Page 13 of Wicked Sin

I sit there and listen to the beeping from a monitor in the next room. The distant squawk of a dispatch radio, maybe at the nurses’ station, and footsteps in the hall.

Hospitals are not my favorite place.

They’re no dance club, that’s for sure.

I look at my watch. It’s just after four in the afternoon. God damn it, there’s still so much more of today that could go fucking sideways.

Taylor has the right idea by closing her eyes and grabbing some rest.

6

Taylor

It doesn’t take longfor the pills they gave me to work. The tightness in my chest recedes and the dark, flashing images—of my car blowing up, of Detective Vasquez holding me up when I desperately wanted to just sleep, of sitting in the back of the ambulance as people fled my building—get a little less intense.

I can still see it all over and over again, like a silent film or a grotesque vacation slide show. But there’s some distance, finally, and I can breathe.

It’s something.

But that fragile peace doesn’t last long. When I’m discharged with a prescription for sleeping pills clutched in my hand, we go straight to the hospital pharmacy to fill it—and my debit card doesn’t work.

“Do you have the cash to cover it?” the clerk asks.

I roll my eyes. “No. Who carries cash anymore?”

Luke wordlessly pulls two twenties from his wallet and hands them over.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

He doesn’t say anything.

When we’re sitting in his car, I try again. “I have cash at my apartment. I can repay you.”

“That’s where we’re going. You need to pack a few things.”

“I can’t stay there?”

“Not right now.”

I frown. “Can I go to a hotel?”

“Do you have money for that?” He says it without judgment, but fuck, I don’t know if I do.

Why doesn’t my bank card work?

I huff out a frustrated breath and close my eyes, sinking into the sweet dullness of the drugs still numbing my pain.

It takes half an hour to get to my apartment. We don’t talk and that’s just fine by me.

When we get there, a marked cop car is sitting out front, but otherwise, everything looks normal.

Nothing feels normal, though. I have had my world crash down around me before. And yet this is different. I didn’t see this coming.

I’d thought I’d escaped the madness.

I was wrong.

I blink. My eyelashes feel wet. No, that won’t do. I’ve cried enough today.

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