The ground met her with startling speed and before she realized it, she was flat on her back. A kaleidoscope of blue and red spun above her in a haze. The slow spreading fire eating through her chest was the only clear thing in her mind. She struggled to keep her eyes open. Concerned faces appeared above her. Impossible to keep her eyes focused on any one person, she did the only thing she could, and tried to steady her erratic breathing. After what seemed like an eternity, although probably only thirty seconds later, her manager’s worried face appeared.

“Calista? Are you okay? Can you hear me?” Robert sounded like he was in a tunnel, but at least she could understand him.

Terrified to let go, she still clutched her chest in a death grip. Sweat drained off her face in buckets, despite the fact that she couldn’t stop shivering. “So much pain. Have I been shot?” Her teeth chattered, and her normally strong voice came out as a scant whisper.

“Calista? Stay with me!” Robert shouted.

She tried to keep her eyes open. There was something she wanted to tell him. Something she needed to tell him. It hovered on the tip of her brain. Before she could voice it, blackness engulfed her.

****

Calista opened her eyes and fought through the cobwebs of nightmare-filled sleep. She looked around, disoriented. White linens, white walls, and stark white furniture encompassed her. That combined with the sickeningly sterile aroma of antiseptic and death caused her to groan. She was in a hospital. Which one she didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter. She hated hospitals more than she hated the paparazzi.

She might have panicked, but Robert leaned back in a cheap wooden chair barely two feet away, eyes closed. Worry lines played across his perfectly chiseled features, and his square jaw thrust forward into a painful grimace. Though high strung by nature, Robert rarely let her see him worry. A jolt of panic ran down her spine as the night’s events all rushed back at once. The concert.

“Robert? Where am I?” The question came out hoarse and scratchy. Her chest and head throbbed. Talking only made the pain worse, but she needed answers.

His eyes snapped open in awareness. The earlier expression of concern she’d witnessed on his face eased up, although it didn’t completely disappear. “Thank God you’re awake.” He immediately moved to the edge of her bed. “You’re in St. Vincent’s Hospital. We’re still in Melbourne. How do you feel?”

“Sore.” She cleared her throat and tried to speak again. “What’s going on?”

“Do you remember anything?” Robert asked with concern etched around his dark eyes and mouth.

“The concert. What—” She made an attempt to sit up, but he gently pushed her back, causing the institutional sheets to rustle loudly underneath her.

“You need to rest.” He kept a light hand on her shoulder, presumably to keep her from moving again.

“What the hell is going on, Robert?” She swatted his hands away, gaining some of her strength back. She wanted answers, not pacification.

“The doctor said you had an anxiety attack.” Hands on hips he stood and paced the floor in tiny half circles.

The repetitive squeaking of his shoes against the tile grated on her headache. “That’s impossible.” She shook her head vehemently in an effort to get her point across, but stopped immediately. Pain fractured through her skull at the abrupt movement.

“You’ve been going at full speed for the past ten years. I should have seen this coming. I’m so sorry, Cal,” he said, panic and guilt plain in his deep voice. His face contorted in misery, as if he would have a seizure at any moment. He was such a mother hen.

“Stop pacing and stop with the ridiculous face. You look deranged. You don’t have anything to be sorry for because the doctor is wrong. My chest…” She abruptly stopped when a thought occurred to her. She lifted the flimsy hospital gown to view her chest. A garish blue and purple bruise the size of a softball covered most of her left breast. Without thinking, she pressed it with her fingertips.

“Crap!” She instantly withdrew her hand. She should have known better. Just looking at it made her cringe.

“You asked if you’d been shot. Do you remember any of that?” Robert’s concerned voice forced her to look up.

“Connor,” she whispered her twin brother’s name.

“What does he have to do with this?” Robert said, brows drawn tightly together.

“He’s been hurt.” She knew without a doubt something bad had happened to her brother.

Her insides turned to ice at the thought of Connor injured. Taking deep breaths, she pushed her panic back down. This was no time to lose her cool. She didn’t feel like explaining anything to Robert. Eventually she would. At the moment, she wasn’t going to bother. There wasn’t time.

“What are you talking about? I think you’re confused honey. Your brother wasn’t at the concert.”

Robert’s placating tones only spurred her resolve to escape this colorless hole. She knew she wasn’t crazy or confused. Doing her best to ignore her achy body, she pulled the IV from her arm and slipped out of the bed. Robert kept talking, but after years of working together, she’d learned to tune him out when necessary. “Where are my clothes?” She opened the small closet only to find it empty.

“Let’s wait until the doctor gets back. Please, he said he’d be—”

Calista delayed her search to look up. Robert’s eyes widened and his mouth snapped shut. She caught her reflection in the elongated mirror behind him and realized why. Her hospital gown hung haphazardly on her small frame, streaks of mascara smeared underneath her eyes, and her normally perfect auburn hair stuck out all around her head like a halo of straw. She shuddered. She looked like Tinkerbell on crack.

With forced effort, she managed to focus on the man in front of her. “You listen to me. I don’t have time for this. Give me my clothes. We are leaving this instant. If you don’t do what I say, you can look for a new job. I’ll manage with or without your help.”

Shock registered on her friend’s face. Guilt engulfed her, but it was fleeting. She’d apologize later and he’d forgive her tantrum. For now, all she cared about was getting to her brother. Robert had been her manager and best friend for almost a decade, and not once had she ever threatened anything like this. Oh, she had her moods just like any other woman on the planet, but she normally kept a level head about things.

“Here, here.” Fumbling, Robert reached under the bed. She sighed in relief when he pulled out what she’d been searching for: real clothing. Not the see-through, itchy gown that barely covered her behind.

“I brought a bag with some personal items just in case they released you early.” He dropped it once then tossed the bag in her direction.

She knew he was curious as to what was running through her supposedly unhinged mind at the moment, but she wasn’t ready to give answers. Once they were safely on a plane, she’d start talking.

Ten minutes later, in a pair of faded True Religion jeans and a green boat neck sweater, Calista exited the room with a washed face and semi-tamed hair. Her escape almost complete, a small Indian man in a white lab coat cut them off in the hallway. She assumed he was her doctor.

“Miss Kingston, what do you think you are doing? I still need to run more tests.” The man’s dark eyes furrowed together tightly as he gripped the chart in his hands and pointed to her room.

“Dr…?”

“I am Dr. Patel and you really need to get back to bed,” he said with an air of authority. Barely an inch taller than she, and just as small, he had the look of a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed.

Too bad that wasn’t going to happen today. She shook her head slightly and tried to appear apologetic. “I’m fine. What I need is to get out of here.”

She glanced at Robert. “Charter a private plane to Los Angeles. If the rest of the crew wants to come that’s fine, but they need to be ready to leave immediately.”

“Okay, then what?” For the first time since she’d known him he looked lost.

“Honestly, I don’t know. The only thing I do know is that we need to get home.”

Without a backwards glance, she continued her grand exit from St. Vincent’s Hospital with Robert in tow. Dr. Patel tried to reason with her one last time, but she was out the swinging exit doors before he’d finished.

Chapter 2

“Now do you feel like telling me what’s going on?” Robert asked Calista from the plush leather seat of the private jet.

The plane had been airborne for almost an hour. Calista knew he’d been waiting to ask her that since they’d left the hospital. It surprised her he’d waited this long to question her sanity. “Connor was hurt.”

“You keep saying that. Why are you so sure?” He unsnapped his seatbelt and turned to look at her across the small walkway that separated them.

Calista sighed. How could she explain this without sounding cracked in the head? She barely understood it herself. “When we were fifteen years old I broke my leg playing soccer. We weren’t together at the time, but he knew something had happened to me. By the time the school called my parents they were already on the way.”

“Okay. So what?” His brows snapped down in confusion.

She knew it sounded crazy, even if it was true. “His leg broke out in a horrible rash. The same leg I’d broken. He felt my pain.”

Robert shook his head disbelievingly. “That’s all very impressive, but you still don’t know that he’s been hurt. You could have just had an anxiety attack like Dr. Patel said.”

“Then how do you explain the huge bruise on my chest?”

“I can’t, it just seems farfetched.” Robert sighed, leaned back in his seat, and massaged his temple.

“This is the only viable explanation, although…”

She turned to gaze out one of the circular windows into darkness. A half moon and a few stars dotted the sky, barely illuminating the Pacific Ocean. As her thoughts wandered, doubt crept in to the small recesses of her brain.