Page 21 of Defiant Hearts

Terror sat thick in her throat.

He was going to find her. He was going to find her, and there wasn’t anywhere left to run.

No mountain. No hidey-hole cut into a ledge.

She’d survived two months of hell for nothing.

Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs that an alarm beside her started shrieking.

Her chest locked on the breath she couldn’t pull in or push out even as she recognized what was happening to her. Tachycardia, hyperventilation. Her body flooding with adrenaline.

She’d charted these exact findings in other people, watching their monitors climb and talking to them in a calm voice.

There was no calm inside her body now, just her own pulse hammering in her neck and her fingertips going cold and prickly.

The room narrowed at the edges and the sounds around her started to fade.

A chair scraped, and her mind cast around for the source of the sound. Suddenly, a man hovered over her.

She almost screamed, but her fogged brain finally placed him. The man from the mountain.

Wyatt.

He wore an expression that she didn’t have the ability to interpret, though it was between concern and alarm at the machines going off.

Her brain crashed back into place with lucid clarity.

“Hand me that gauze,” she rasped, jabbing her finger at a tray a few feet from the bed.

“Why?”

“So I can take out this IV.”

His dark brows lowered. “You’re not doing that.”

Between the panic inside her and the glare she attempted to give him, her energy stores dipped lower.

Just then the door across the room swung open, and a doctor strode in. He silenced the alarms, and his calm blue eyes flicked to the monitors, then to her.

“You need to stay here.” His voice was calm and professional. “You’ve got a nasty wound on your back that needs treatment, and you’re in no condition to leave.”

She opened her mouth to argue. But her gaze snagged on another man who appeared in the doorway behind him. He was a touch older and harder around the eyes and possessed the kind of presence that commanded a room without even trying.

“She knows she can’t leave,” he said before she’d uttered a word of protest.

The doctor glanced between them. “She knows?”

“That’s right, Dr. Hitchcock. She knows because she’s an RN.” The man’s gaze cut to her, his gray eyes direct. “Right, Whitley?”

Her shoulders sagged at hearing her real name spoken out loud for the first time in months.

“Facial recognition”—she swallowed hard, mouth dry—“or fingerprints?”

He moved to stand at the foot of her bed. “Prints. I took them while Hitchcock was cleaning out your wound.”

Her wound. Her back.

She focused on the spot she’d scraped on a rock after slipping in mud. She’d twisted her body to avoid scraping her face, but looking back, at least she could have tended a wound on her face. Her back was out of reach, though she’d done the best she could with the small store of herbs she’d gathered for healing.