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PROLOGUE: NICO
The world is upside down.
No, it’s sideways. I don’t know. The Maserati is screaming, metal shrieking against asphalt, and the sky keeps trading places with the road.
There’s glass everywhere and it’s glittering.
Beautiful, almost, the way it catches the streetlights as it sprays across my face like rain.
One flip.
I was angry. I remember that much.
The Corsicans—the deal—we’d been fucking played, and my hands strangled the wheel while the speedometer climbed because I’ve always had a lead foot and it got worse when I was full of rage.
Or maybe that’s not how it happened. Maybe the brakes. Maybe the truck that came out of nowhere. The memory keeps dissolving every time I reach for it, sand slipping through broken fingers.
Two flips.
There’s blood in my mouth and it tastes like copper and salt.
My ribs are wrong. I can feel them moving in ways ribs shouldn’t move, grinding like gravel under a boot heel.
Somewhere far away, a horn is blaring one long endless note, and it takes me too long to realize it’s my own car. My own chest collapsed against the wheel.
Three.
Concrete. The barrier rushes up and the world goes white—
—nothing has edges anymore. Time means nothing. I’m hanging from the seatbelt or I’m lying on the ceiling or I’m floating somewhere above all of it, watching a man die in the wreckage of a quarter-million-dollar car.
I think, Good riddance, and I also think, not yet, and I can’t tell which thought is mine.
Sirens. Red light sweeping through shattered glass. Voices shouting numbers and words I don’t understand (BP dropping, pneumothorax, get me a line) and hands. Hands on me, pulling, pressing, and I want to fight them because hands on me have only ever meant violence, but my body won’t answer.
Then the voice. “Stay with me. You hear me? Eyes on me. You’re not done yet.”
The voice is feminine and soft and steady, cutting through the chaos like a blade through silk, and I latch onto it the way a drowning man latches onto driftwood.
The hands that go with the voice are sure of themselves.
They don’t fumble or shake.
They move over my ruined body like they’ve already decided I’m going to live and my wishes and wants are irrelevant.
I try to see her, but it’s hard. Instead, I get pieces. Dark hair. The curve of a jaw.
Brown eyes catching the ambulance light, fierce and focused and looking at me—at me—like I’m something worth saving.
Then the white swallows everything.
I surface in fragments.
Fluorescent light.
The rhythmic sigh of machines breathing for me. Pain that lives in every cell, dulled to a roar by whatever’s dripping into my veins.
A ceiling I don’t recognize. Restraints—no, not restraints, just tubes and wires, my body being held together by other people’s skill.
