I put on my jammies—a white ribbed tank and panties—brushed my teeth and opened my medicine cabinet. There was some PM-style pain reliever, the closest thing I had to a sleep aid. I popped two of them, and then Myrtle and I went to bed.
She walked up her little set of doggy steps, and I knew she’d missed sleeping with me. I wondered where she’d been spending her nights while I’d been gone. With Misty, or in here all alone? She stretched out on top of the covers, as close to me as she could manage. I rolled onto my side and put my arm around her, and she sighed as if all was right with her world again. She was snoring within ten seconds.
And then I closed my eyes and hoped I was wrong. That there would be no vision. That there was no connection between me and the others who’d received organs from my donor. Mason’s brother. The dead serial killer. None at all.
* * *
I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming because I wasn’t me, I was someone else. I was lying on my back on the ground. I could feel the icy cold earth underneath me and the snow around me. It was freezing. I couldn’t move. I was awake, I was breathing, but I couldn’t move, and I was terrified.
Someone was with me, crouching over me. I angled my eyes until they hurt, but I couldn’t see them, really, because I couldn’t move my head and I was lying flat and naked in the snow.
Naked? No, not quite. I was wearing a dress, but it lay open on either side of me, sliced up the front. I could just make it out in my peripheral vision. I could feel something tight around my waist, like panty hose. And there were shoes on my feet, a little too tight in the toes.
All I could see was the night sky, dotted with stars and—
Ohmygod, something’s cutting me!
An ice-cold blade flashed in my vision and drove into my abdomen, and the pain screamed through me. And I tried to scream, as well, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. It was cutting me. Oh, God, it was cutting me. I felt the blood, warm and running over my naked skin. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe!
I was going to suffocate. Let it be fast! Faster than the cutting! Oh, God, no more.
But there was a tearing, ripping. My lungs seemed to spasm in my chest, hungry for air, but I could not take a breath. Black spots started popping in and out of my vision. My head was going to explode. My torso was on fire with pain, and my heart was pounding like a jackhammer in my chest, or trying to.
Something was torn from my abdomen, and it rose up, into that tiny area within range of my vision. It was pink and dripping, and clutched in a gloved hand. A piece of me!
And then blackness descended. Merciful death caught me in soft hands. The pain went away from me. Or rather, I went away from the pain.
* * *
I screamed until my bedroom door was flung open and Misty stood there with a baseball bat in her hands. She wore cute flannel PJs, and her perfectly straight, perfectly platinum hair was in her face as she shrieked, “What the fuck!”
Hearing that particular word from my seventeen-year-old niece seemed to do the trick. I clamped my jaw and blinked my vision clear, pushed my hair off my own face and turned on the bedside lamp. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Misty, I must have scared the hell out of you.”
“You okay?” She lowered the bat.
It made me proud to think she would come running to my defense if I really was being attacked in my sleep.
“What happened, Aunt Rache?”
Someone paralyzed me and cut out one of my organs while I lay there unable to move. Good God.
“Aunt Rachel?”
“Bad dream, kid. Just a bad dream.”
She heaved a big enough sigh that I knew she’d been truly scared. “Jeeze, I thought someone was murdering you.” She let the bat drag on the floor as she came farther into the room.
Someone was. Only not me. Another of Eric’s organ recipients. Dammit, Mason was right. It isn’t over.
“Aunt Rache? You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Fine. Look, I’m sorry, kiddo. You want to curl up here for the rest of the night?”
“Only if you promise not to wake up screaming again.”
I looked at the clock. 4:00 a.m. The pills would have worn off by now. “I’m pretty sure I won’t.”
“If you do, I swear, I’m gonna hit you with this bat.” She stood it up against the headboard and climbed under the covers.
Myrtle snuggled back down between us and started snoring like a chain saw.
“Hope you don’t mind sharing with a bulldog,” I said.
“She’s been in bed with me every night since you left. I kind of missed her, to be honest.”
“Yeah, she has a way of getting under your skin, doesn’t she? Good night, Misty.”
“Good night, Aunt Rache. Sweet dreams. And that’s an order.”
I turned off the bedside lamp. Of course the night-light was on. I always left the night-light on.
Saturday, December 16
Seeing Rachel again after almost a month had had an impact on Mason that he hadn’t expected. He’d thought their one-night stand had been based on the drama they were going through, and the sense of intimacy between them on the secret they shared. No one else in the world knew the truth about his brother. Or that he’d concealed evidence to protect his family—his mother, his pregnant sister-in-law, his nephews. He loved those boys like his own. No one knew what he’d done but Rachel.
He knew she needed time to figure out who the newly sighted Rachel de Luca was. He’d been relieved by that when she’d said it, because he’d convinced himself that their roll between the sheets hadn’t meant anything special. And he wasn’t ready for anything more than that, anyway. He’d just lost his brother, betrayed his oath of service, become the only father figure in his nephews’ lives. There was no room for anything else.
Even the way he kept thinking about her at odd moments, and the idiotic way he’d set his damned DVR to record anything that had her name attached to it, had seemed like no big deal. But seeing her again...that had hit him like a mallet between the eyes.
And now he was starting to wonder if maybe what connected them was more than just the traumatic situation they’d gone through together, the secret that they shared. Hell, he’d seen through her masks so easily on that talk show yesterday that she’d seemed completely transparent. But she wasn’t, she couldn’t be, or the entire reading public would see through her, too, right?
No, it was only him. And he saw more than the mask she wore, the positive-thinking public persona. He saw through the cynic she thought she was to the real Rachel. And it made him want to see her even more.
A door slamming downstairs reminded him that he wasn’t alone. It was the weekend, and his nephews, who usually showed up on Friday nights, had been delayed an extra twelve hours due to his trip into the city
