Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,26

been alive.

Was I happy about that?

His jacket smelled like leather.

Smoke.

He was still wearing it, hadn’t covered me from the biting cold creeping in with the pain.

Branches crunched underneath his steady, purposeful step. He wasn’t rushing, but he wasn’t dawdling either.

He was looking straight ahead, not even glancing at me. Then again, a wandering eye and mind was what got me here in the first place, so I should’ve been glad he was keeping his attention on not tripping.

Not that this was a man that would trip over anything.

He barely even stuttered a step carrying a fully-grown woman through the forest. To be fair, this woman was most definitely underweight and this guy had arms like tree trunks.

I only got the view of his neck. Chin. Upward.

My eyes were still full of that grit. Mind cloudy with pain, disorientation. It was frustrating, that I could tell he had the shape of a man, a strong one, but I couldn’t decipher any features.

It frustrated me even more that this was happening at all. Here I was, living up to every fucking stereotype. The woman lost in the woods, being carried to safety by a man. I may as well have been wearing a bright red hood. Maybe he was really a wolf underneath.

“Saint,” the man spoke abruptly.

“What?”

“My name.”

“Saint,” I repeated. “You seem like more of a sinner to me.”

He grunted in what I thought might’ve been agreement.

We walked in silence for a little while longer. I didn’t know how long it would take to get to where we were going. I didn’t know where we were going.

“You told me your name,” I blurted.

Again, he didn’t look down. Didn’t answer either.

“Does that mean you’re going to kill me?” My voice held no panic, no pleading, just curiosity. I had been accepting of the fact that Mother Nature was about to kill me, what was the difference if it were a man?

I didn’t remember passing out.

No one remembers passing out.

It’s a weak plot device—one I’d used many times—saying something along the lines of “and then I passed out.” Fade to black. New chapter. New scene. New point of view.

That’s not how it worked.

You don’t remember the exact moment. Everything is a jumble of sounds, images, confusion. You’re not quite sure about what’s real or what’s not.

It’s like when you lay down for a nap at two in the afternoon and you wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what year it was and if you’d slept through the apocalypse and you were the last person on earth.

Which was what I was wondering right now.

I was lying down.

The room smelled like cleaning products. Perfume.

He hadn’t killed me.

He’d taken me to what I guessed was a doctor’s office and the doctor was a woman.

I felt like shit.

What else did I expect to feel?

But I was somewhere where they store narcotics. Where was my cotton mouth, the floating feeling morphine was meant to give me?

“You’re awake.”

I jerked at the noise. The world was not yet in focus and I had no instincts to grasp on to. I didn’t even know there was anyone in the room. In addition to that, I had no idea where I was.

But using logic, I would say I was in some kind of medical facility. That thought was reinforced by the woman in a white coat and a friendly smile coming to stand beside my bed.

Whenever I first met a person, a word always came to my mind. It was different with every person, obviously. It was my first impression of someone, all packaged into a single word. Their appearance, their clothes, whether their eyes smiled with their mouth, whether they walked slow or fast, shook my hand, or just nodded.

It was a culmination of it all.

As a writer, I understood this quirk now as part of my weird creative brain, but I had been doing it ever since I could remember.

This doctor, her word was Escape. That’s what I thought about her. Whether she was looking for escape, or offered escape, I didn’t know. The words didn’t always make sense, and obviously I never uttered them, but they were just there, always, until I got to know them better and the words either faded into obscurity or strengthened.

She wasn’t pretty.

She didn’t try to be either. Her skin was bare of makeup. Pale in a way a lot of people around here tended to be, low sunlight hours and all that. Her features were spread just a little too far