Rita Herron - Don't Say a Word

Then he saw her. At least the part that was visible.

Her hand.

Just a single hand sticking up through the quicksand.

Brittle, yellowed bones poked through skin that had been gnawed away. The fingertips were half-gone. Blood dotted the remnants of mangled flesh, revealing exposed veins that had been sawed away by the jagged teeth of animals now watching nearby in silent reverie.

“How…” He had to clear his throat, push away the mounting fury and choking bile. No woman deserved to end up like this.

Had she been dead or alive when the gators got her?

“If this is all they found, what makes you think you know her?”

Antwaun’s hand shook as he pointed to what was left of her third finger. “That ring…”

“Yeah?” Damon squinted, moved closer, knelt and caught the thin thread of silver glinting through the mud and debris. Amazingly, the simple silver band still clung to the bone.

“I gave it to her,” Antwaun said in a low, tortured voice. “Right before she went missing.”

SHE LIVED IN THE DARKNESS. Had known nothing but pain for months.

And all that time, she had been missing, but no one had come looking for her. Why?

Clutching the sheets of her hospital bed between bandaged fingers, she begged for relief from the agony of her tormenting thoughts. Time bled and flowed together, sometimes nonexistent, sometimes lipping through the hourglass in slow motion. Sometimes chunks and days, even weeks gone by without notice.

Isolated, starved for human contact, she lay waiting for the doctor’s visit.

The bleep-bleep of hospital machinery became her music. His voice, her salvation.

Gruff. Soothing. Coaxing her to sit up. Eat. Fight for her life. Heal.

His touch offered comfort, compassion. It murmured promises that she might recover one day. Be human. Even beautiful.

His miracle.

Yet as much as his manner evoked concern and care for her, even growing feelings, the scent of medicine and hospital permeated his clothing, reminding her that he was her doctor, she his patient.

She was only one of many he had helped. But she’d heard the rumors. The hushed voices. And she had yet to see her reflection because he had stripped the hospital rehab facility of mirrors.

She was the woman without a face. A human monster.

He had repaired what he could. Endless, countless surgeries over the past few months. Bandages and medication, hours and hours of mind-control techniques to keep from going crazy. Sometimes she feared she walked a tightrope to insanity.

And when he left her room for the night, another man came. A monster like her who whispered in the shadows. The man with the scalelike skin.

Her one and only friend here. Lex Van Wormer.

He seemed to sense when she was teetering on the edge, and reeled her back in, sewing the tethered strands of her mind together with some fanciful story. Silly dreams of a future she had to look forward to.

One he dreamed about as well, but one that eluded them both. Instead they had become prisoners of the darkness.

A gentle knock sounded at the door, and the heavy wooden structure squeaked open. A sliver of light from the hall sliced the black interior, causing her to blink. Slowly over the past months of her imprisonment, her vision had adjusted and returned to near normal, though she still preferred the shadows. Whether this was to shield herself from having to face others and see the disgust or pity in their eyes, or because she’d begun to view the darkness as her best friend, she wasn’t certain.

Her breath lodged in a momentary panic in her throat as she listened to the approaching footsteps. One of the nurses with another round of injections? Dr. Pace with his soothing voice and promises that she would get better? Or Lex, somehow sensing that she had suffered another nightmare?

Nightmares or memories—she could no longer distinguish the difference. She only knew that night after endless night, some fathomless, sightless, black-hearted devil chased her. That he waited around every corner, watching, stalking, breathing down her neck. That she had to escape. That he wanted her dead and would stop at nothing until he achieved his purpose.

The door closed, blanketing the room once again in the gray fog that offered her safety.

It was always twilight in her room.

“Crystal?”

“Lex.” She exhaled a sigh of heartfelt relief. Still, the name felt foreign. The first time he’d seen her, he’d commented that her eyes reminded him of sparkling crystal cut glass, so he’d called her Crystal, and the nurses had latched on to it.

That she’d been blind at first and hadn’t been able to see him hadn’t mattered. She’d relished his company.

Then, finally, on a pain-filled admission to prove to her that she wasn’t alone in her world of shadows, he’d allowed her to touch his hand. She’d felt the scaly dry patches of leatherlike skin and had understood his reason for withdrawing from the world.

The condition, caused by exposure to an unknown chemical he’d been exposed to in the war, had disfigured him and eaten away at his body like battery acid. For a brief time before the bandages from her eyes had been removed, she’d feared she would react to his impairment.

But she had grown accustomed to the sound of his voice as he read her poetry at night, to the cadence of his laugh as he fabricated stories of journeys he’d taken, and his looks hadn’t mattered. In fact, she hadn’t even cringed when she’d finally rested her eyes upon him.

Apparently, he had adjusted to seeing her without a face, and covered in bandages as well. Who else would be so accepting?

He dragged the straight chair against the wall near her bed, then reached for her hand. A light squeeze, and her breathing steadied.

“Thank you for coming.” Heavens, she hated the choked, childish quiver of her voice. But she had been so lonely.

“I’ll always be here for you, Crystal. Always.”

She closed her eyes to stem the tears threatening. Theirs was an odd relationship. Two misfits thrown together, two survivors hanging on to life by a severed thread. Yet they weren’t really living either.

“I’ve missed you since last night, Crystal,” he said in a low voice.

She tensed. She’d sensed that his friendship ran deep, that he wanted more from her. She loved him in a platonic way.

Too many pieces of her past lost. Too many questions unanswered.

Another man…maybe waiting.

The sound of Lex turning his harmonica over in his hands with fingers brittle from his disease forced her to open her eyes again.

“Our quote for the day,” he began, “is from Ecclesiastes 49:10. ‘Two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.’”

A sliver of unease tickled her spine as his words washed over her. Lex was her friend, but if she healed as Dr. Pace promised, and she had to hold on to the hope that she would recover, she couldn’t imagine Lex as her lover. And she knew that he wanted more from her.

He lifted his harmonica and began to wail out a blues song that gripped her with sadness. Regret fed the flames of her emotions. She loved Lex, and she didn’t want to hurt him.

But she had to find out who she was. Where she’d come from. How she had ended up here.

If she had a family, a husband, other friends. A lover.

And why in the past months, not a single person had cared enough to hunt for her.

DAMON STUDIED HIS BROTHER’S face as he drove toward their family’s house. Of all the confounded nights to have a homey get-together…but his mother had refused to take no for an answer. She’d hinted that his oldest brother, Jean-Paul, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department, had to see them.

God, he hoped that didn’t mean more trouble. Their family had been through hell the past two years. Katrina had nearly destroyed the family home and business—Jean-Paul had lost his first wife during the ordeal—and only a few months ago, their baby sister, Catherine, had almost died at the hands of a serial killer they’d dubbed the Swamp Devil.