Lacey’s eyes were wild, darting over their faces, to the door, to the stairs, back to Mia. Her finger tightened on the trigger, and Izzy could see the confusion, the hesitation, and then the slow and steady press of flesh against metal. The barrel was still aimed at Izzy’s chest.

The door crashed open to her right, the wood splintering and then slamming against the wall. Voices yelled things that made no sense to Izzy, not in that moment.

And still they wouldn’t be fast enough.

Lacey’s eyes were bright. She hadn’t even glanced toward the bodies flooding in from the outside.

Before Izzy could move or react, Mia stepped in front of her just as Lacey pulled the trigger.

The bullet slammed into Mia, and then Lacey’s body hit the ground.

Izzy had been right. They hadn’t been fast enough.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

IZZY

Izzy hated hospitals. Maybe it was a cliché, but maybe she didn’t care. The too-bright halls, the lemon disinfectant that burned her throat, the gray pallor of the nurses’ skin. She couldn’t stand any of it.

She smoothed her palm over her arms, a gesture she easily recognized as self-soothing, as she stepped into Mia’s room.

It was empty save for Mia stretched out on the bed. Tubes pumped liquid into her veins; wires kept track of the fluttering heartbeat beneath her rib cage. Both served only to make her slender body appear all the more fragile. Utterly breakable. That’s what she was.

Izzy pulled the visitors’ chair right up next to the bed and watched the steady blinking light on the heart monitor.

Alive. That’s what the rhythmic beeping told her. Mia was still alive.

Izzy held on to that, wrapped greedy arms around that certainty and kept it close.

Time passed, because that’s what it did. Izzy didn’t mark it, didn’t note it. There was sun in the room and then there wasn’t. A nurse tsk-tsked at her, tried to kick her out, but Izzy didn’t budge, and the woman eventually relented.

All Izzy could do was hold her breath in the spaces between the little dings—the ones that spoke and said Mia is alive.

Izzy inhaled on one. Exhaled on the next.

When the machines went wild, Izzy straightened from her slouch too fast, the exhausted muscles in her neck pulling so tight that white-hot pain throbbed in her shoulder, up along the base of her skull. Nurses shoved into the room, pushing Izzy back against a wall.

She only realized she was shouting when someone grabbed her, fingers digging into the sensitive spot above her elbows.

“Honey, she’s waking up,” the nurse said, her voice firm, her body blocking Izzy’s view of Mia. “We need you to wait in the hall.”