I tried to speak.Nothing came out but a rasp.
He sighed, straightened, and made a decision.
“Get her off the street,” he said.“I’m not explaining a bleeding bride to the police.”
Strong hands lifted me.I cried out as pain flared, my fingers clutching uselessly at a stranger’s jacket.
The man leaned close, his voice low and cool against my ear.
“Don’t scream,” he said.“If you’re lucky, this is the worst thing that happens to you today.”
Dude, you have no idea.This is by far the best thing that happened to me today.
I was placed onto the leather back seat of a foreign car.The door shut with a heavy finality, sealing me into darkness and the scent of expensive cologne that pressed in from all sides.It was too much—too close, too unfamiliar.
As the car pulled away, the world tilted.The motion rocked me gently, almost kindly, and my consciousness slipped loose, drifting out of reach before I could grab hold of it again.
The last thing I heard was the man speaking again—mild, irritated, stern.
“And someone,” he added, “find out who she belongs to.”
Before everything went black.
2
Mikayla
Pain woke me with a vengeance—not all at once, but in layers, creeping through muscle and bone until there was nowhere left to hide from it.As if my body had taken the entire situation personally and decided to bruise everything out of spite.
My hip throbbed with a steady, ugly pulse, each beat a reminder that something had gone very wrong.My head felt thick, stuffed with cotton and bad decisions.When I tried to shift, even slightly, the world pitched sideways, sharp and sudden, and I froze—heart racing—until the room settled again.
Apparently gravity and I were no longer on speaking terms.
I lay still, testing myself in small increments.Fingers first.Then toes.Everything answered, reluctantly, as though offended I was asking it to function at all.My throat was dry.My mouth tasted faintly of copper.
There was leather beneath me.Smooth.Cool against my skin.
That registered next.
Not stone.Not asphalt.Not the hard, unforgiving pews of a church I’d fled barefoot and bleeding.Leather meant furniture.Furniture meant indoors.Indoors meant someone had moved me.
I cracked one eye open.
The ceiling was unfamiliar—too high, too clean.Light filtered in softly, not the harsh glare of hospital fluorescents or the flicker of streetlamps.When I managed to turn my head, slowly, carefully, I confirmed it.
I was lying on a couch.
Someone else’s couch.
And given how thoroughly my body ached, I had the sinking suspicion that wherever I was, I hadn’t arrived there by choice.
That realization sent memory slamming back in jagged pieces: the window.The fall.The sprint fueled by pure panic.The car.The very public, very ill-advised attempt at becoming roadkill on my wedding day.
I gasped and tried to sit up, because apparently I hadn’t learned a thing.
“Don’t.”
The voice came from my left.Male.Calm.Far too close for comfort.