Kiss Read Free Page A

know about my scars from Patrice’s iron. I’ve told Dr. Ayers, but not Rudy. He and Patrice get along.
    “What does he worry about?” The relative unsafety of my little car? The condition of my heart?
    My heart is even more mangled than the skin under my arms.
    So why have I never stopped wishing? Wishing that Landon would only—
    “Watch out!”
    Rudy’s cry comes at the same moment that glaring lights from another vehicle blind me. It all happens so quickly that I don’t have time to think about swerving or stopping.
    A horn is blaring, and voices are screaming, and then the terrible sound of metal smashing into metal.
    Daddy . . .
    This is the last plea for help that fills my mind before the world ends.

    He shifted his cell phone to the opposite ear and stared at the hospital entrance through the windshield of his car. The parking lot lights were still on, though dawn had broken the horizon behind him.
    “She was in surgery six hours,” he said. “Internal bleeding.”
    “Where is she now ?”
    “Private room.”
    “But still in a coma, correct?”
    “Yes.” Ironic that Shauna McAllister had dodged death only to end up in a coma. “I can get to her easy enough now. She’ll be dead within the hour.”
    “No. Change of plans. Our hands are being forced. I’ll explain later, but for now she stays alive.”
    “She’s too big a risk to just—”
    “What’s her prognosis?”
    “Too early to tell. She could be in a coma for a day or for a year.”
    “Or forever. Even if she comes out, she could have brain damage.”
    “Yes, that’s possible.”
    “So she stays alive for now. She’s not a threat as long as she’s unconscious.”
    “And when she comes around?”
    “With any luck, she’ll forget everything.”
    “I don’t do business with luck.”
    “You will today. Like I said, our hands are being forced in this. Her condition buys us time. I’ll call Dr. Carver; he’ll have options for us. If we have to change course, we do it later.”
    “What if she remembers?”
    “If she remembers, she dies.”

1
    SIX WEEKS LATER
    Nightmares of death by black water ticked off the hours of the deepest sleep Shauna McAllister had ever experienced. In an eternal loop, she choked and drowned and was somehow resuscitated, only to choke and drown again, and again, in an endless terror. Always the same fight, the same thrashing for air. Always the same intense agony for the same amount of time before the screen of her mind dimmed.
    Then it would flicker back to life.
    Merciless, exhausting.
    Her stomach hurt with the penetration of a hundred slicing knives, cut-ting her enough to scrape and bleed and sting. The cold water was not a strong enough anesthetic.
    She could not remember where she was or how she had come to be here.
    Why wasn’t her father with her? And where had Rudy gone?
    The water closed over her head again. She considered welcoming death and letting her fatigue have its way. She was so tired.
    Something touched her. A stable hand, gentle and helpful, grabbed her wrist. In that Herculean grip was all the strength she could not muster. And so it was that at the very moment she resigned herself to drowning, she sensed as she rose through the black waters that maybe she would not die today.
    Shauna broke the surface, gasping and flopping like a snagged fish tossed onto the deck of a—
    No, she was on a bed, some narrow thing that rattled when she moved.
    Her hands hit metal rails and she grabbed hold to avoid sliding back underwater, though some sixth sense told her there was no water. She started coughing and could not stop, as if the oxygen in this place would kill her just as quickly as liquid.
    How did she get here?
    Someone shoved a pillow under her shoulders. Someone was speaking. Several people were speaking at once, animated and urgent.
    She opened her eyes and took her first full lungful of air.
    A middle-aged woman in nurse’s scrubs stood next to the bed, bright eyes wide and