks. Can I get blood? Can I get blood? The answer to that is simple, but it raises a hundred more questions. Will I get caught taking the blood? Are there cameras in the corridor outside the blood bank? Will I get to Zeth in time to administer it?

 

“Sloane? Sloane!”

 

“Uh…yes, sorry. What’s his blood type?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

That’s just throwing another variable into the mix. Will I even be able to get type O negative? I suppose I’ll just have to hope for the best. “Okay. Alright, I’ll sort something out. Come and get me.”

 

Michael exhales down the phone. “Good. I’m already on my way. And Sloane, there’s one other thing.”

 

One more thing? I don’t think I can cope with one more thing. One more thing is probably going to be enough to break me. I can tell by the serious note in Michael’s voice that this is important, though. I hold my breath. “What is it?”

 

“Charlie knows where your parents live. He went there, dropped your father’s car off. But don’t worry. I have two guys watching them at all times. They’re okay. They’re safe.”

 

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I call my mom while I’m stealing blood. I can’t…I just can’t believe it. Charlie was there, at their house. Drinking my mom’s stupid Lady Grey tea. The thought is so terrifying that I’m contemplating jumping on a plane and heading straight back there, just to see with my own two eyes that they’re fine. It feels like I can’t fucking breathe. I still feel that way, even after I hear my mom’s voice and she starts wittering on about the early Christmas party they’re holding at Dad’s hospital.

 

“It’s only halfway through November. What’s wrong with having a Christmas party at Christmas? That’s what I want to know. Sloane? Sloane, are you there?”

 

I grab a second bag of O neg from the fridge and stuff it into my purse, trying to think through the crippling headache that’s pounding at my temples. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here, Mom.”

 

“Well, your father’s home now, so I’d better get dinner started. Have you heard anything more from Alexis? Has she said when she’ll be coming home?”

 

“Can you see Dad?” I ask, my heart beating hard in my chest.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Can you actually see him? Is he standing right in front of you?”

 

“No…not right in front of me, he’s just walking through the door. Now he’s in front of me. Al, talk to your daughter. I can’t get any sense out of her.”

 

The line goes quiet, and I hang up. Michael was right; they are both safe. But for how long? How long before they’re not?

 

I slip out of the blood bank, but not without being spotted by one of the nurses. It’s Grace. She sees me, out of scrubs with my key card gripped in between my teeth and my purse bulging with stolen bodily fluids. She asks me how I am, concerned for me after the smash; she then eyes my bag, gives me a warm smile and heads off on her rounds. I have no idea if I’ve been busted or not, and if I have, whether Grace will rat me out. Theft from the hospital is a very serious offense. You can’t take one analgesic for a simple headache without being held accountable. There’s paperwork documenting every single pill, bandage, bedpan and milligram of blood in this place; at some point, and some point very soon, someone is going to notice the missing blood and a lot of questions will be asked. There’s a real possibility that Grace will recall seeing me leaving the blood bank and will inform the relevant people. There’s nothing I can do about it now, though. It’s a problem I’m going to have to deal with at a later date.

 

Michael pulls up outside the hospital and the passenger side door is already opening before he stops the car. “Get in,” he tells me. He flinches when he sees the state I’m in.

 

“There are cuts all over your face,” he advises me.

 

“Really? Oh, I hadn’t noticed.” I yank the seatbelt across me—wearing one earlier is probably the only reason I’m alive right now—and shove it viciously into the clip, sending a stab of pain through my sore arm. “Being in a car accident will do that to you, I suppose. Where is he? How the hell did he end up stabbed? And tell me one more time that my parents aren’t going to get dragged into this any further.”

 

Michael’s a pro driver; he slings the car through the bend, drifting it like someone who’s had to do it before. Many times. “Your parents are one hundred percent safe, Sloane. I swear it personally. And I’m taking you to Zeth right now. He got himself stabbed by Charlie’s woman. Killed herself apparently, but thought it would be wise to try and take Zee with her.”

 

“What? Why? Why the hell would she do that?”

 

Michael just shrugs, scowling out at the road. I don’t press. I grip hold of the edge of the seat. I do try and get more information out of him about Zeth’s injury—how deep is the wound? What angle? Where exactly in his abdomen? What kind of knife?—but all he will say is that I don’t need to worry. It’s all being taken care of.

 

I find out what he means twenty minutes later when he pulls into the dockyard and parks the car in front of an industrial-looking building—single story, with high windows and a single entrance to the side. It looks like a storage facility.

 

“Go let yourself in. I can’t leave the car here,” Michael tells me.

 

“Let myself in? What—”

 

“You have a key, Ms. Romera, remember? Zeth had me hand deliver it myself. Have you lost it?”

 

I’m transported back to the hospital, to the day Mikey the intern came to advise me there was someone waiting for me. Michael had given me the note and the key from Zeth…to Zeth’s home. “This…this is where he lives?”

 

“Were you expecting a McMansion?”

 

Maybe I was expecting something a little more salubrious-looking given the property where Zeth held his party. But this, this actually makes a lot more sense. “No. Just surprised there aren’t any armed guards is all.”

 

Michael grunts, lips pulling tight. “I’m about as close as you’re gonna get.”

 

I get out of the car and locate my keys inside my bag. The small key still sits there, thus far unused; I select it and open the padlock, which is currently keeping an industrial chain locked through two massive steel handles. I have to throw all of my body weight behind me to get the eight-foot-high door to slide back, and my injured arm sings out in pain. I pull it back and head inside, surprised by what I find. Not a hollow shell of a building, filled with rats and empty packing crates as I’d expected. It’s a fully renovated home. One I don’t have time to explore right now. I follow the sound of voices and end up in a large, open-plan space which is lit by three high-powered lamps, each directed at the prone form of Zeth where he lies on a tall, wooden bench. Lacey stands to one side, chewing on her thumbnail, arm folded tightly across herself. The moment she sees me, she runs, slamming into me, throwing her arms around my middle.

 

“Sloane, I don’t…I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. Please. Please.”

 

The him she’s referring to is a large, bird-like man with his dirty blond hair tied up in a top-knot, hovering over Zeth. His jacket is rumpled but appears to be a fairly clean white. He looks up at me, peering over the top of his hospital-grade protective glasses, and gives me a curt nod.

 

“You’ll be her, then,” he says.

 

“Yes. I’m her.”

 

“I’ve given him Ceftibuten. It’s all I had. I abraded and closed the wound, just finished stitching him up. You can take a look at him if you like but you’re a little late, lady. Everything’s been done.”

 

“Everything’s been…” I can hardly comprehend what he’s saying. This guy laid hands on Zeth? This guy treated him and stitched him up? My heartbeat is pounding in every inch of my body as I shrug out of Lacey’s hold and hurry toward the table. Zeth is unconscious, his lips tinged a pale blue. His shirt is missing—it’s wadded up in a bloody mess on the floor beside the table—and there’s a three-inch-long wound just under his ribcage. It’s long, but it’s clean and straight. That means the knife this woman used was probably very sharp. A good thing in some cases. Not so good in others. Depends what she hit on the inside.

 

“What about internal bleeding? How much blood did he lose?”

 

The guy purses his lips. “Couldn’t tell you. He was out cold when I got here, so it must have been a lot. And I couldn’t see any bleeding inside. Like I said, I just cleaned him up and closed him.”

 

“You idiot!” I shove him out of the way, placing my hands on Zeth’s stomach. No rigidity. No signs of anything serious. No discoloration. No way of knowing what the internal damage is like now that this…this person has sewn him up. The stitches are regular and neat—the handiwork of someone who’s used to such tasks. I spin on the other man. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

 

He raises his hands, smiling. “I’m you,” he says. “I’m a doctor that got caught up in this shit. I got caught up in something I had no business sticking my nose into. Are we done here? I have other patients to see.”

 

“Other patients? Where’s your practice? What hospital are you based out of?”

 

He only laughs. “My hospital is in the basement of a building somewhere you frankly don’t wanna know about, lady. And I have other people with other injuries that need stitching up, too, so if you’ll excuse me…”

 

He goes to leave, but I grab hold of his arm. “Do you even have a license?”

 

“No, sweetheart. I do not have a license. I lost that when I lost everything else.”

 

“Sloane! Sloane, he’s waking up! Hey! Hey, Zeth!” Lacey rushes toward the table, tears streaming down her face as she reaches her brother. His eyes are indeed cracked open, though bloodshot and unfocused.

 

“Lace,” he croaks. He lifts one arm, probably in an attempt to try and touch her, but then it falls limp to his side.

 

The sound of the huge metal door being pulled open echoes through the building, and I realize the black-market doctor is gone. In his place, Michael rushes through the door, eyes searching for Zeth. I meet him halfway and slap him so hard his head rocks to the side.

 

“What the hell were you thinking, letting some unregistered back-alley freak touch him? He could have killed him, Michael!”

 

Michael slowly turns to face me, touching his tongue to his lower lip. His eyes are devoid of any anger, though I can feel it pulsing steadily just beneath his calm exterior. “I was thinking that he was going to die if I waited for you. Would that have been a preferable solution?”

 

My anger sticks in my throat. “No. No, of course not. I’m sorry. I…” I was scared. I was terrified. I still am. I keep all of that inside, though. “I shouldn’t have hit you. I’m sorry.”

 

He doesn’t say a thing, just maneuvers around me in order to find his boss. I follow after him, swallowing down the hesitation I feel. I don’t want to see Zeth like this—it hurts way more than anything I’ve ever experienced before. And I definitely don’t want Zeth to see me so scared. I just…I just can’t. I drag in a deep breath, drawing all of my strength together before I face him.

 

It looks like Lace is doing her level best not to cry. “Don’t you dare die,” she says. Her hands are clamped on the very edge of the table, not touching him. She wants to, I can see it in her eyes, but she doesn’t.

 

Zeth smiles. “I’m not dying. I’m fine.” He tries to prove this by shifting his body weight, attempting to sit up. He makes it, too, the stubborn bastard. Michael rushes to his side, offering out an arm to lean on but Zeth shoots him a look I’m sure has withered the balls of many men. Michael backs up, one eyebrow raised.

 

“You wanna eat concrete, that’s fine with me.”

 

I stand and watch all of this, the fingers of my right hand pressed against my lips, hugging myself with my other arm. I feel stupid. I feel so, so stupid. I mentally planned out everything I would need to do to help once I got here, and now that I’m here and my help isn’t apparently needed I feel…I don’t even know how I feel. Mostly four different kinds of scared. Scared that that doctor might have done more harm than good; that I’m going to get busted for taking that blood from work; that I’ve shown up in Zeth’s place without him personally bringing me here. But most importantly, I’m scared because there was a second there when I contemplated Zeth dying. And the sheer terror that thought inspired won’t be leaving me anytime soon.

 

When did this happen? When did I begin to need him so much? I’ve always made a point of never needing anyone. I feel sick to my stomach. Zeth looks up through the fussing he’s receiving from Lacey and Michael, and his eyes meet mine. His expression tightens, forming a deeply furrowed brow. “What happened?”

 

Oh, yeah. I’ve completely forgotten that I look like I’ve been street fighting. “Fender bender,” I whisper.

 

“One of Charlie’s guys nearly forced her off the freeway,” Michael helpfully supplies.

 

“They what?” Not content with the minor miracle of merely sitting, Zeth tries to go the whole hog and slips from the table, trying to stand. It’s a glorious failure. His legs don’t even pretend they’re fit to hold him up; they bow immediately, and he drops like a sack of stones. I rush forward—like I would have a hope in hell of catching him without getting flattened—but Michael’s already on the case. Zeth’s unconscious again, his skin a pallid, deathly white.

 

“How about that transfusion, Ms. Romera?” he suggests.

 

“Yes. Of course.” I go and grab the blood from my bag, feeling the weight of the fluid heavy in my palm. Before blood transfusions, people would die from wounds like Zeth’s. Hell, people still died from them today, with the blood transfusions. As I put a line into Zeth’s arm and watch the dark, almost black blood slowly make its way into his body, I can only hope I brought enough. And I can only hope Zeth wakes up again.