Chapter 1 1

The smell hit her first. It was a cocktail of bleach, damp drywall, and the metallic tang of old blood. Her eyes snapped open, but the blinding white light of the surgical lamp forced them shut again.

She tried to lift her hand to shield her face. She couldn't.

Her wrists were strapped to the cold steel of the operating table. The leather cuffs were tight, digging into the soft skin, cutting off circulation. Panic didn't flood her. It trickled in, cold and slow, like an IV drip.

She knew this feeling. She knew the pre-op sedative haze. But she wasn't the doctor this time.

Voices drifted through the thin wall to her right.

"Just cut it out," a man said. The voice was gravel and expensive scotch. Arthur Bailey. Her stepfather. The man who had seized control of her family's, the Holden family's, entire estate after her father's death. "Do whatever you want with the rest of her. Just get the kidney on ice for Archer."

Her heart slammed against her ribs. It wasn't a figure of speech. Her chest actually hurt from the force of it. This wasn't a kidnapping for ransom. This was a harvest.

The door swung open. A man in green scrubs walked in. He was pulling on latex gloves. Snap. The sound was loud in the small room. He held a syringe in his other hand. He hadn't flicked the air bubbles out. Amateur.

He looked at her open eyes. He didn't look surprised. He looked bored.

"She's awake," he called out to someone behind him. "Upping the dose. Hold her legs."

He stepped closer. She saw the grime under his fingernails through the translucent gloves. This wasn't a hospital. It was a slaughterhouse in Queens.

She didn't scream. Screaming takes oxygen. She needed every molecule.

She looked at her right hand. The leather strap was tight, but the leather was old. Cracked. She looked at her thumb.

She needed to make her hand smaller than her wrist.

She closed her eyes and focused on the joint. She exhaled. Then she pulled. She jerked her thumb inward, forcing the joint out of its socket.

A sickening pop echoed in her ears. White hot pain shot up her arm, blinding and absolute. It tasted like copper in her mouth. But the structure of her hand had changed.

The doctor turned to adjust the IV drip. He gave her half a second of blind spots.

She greased her hand with the sweat of her own fear and pulled. The skin tore. The dislocated thumb caught on the leather, grinding bone against strap. She bit her lip until she tasted blood.

Her hand slipped free.

The doctor turned back. His eyes widened, but his reaction time was sluggish. He was used to unconscious victims, not cornered animals.

Her right hand, throbbing and misshapen, grabbed the Number 10 scalpel from the metal tray next to her head.

She didn't slash wildly. She didn't stab. She moved with the muscle memory of a thousand surgeries.

She sliced across the inside of his wrist.

She didn't aim for the artery. She aimed for the median nerve.

He screamed. It was a high, wet sound. He dropped the syringe and clutched his wrist, stumbling back into the instrument cart. Metal Clattered against the tile. Blood sprayed, bright and arterial, painting the front of his scrubs.

"My hand!" he shrieked. "I can't feel my fingers!"

He would never hold a scalpel again.

A nurse rushed in, eyes wide. She grabbed a pair of heavy hemostats from the tray. She didn't have the strength to fight her. She braced herself against the table, took a deep, ragged breath, and snapped her thumb back into place with a dry crunch that made her stomach lurch, and threw the metal tool.

It hit her shin, right on the bone. She went down hard.

She slid off the table. Her legs were jelly. The sedatives were still fighting her adrenaline. She hit the floor, her knees cracking against the tile.

She grabbed a surgical gown from the floor and threw it over her hospital gown. She needed to cover the blood. Not his. Hers.

Heavy footsteps pounded in the hallway. Arthur's bodyguards.

She shoved the instrument cart against the door. It wouldn't hold them for long. The handle jiggled. Then a shoulder slammed against the wood.

She looked up. A ventilation grate.

She scrambled onto the counter, her bare feet slipping on the slick tile. She used the handle of the scalpel to pry the screws loose. One. Two.

The door splintered. A hand reached through the gap, grasping for the cart.

She kicked the grate in. It clattered into the duct. She pulled herself up, her abdominal muscles screaming. The duct was tight, smelling of dust and rat droppings.

She crawled.

A gunshot blasted below her. The metal near her foot sparked. A bullet hole appeared inches from her toe.

She didn't look back. She dragged her body forward, elbows scraping against the galvanized steel. She crawled until she saw light.

She kicked the louvers of the exit vent. They gave way. She tumbled out, falling ten feet into a dumpster filled with wet cardboard and rotting vegetables.

The smell was atrocious, but it smelled like life.

She rolled out of the dumpster and into the alley. She was covered in filth, blood, and sweat. She ran toward the streetlights.

A yellow cab was idling at a red light. She ripped the back door open and threw herself in.

The driver turned around, his face twisting in disgust. "Get out. I ain't taking no-"

She reached up and tore the diamond necklace from her throat. It was the only thing Arthur hadn't taken, probably because he wanted her buried in it.

She threw it into the front seat.

"The Plaza Hotel," she rasped, her voice a wreck. "Drive."

He looked at the diamonds. He looked at her. He hit the gas.

She leaned her head against the cool glass of the window. They were crossing the bridge into Manhattan. The city lights blurred into streaks of gold and red.

Arthur was at the Plaza tonight. The Bailey family merger dinner. He thought she was on a table in Queens, being hollowed out.

She looked at her reflection in the glass. Her hair was matted. Her eyes were dark holes.

She didn't look like a victim. She looked like a reckoning.