Page 45 of By the Time You Read This

It wasn’t long before a paramedic gently shifted her out of the way. They were working on Kilkenny some more. She didn’t know what they were doing.

There was a bag of blood swinging with each bump in the road, each turn.

Four seconds or four years later—she couldn’t tell—they pulled to a stop.

The beauty of a small town, the hospital was right here.

Hands again, directing her out of the way.

Then Kilkenny was gone.

Raisa scrambled to keep up, but they were too fast, disappearing through a door, yelling stats to each other even as it slammed closed behind them.

She stopped, her body refusing to move.

She couldn’t even imagine what she looked like, her skin smeared with Kilkenny’s blood.

“Miss, are you okay?” someone asked. A nurse in pretty pastel scrubs.

Raisa shook her head. “No.”

Nothing was okay.

A baby cried, his mother trying to soothe him across the waiting room. The woman sent Raisa an apologetic smile.

Raisa tried to force her face into something understanding, but it might have just come out a grimace. The woman seemed to understand anyway.

Kilkenny was in surgery, someone had finally come out to inform her. She might have claimed she was his partner, and they’d run with the assumption that she was his next of kin. He wouldn’t care, and at least it meant that she was getting updates.

It had been three hours.

He’d sustained a skull fracture. That was bad.

His leg had been broken in two different spots. That was also bad.

There was other damage, the kind sustained when an SUV slammed into a vulnerable rib cage.

But that was all secondary.

They needed to save his life first. Then make sure he would wake up.

A pair of heels appeared in Raisa’s line of sight. She wanted to ignore them, but she couldn’t.

“Did you catch them?” Raisa asked, lifting her eyes to meet Maeve St. Ivany’s gaze.

“No,” St. Ivany said, taking a seat near Raisa, but leaving one in between them. “We have an APB out for the make and model of the SUV. A few bystanders caught a good enough look to give us that.”

“But no license plate, am I right?” Raisa asked, going back to staring at her hands. Someone had helped her get cleaned up a while ago, and shewas wearing the extra scrubs one of the nurses kept in her locker for emergencies. “Not even a letter or number to go off of?”

There was a beat. “No.”

Raisa nodded. This hadn’t been an accident. “They probably covered it with mud.”

“Probably,” St. Ivany agreed. “What are you thinking?”

“That it’s a pretty inefficient way to kill someone,” Raisa forced out, her lips numb.

St. Ivany didn’t say anything, which Raisa appreciated. Of course St. Ivany agreed with that assessment—any law enforcement officer would. But if she had made some comment that hit just left of acceptable, Raisa would have burned the bridge as quickly as she could come up with something to say that would do it.

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