Page 1 of Malice

Prologue

Trixie

My scrubs cling like a filthy second skin—a prison, not clothes. The knees are torn, the collar a noose. Nine hours into this sweat-drenched shift, misery is a film on my skin. My sneakers are more crust than shoe, fused with whatever lives on this floor. Caring? That’s a ghost. Each tick of the clock is another turn of a screw in my skull.

The faded stain on my left cuff won’t scrub out. Every time I see it, I’m back in 412, Mrs. Calloway’s nails digging into my wrist, her body shaking against mine while I kept my voice calm, pretending I wasn’t drowning. Fourteen hours since everything went to hell. Feels like forever ago, like I was someone else, clueless about how quickly a life unravels.

I find the wall with my shoulders and let it support me. The night air bites. Above the roofline, the sky is that orange-gray shade that means city, never dark, nowhere to rest your eyes.

The courtyard feels empty, less like peace and more like something hurriedly cleared out. Beyond the chain link, the highway murmurs its low, insomniac chant. The IV pump down the hall chimes its single note through the propped door at steady intervals, patient as a metronome.

I take a longer sip of my hot drink. A cloying, chemical sweetness hits the back of my throat. My body jerks back before my mind catches up. I tear the cup away from my lips.

Under the orange security light, the coffee looks normal, smells like stale hospital brew. But that sugary film clinging to my tongue is all wrong.

My mouth tastes like pennies and fake cherry syrup from old cough drops. My pulse isn’t racing—it’s slow, heavy, a thick thud in my chest and skull. I can feel it buzzing in my teeth.

No.

The word forms somewhere behind my sternum and doesn’t make it to my mouth.

My fingers go slack.

The cup falls from my hand, clattering on the concrete. Coffee spreads in a dark stain across the pale sidewalk. I reach for the wall, my palm scraping brick, then the ground rushes to meet me.

The pain arrives all at once, blunt and total, but it still feels far away, like it’s happening to someone else. I’m sprawled on the ground, cold concrete biting into my hip, shoulder, cheek.

Above, the sky’s a mess, spinning slow and sick, the moon fractured into jagged shards of twitching light.

I try to scream, but it’s just a whisper of air. My own voice drifts in from somewhere far away, like it belongs to a stranger.

Get up. Get up. Get up.

My body doesn’t even consider it.

Footsteps.

The sound is everywhere and nowhere at once, each step steady, intentional, unhurried. Their echoes bounce off the bricks, making it impossible to pin down where they’re coming from. I try to track them, to find something, anything, to focus on, but the shapes overhead blur at the edges, dark silhouettes gathering against the shattered sky.

Hands close under my arms.

He lifts me like he’s done it a thousand times. My scrubs bunch, and the air chills my bare skin. My heels drag on the rough concrete, useless. My head rolls to the side, and through the fog in my mind, I see it: a car idling at the curb, back doors wide open, ready to swallow me whole.

No.

No, no, no.

The word spins in my brain, over and over, but my lips won’t shape it. My body feels alien, just dead weight, like a sack of wet sand.

The ground disappears beneath me, and my stomach plunges with it. The rough carpet scrapes against my cheek, and I can feel the engine’s hum vibrating through the floor, rumbling up into my jaw, and setting my teeth on edge.

Car floor.

Training kicks in, flickering through my mind like someone else’s slideshow.

Roofie, GHB, maybe ketamine. Breathing could be in trouble. Timing matches up.

Doors slam hard, their impact rattling my bones.