Sadie
Sound comes first.
A distant, heavy cracking. Wood splintering. A man's voice, low and urgent, saying something I can't assemble into words. My name, maybe. My name repeated like he's trying to pull me out of a hole with it.
The floor is cold under my cheek. That's the only thing I know for certain. Cold, the smell of copper, and a pain at the back of my skull that pulses in time with my heartbeat.
I try to open my eyes. The light is wrong. Too bright. Daylight, which means it's morning, which means I've been on this floor for hours.
Something warm closes around my face. Both sides. Hands. Large hands, tilting my head, and I hear the voice again, closer now, almost inside my ear.
"Sadie. Open your eyes. Look at me."
I know this voice. I know the shadow of an accent underneath the consonants, the careful control of a man who is holding himself together by force. I try to find his face but my vision is a smear of grey and light, and the effort of focusing makes the room lurch sideways.
"She's cold." His voice, but not to me. To someone behind him. "She's freezing. Get me a blanket. Get Mikhail on the phone right now."
Hands on my wrist. Fingers pressing for a pulse. His fingers, I think, because I know the weight of them from the sedan, from the diner, from the sidewalk under the streetlight where he kissed me. He's checking me the way I checked him, and somewhere in the fog of my brain the irony of that registers and almost makes me laugh.
Only my mouth won't move.
"Sadie, can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."
I squeeze. It's barely anything. My fingers close around his thumb and it's the most effort I've ever spent on a single movement.
"Good. Stay with me. You're going to be fine."
I want to tell him about Jason. I want to tell him about the knife and the blood and the way Jason's chin dropped to his chest. I want to sayhe needs help, but my tongue is thick and useless and the words dissolve before they reach my mouth.
Something sharp stings my arm. An injection. I flinch, and his hand tightens on mine.
"Glucagon," says a voice I know. Calm, clinical, efficient, female. "We need to move her. Her sugar is dangerously low, and I don't like the look of the head wound."
"Then we move her. Dmitri, bring the car to the back."
Something slides beneath my knees and under my shoulders, and my face is pressed against something that smells like coffee and wool and something underneath that's just him. The movement sends the room spinning and my stomach clenches, and I make a sound that comes out thin and pathetic.
"I know," he says against my hair. "I know. Stay awake for me."
I try. I hold onto his voice the way I held onto the glucose tab, like a foothold at the edge of a cliff. I feel cold air on my face andknow we're outside, and then warmth again, the leather seat of a car, and his hand is still on mine and his voice is still in my ear.
A beeping sound wakes me up in a room I don't recognize. Clean, warm, too bright. Something is attached to my hand, tape and tubing, an IV line running up to a bag of clear fluid. There's a second bag beside it, smaller, with a label I can't read from this angle.
I turn my head and the pain flares from the base of my skull down through my neck, a hot wire that makes me hiss through my teeth.
A man is beside me. Not Nick. Older. Glasses. He's reading something on a clipboard and he looks at me over the top of the frames with an expression that's equal parts professional concern and quiet relief.
"There she is," he says. "Welcome back, Sadie. My name is Dr Volkov. Can you tell me where you are?"
"No," I manage. My voice sounds like sandpaper on gravel.
"That's fine. You're safe. You've been unconscious for a while. Your blood sugar was critically low when you were brought in, and you have a concussion. I've stabilized your glucose with an IV dextrose drip and I'm monitoring you closely. I need you to try to stay awake for me. Can you do that?"
I nod, which is a mistake, because the room tilts and my stomach rolls. He catches my chin with steady fingers and holds my head still.
"Don't move your head. You took a significant impact to the occiput. You're going to feel nauseous for a while. That's normal."
"Nick," I say.
