The in Death Collection Books 11-15 - J. D. Robb [351]
To wake in the hospital, with the machines, the pain, the strange faces. What could the mind do but hide?
What’s your name?
They’d asked her that. It was the first thing they’d asked her. Doctors and cops, standing over the gurney while she’d stared up at them.
What’s your name, little girl?
The phrase sent her heart racing, made her try to curl up into herself. Little girl. Terrible things happened to little girls.
They’d thought at first she was mute, either physically or psychologically. But she could speak. She just didn’t know the answers.
The cop hadn’t looked mean. He’d come after the doctors and the others in flapping white coats or pale green smocks.
She’d learned later that it had been the police who’d brought her out of the alley where she’d hidden. She didn’t remember it, but she had been told.
Her first memory was of the light over her head, burning into her eyes. And the dull, detached pressure of her broken arm being set.
She was filthy with sweat, dirt, and dried blood.
They spoke gently to her, those strangers, as they poked and prodded. But like the cop, the smiles didn’t reach their eyes. Those were grim or aloof, filled with pity or questions.
When they went down, down to where she’d been torn, she fought like an animal. Teeth, nails, with the howling screams of a wounded animal.
That’s when the nurse had cried. A tear sliding down her cheek as she helped hold her down until the calmer in the pressure syringe could be administered.
What’s your name? the cop had asked her when she’d drifted back. Where do you live? Who hurt you?
She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She closed her eyes and tried to go away again.
Sometimes the drugs let her slip under. But if they took her too deep the air was cold, cold, cold and smeared dirty red. She was afraid, more afraid down there than of the strangers with their quiet questions.
Sometimes, when she was in that cold place, someone was with her. Candy breath and fingers that skittered over her skin like the roaches that skittered across the floor when the lights came on.
When those fingers were on her, even the drug couldn’t stop her screams.
They thought she couldn’t hear them, couldn’t understand when they spoke in their hushed murmurs.
Beaten, raped. Long-term sexual and physical abuse. Suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, severe physical and emotional trauma.
She’s lucky to have survived.
Bastard who did this ought to be cut into little pieces.
One more victim. World’s full of them.
No identity records. We’re calling her Eve. Eve Dallas.
She woke with a jolt when the car stopped, stared blankly at the dark stone of the house, the glow of lights against the glass.
Her hands were shaking.
Fatigue, she told herself. Just fatigue. If she related to Moniqua Cline, it was only natural. One more tool, she thought as she climbed out of the car, in the investigation.
She knew who she was now. She’d become Eve Dallas, and it was more than a name the system had labeled her with. Who she’d been before, what had come before, couldn’t be changed.
If that broken, frightened child still lived inside her, that was okay.
They’d both survived.
She dragged herself upstairs, stripping off her jacket, releasing her weapon harness. Stumbling and peeling off her clothes as she headed for the bed. She tumbled in, curling under warm, smooth sheets and willing the voices that still echoed in her head to quiet.
In the dark, Roarke’s arm came around her, drew her back against him. She shuddered once. She knew who she was.
She felt his heart, the steady beat of it, against her back. His arm, the comforting weight of it, over her waist.
The tears that stung her throat shocked and appalled her. Where had they been hiding? The sudden wave of cold warned her the shakes would follow.
She turned to him, into him. “I need you,” she said as her mouth found him. “Need you.”
Desperate for warmth, for him, she fisted her hands in his hair.
She knew him in the dark—taste, scent, texture. Here,