Authors: Gina Ardito
But the stranger in white spoke again. “No, Adara. Please,
do not leave me.”
The detective tilted his dark head, leveling those stunning
eyes on her, washing her in Pacific blue. “You know him, miss?”
“Not really. He must have followed me out of the Silk Club.”
She indicated their clasped hands. “He’s kinda latched onto me.”
When Detective Griffin leaned closer, his face blurred.
Clouds floated in the air between them. She raised her hands to break the misty
vapors, but her fingers drifted through, grabbing nothing tangible. Where had
the world gone?
“Miss?” His eyes narrowed, brow pleating in neat wrinkles.
“You okay? Talk to me, honey. What’s your name?”
He called her honey. The compliment lifted her aloft more
thoroughly than a hot air balloon. “Adara.”
She barely spoke the name before excruciating pain burned a
trail from her chest to her knees. Her toes prickled above a fire licking up
from the street. The edges of her vision grew fuzzy, and a high-pitched buzz
filled her ears. The earth tipped, and she wavered as if she sat atop a sapling
in a windstorm.
From far away, she heard a voice say, “Gotcha!” Then a
strong arm wrapped around her waist.
Struck blind, she collapsed against her hero, feeding off
his strength. His hold tightened, drawing her close to a rock-hard chest.
Talons clawed her lungs. She gasped and swallowed, seeking
enough precious oxygen to fill her chest. Nothing. Her ribs constricted, and
sweat popped out on her forehead.
“Adara, sweetheart? You with me?”
She forced her mouth open, but could elicit no sound.
“Oh, shit. She’s hyperventilating. Adara! Can you hear me?
Breathe, honey. Come on. In and out. With me. Like this.”
Her eyes filled with desperate, frustrated tears. Terror
swirled inside her. No matter how hard she struggled, her lungs refused to
inhale.
“Come on, Adara. You can do it. Breathe. Take a nice, deep
breath.”
At last, a whisper wafted in. But that piddly amount of air
couldn’t sustain her. She choked and coughed, scraping her throat raw. To no
avail.
“No, Adara.” His voice came from the end of a tunnel she
couldn’t see. “Exhale first. You have to breathe out before you can breathe in
again. Come on. You can do it.”
A two-ton weight crushed her chest, and the tilted world
began to spin—slowly at first, and then faster and faster until nothing existed
but smears of color. The voice called again, but from deeper in the tunnel now,
cylindrical walls muffling the words to gibberish.
As her knees buckled, Adara stared up at the twin patches of
sky in the griffin’s face and murmured, “I can’t die today. Today’s my
birthday.”
Chapter Two
Detective Shane Griffin stared at the woman lying on the
gurney. The thick plastic oxygen mask over her nose and mouth didn’t mar her
pretty face. Pale blond hair surrounded her head like a platinum cloud.
Tissue-thin lids veiled her eyes, but he recalled their color with no prodding.
Golden, glossy brown. Like honey. With the help of the mask, she inhaled in a
normal rhythm now.
She’d scared the hell out of him when she fainted against
him like some damsel in his nephew’s fairy tale book. Damnedest thing he’d ever
seen. With such extensive injuries, he wondered how she’d managed to stay
seated upright as long as she had. According to the EMT’s quick exam, she had a
couple of fractured ribs, a broken ankle, and a collapsed lung.
Shane frowned. The man on the sidewalk, the supposed second
victim of this accident, looked perfectly fine. No bleeding, no broken bones,
not even a bruise. With the help of the EMTs, he managed to get to his feet and
now hovered beside the woman named Adara, as if terrified to let her out of his
sight.
What the hell had really happened here? Because he sure as
shit didn’t buy the ludicrous hit-and-run excuse she’d given the 911
operator.
Strange how she’d sounded coherent when the operator asked
if she was injured. She said she’d bumped her head. She was fine, but shaky.
Yeah,
right.
And I’m President of the United States.
She oughta be a
helluva lot worse than shaky after surviving the battering she’d apparently
endured.
“Hey, Detective.” Sergeant Andrew O’Reilly stepped out of
his black and white and approached, notebook in hand.
“How’s it going, Andy?”
“Same crap, smaller shovel. What are you doing here?
Slumming?”
“Nah, I just happened to be near the Silk Club when the
first call came in about some guy hassling a female customer. Heard about this
when I got back in the car and put the two together. Figured I’d give it
a look-see. Make sure you guys used proper procedure.”
“Bull.” O’Reilly’s baby face and chipmunk cheeks softened
the severity of his frown. “You have a nose for this stuff. You smelled a
rat—even over the radio.”
Shane raised a brow, but truth overcame professional
courtesy, and he shrugged off the disrespect.
The patrolman jerked his head at the ambulance. “What do you
think of this one?”
With a calculating eye, he took in the woman struggling to
breathe. Black eyes on her swollen face, arms striped with red welts, bruises
on her legs. Meanwhile, the man seemed perfectly fine, coherent, without a
scratch on him. Both vics resembled the description the bartender had provided
of the male and female from the Silk Club incident. “I think it stinks.”
“Figured you might,” Andy said with a grimace.
Adara and Pretty Boy probably had a fight sometime
yesterday, no doubt because she planned an evening out with her girlfriends,
without
him.
Later in the evening, jealousy already spiking his temper, he caught
up with her at the Silk Club. Trying to avoid a fight, she hid in the club’s
storage room. But when the guy started calling her cell, she must have figured
she’d be better off hightailing it outta there altogether. Unfortunately, when
she left the club, he followed her out. They got into a heated debate on the
street, he started knocking her around. She hit back. Not as strong as Pretty
Boy, she took the brunt of the abuse. But she must have hit him hard enough to
knock him out. Then, panicked at what she’d done, Adara called in the details
as a hit-and-run accident.
Shane sighed again. Even
his
scenario didn’t sit
right in his gut. He wished she’d killed the bastard. She wouldn’t be the first
abused woman to take the law into her own hands. Hell, he wished Cassia had
done that. At least she’d be alive now.
“Did you get a whiff of the guy?” Andy’s question shook him
out of his crime scene reconstruction.
“No.” But he could hazard a guess what the young cop
suspected. “Alcohol?”
The sergeant nodded. “The smell’s oozing out of his pores,
but not on his breath.”
“So he likes to get drunk before he beats her up,” Shane
concluded.
“Either that, or she started nagging him while he was
nursing the mother of all hangovers. You know how these things go.” Andy clapped
his thumbs against his fingertips, forming the illusion of birds’ beaks.
“Yakkity-yak-yak all the time. Finally, after one too many comments like,
‘You’re drunk again,’ and ‘Who were you out with this time?’ our friend over
here couldn’t take anymore and hauled off and—”
“Beat her within an inch of her life,” Shane finished in a
clipped tone.
Andy dropped his hands to his sides, and his face colored a
dozen shades of red before he looked away. “Sorry, Detective. I shouldn’t have
gone on like that.”
He stole another glance at Adara Berros strapped to a
gurney, oxygen mask literally breathing life into her. “Why not? You’re
probably right.” Straightening, he swerved his attention back to Andy. “Any
witnesses?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Not a one. Does that surprise you?”
“Not really.” People rarely wanted to get involved in
domestic disputes, no matter how ugly.
Time evaporated, and Adara’s ashen face transformed into
that of his sister, Cassia, as he’d last seen her—lying on a similar stretcher,
both eyes swollen shut, blood crusted around a split lip, and the dark stain
seeping from the hole in her chest.
Order of protection, my ass. A goddamn useless piece of
bureaucratic red tape.
Shane shook his head violently, hoping to erase the visions
of Cassia the way his nephew would erase a drawing on his Etch-a-Sketch.
The EMTs lifted Adara into the back of the ambulance. “We’re
outta here,” one said as he closed the double doors. “Anything else you want
from her, you’ll have to visit College Hospital to get.”
“Yeah, okay.” Shane’s focus remained glued to the small
window cut into the ambulance’s right rear door. Nothing met his gaze except
plastic IV tubing, white boxes labeled with red crosses and blue lettering,
packages of latex gloves marked Large, and medical supplies he didn’t
recognize. “Thanks.”
He and Andy stepped toward the curb while the EMTs climbed
into the vehicle. Sirens blaring, the ambulance drove off. Once the
ear-splitting wail faded to a screech in the distance, Shane turned to Andy.
“Let’s get the bastard’s statement.”
He turned to question the man left behind.
But the man was gone.
~~~~
At College Hospital, Shane headed straight for the emergency
room. Bypassing the waiting area where dozens of people already sat like
wounded sheep, he strode toward the front desk. One dark-haired nurse, white
scrubs decorated with dancing images of Pooh and Tigger, sat beneath the
glaring white lights, gaze focused on a computer monitor. He stopped there and
laid his badge on the gray-speckled counter. “I’m looking for the woman who
came in about a half hour ago. Alleged hit and run?”
The nurse looked up, her penciled brows forming apostrophes
over her neon blue-shadowed eyes. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking, Shane.”
Damn. He hadn’t recognized her with her hair tied up.
Heather Lansky, space kitten extraordinaire, was just a file clerk. Thank God.
He wouldn’t trust Heather to care for a houseplant. But her presence now
wouldn’t make his current task any easier. “Come on, Heather,” he said. “Cut me
some slack. I’m not a morning person.”
She fluttered her hands, and a dozen bangles tinkled in the
quiet hallway. “You’re not an evening person either, based on the outcome of
our date last week.”
“We never had a date last week.”
Her lips opened in a wide o, and she cracked her
ever-present gum with a loud snap. “I rest my case. You promised to meet me at
Generations and buy me a drink, remember?”
He blinked, waiting for some third-rate actor to jump out of
hiding and tell him he was on some new practical-joke-hidden-camera television
show. Heather’s gum snapped, crackled, and popped. A passing stranger coughed.
An ambulance wailed in the distance. No one rescued him.
With a sigh of impatience, Heather slapped a palm on the
counter, dragging her chair closer. “Don’t you remember? Kathleen and I were
talking about going to Generations for their all-male dance revue, and you said
you’d be there, minus your holster.”
A joke. Didn’t she recognize sarcasm?
She waved him off before he could ask. “Never mind. So what
are you doing here this early in the morning anyway?”
“The woman in the auto accident?” His eyes strayed to the
clock above her head. Two-forty-five. That gave him only fifteen minutes before
he’d have to call in—let his boss know where he was and what he was up to.
“Wasn’t that boyfriend of hers scrumptious?” Eyes growing
dreamy, Heather sighed dramatically. “Like Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and
Johnny Depp all rolled into one great big hunky package.”
Shane stiffened. “The guy was here?”
“Sure,” Heather replied. “He rode here with her in the
ambulance.” She shook her head, eyes rolling, and an unspoken, “Duh” on her
frosted pink lips. “Figures he’s got a girlfriend. The really good-looking ones
are always taken, you know. Taken or gay.”
The detective’s version of the Serenity Prayer echoed
between Shane’s ears.
Grant me the patience to listen to rambling witnesses,
wisdom to separate fact from fiction, and the drive to find the answers…
“So where is this hunky package now? Is he still here? Can I
talk to him?”
She batted her lashes like some B-movie ingénue. “Ted left
shortly after the two of them came in. Dr. Velasquez gave him a cursory exam,
but I think that was just so she could get a good look at him with his shirt
off. I mean, the guy didn’t have a scratch on him. But the woman’s still here.
They wheeled her out of surgery about fifteen minutes ago, and they’re putting
her up on six. She was pretty banged up. Dr. Sanjit had to put in a chest tube
and everything.”
Damn! He’d missed Pretty Boy already. Wait. What had she
just called him? “Ted? That’s his name?”
“Yeah, Ted. Not short for Theodore, either. It’s short for
Tedior. Isn’t that weird? I even asked Dr. Velasquez if she had the spelling
right because she’s the one that wrote up the file, and her English ain’t so
hot.”
As opposed to your stellar command of the language,
right, Heather?
To keep from rolling his eyes, Shane focused on the framed
Patients’ Bill of Rights poster mounted above her head. Did people in the
emergency room actually take the time to read that list? Didn’t they have more
pressing priorities than digesting such terms as “full disclosure” and
“appeals” while waiting for a doctor’s help?
“Anyways…” Heather’s high-pitched squeal commandeered his
attention. “There it was. ‘Tedior.’ Dr. Velasquez told me Ted’s from Cyprus. Do
you think Tedior is the Cyprusian way of saying Theodore? I mean, all the Teds
I can think of were really Theodores. Ted Kaczynski, Teddy Roosevelt, Ted
Bundy, Ted Kennedy—no, wait, he’s really an Edward, isn’t he? Okay, so maybe
they aren’t all Theodores, but most of them—”