Fracture (Blood & Roses #3-4) - Callie Hart Page 0,30

to keep my voice down. Both Lacey and Pippa look up from their hushed conversation, entirely one sided by the looks of things, to give me quizzical stares. I spin around, facing my back to them, whispering, “How dangerous are these guys? Do I need to call the cops?”

“Fuck no! Just sit tight. I got you covered.”

I don’t ask questions about that. Got you covered can only mean more shady characters stalking me through the streets of Seattle, lurking in the shadows. “Alright, Zeth,” I sigh. “Just get your ass back here the first second you get. I’m not cut out for this.” Which has to be the understatement of the century. Not cut out for waiting. Not cut out for babysitting. It may seem big to others, the hospital, the vast number of patients I see every time I walk through the doors, the responsibility and the weight of all that knowledge pressing down on me, but I have made my world small. No outside requirements of me, nothing demanding much of anything at all from me besides getting up with my alarm and being there when I’m needed. Being there accounts for the majority of my day. The right person to be there when a pair of hands are needed inside the chest cavity of a wounded person. The right person to be there when an arterial bleed needs stemming. But that’s all physical, logical, manual stuff. I can do that. I’m hollow enough for that. But the other side of things—the nerves I haven’t allowed myself to feel properly when I consider getting Alexis back; the pressure of trying to be there for Lacey in an emotional sense…that’s something I have no idea how to deal with.

Zeth makes a stiff sound down the phone. “You’re gonna do just fine, Sloane,” he tells me, his voice softer than I’ve heard it before. And then he hangs up the phone.

******

Lacey’s story makes me sick to my stomach. I try to leave Pippa and the other woman alone so they can have their session together, but she reaches out and grabs hold of my hand with frightening strength. It seems that she doesn’t like strangers, and out of Pip and me I’m the familiar face. I plant myself on the other end of the couch, determined to remain impervious to whatever I hear, but that becomes increasingly difficult as Pippa asks Lacey question after question and the girl answers in a stiff, emotionless voice.

“You were raised by the state. What happened to your parents?”

They died before I was born.

“But…how could your mom have died before you were born?”

She was in a coma. Technically she was dead for the last three weeks of the pregnancy. As soon as her body gave birth to me, they let her go.

And after that?

Foster homes.

How many?

Seventeen all up. Some I stayed in a couple of months. Some just days. I stayed in the last one a year.

Why so long in the last one?

Mr. Mallory, Greg, he liked to have me around. I was useful to him.

In what way?

Cooking and cleaning. Sex whenever he wanted it.

So you were in a consensual relationship with the man?

Not really.

Not really?

No. It wasn’t consensual.

He raped you?

Silence.

Sometimes a mind can just not bend around a word. The word rape is like a paralytic to Lacey’s system. She just shuts down. Goes to staring out of the window, blinking slowly.

“Was he the first?” Pippa asks.

Lacey’s blonde hair brushes her shoulders as she shakes her head.

No, Greg had not been the first.

After that Pippa backs off, sensing she’s walking a fine line, on the brink of the girl withdrawing entirely. She asks other questions: why is she afraid to be alone? Can she share why she is so attached to Zeth? But all Lacey does is shrug and tell her that she doesn’t know why. After a torturous forty-minute session, Pippa nods her head and gets up from the armchair she was sitting in.

“Alright, ladies. I think we should call it a day, don’t you? I’m exhausted.”

Lacey’s eyes flicker back to life, rising to glance at Pippa. “What, that’s it? You don’t want me to tell you anything else?”

Pip gives her a friendly smile. “Not if you don’t want to. You can tell me anything you want to, though.”

“No, that’s—that’s fine.” Lacey loosens her grip on the edge of the throw she still has over her legs. “I think I’d like to go now.”

“No problem.” Pippa holds her hand out to Lacey, offering